Читать книгу Essential Concepts in Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 9

The digital transformation in communications is clear, but whether this constitutes a genuine ‘revolution’ can be queried. As Zuboff points out, for all the novel applications we have seen so far, capitalist profit-seeking continues to be the main driver of socio-economic change and the industrialized societies remain recognizable as such. After all, industrial production is still required to manufacture microchips, tablets, smartphones, robots and computers, and it may be more realistic to see the current phase as a continuation of industrialization, with its characteristic replacement of human and animal labour by machines.

Inequalities of internet access and ownership of digital devices are described today as digital divides, but these are still marked by existing inequalities of disability, class, gender, race and ethnicity (Andreasson 2015). Early adoption of digital technology was largely across the Global North, which reinforced existing global inequality, though the gap between North and South is gradually closing. Digitization may be ‘revolutionary’ in some respects, but it does not seem to be changing long-established patterns of social inequality. Others accept that digitization may have revolutionary consequences but see these as, on balance, negative, leading to social isolation and a denuded human experience. The idea of online experience as somehow ‘not real’ is a common refrain among digital critics.