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The introduction of digital technologies into an ever-growing number of social institutions, practices and routines over the last few decades has reshaped social relations, structures and dynamics across social spheres in various ways. New patterns of sociality emerge with new forms of structure and agency. These changes surely deserve empirical research, and indeed enjoy much research attention in sociology (often under the title of ‘digital sociology’) and adjacent disciplines. But do they make an appropriate topic for a sociological theory book? One may have legitimate doubts. After all, Sociological Theory (not to be confused with ‘theories’ in the plural and more humble sense, ad hoc explanations for particular empirical phenomena) supplies sociologists with the conceptual tools, categories of thought and postulates without which we cannot even start representing social reality and making sense of it. Too often sociological theory debates are conducted as if these tools predated concrete social realities and have nothing to do with their changing.

The core questions of sociological theory are so abstract and fundamental they seem timeless and beyond time: questions of ontology; the choice of units of analysis; temporality; social action and its motives; power, causality and social change; structure and agency; knowledge and epistemology. It has never been possible and never will be to study social life, explain it, or even humbly describe it without first answering these timeless questions, explicitly or implicitly. This simply cannot be done without choosing units of analysis and making certain assumptions about their relations, the ways they can be studied, and how they may interact and change. Every sociology student is familiar with these eternal oppositions that every theory must address and overcome in its own way: micro and macro, agency and structure, consensus and conflict, materialism and idealism, positivism and constructionism. Every theory offers general assumptions about what motivates and shapes social action and what binds human actions together into something bigger. The answers to these questions often claim to be transhistorical and universally valid.

Now tell all this to a sociologist of knowledge, or a sociologist of science. Looking at sociological theory as sociologists (as opposed to social philosophers), it becomes obvious that its abstractness and timelessness are an illusion. Sociology is part of the social world it seeks to study, and it transforms with it. Sociological theory, the problems that occupy it and the solutions it offers, are social phenomena. They are the product of the history of struggles and position-taking in the sociological field, of epistemological technologies (that is, ways of producing knowledge, such as statistics), of discourses about society and social problems that prevail outside the sociological sphere (e.g. in politics), and most importantly for us, of the society to be studied with theory. What too often evades us is that theory is made to be used. It supplies us with tools that help us solve certain problems while describing and explaining certain social realities. Concepts and theories that proved helpful for solving one problem may completely fail to solve another, very often since the reality they took for granted has changed, and some of their basic assumptions are no longer valid. Simply put: sociological theory is also a creature of its time.

The introduction of digital technologies and digital media does not simply offer yet another new social phenomenon, new objects for empirical sociological research using the same old tools. It seems to challenge some of the core underlying assumptions and core concepts of sociological theory (such as ‘social interaction’ and ‘social network’), as these concepts and assumptions were developed to make sense of very different sociotechnical realities of different eras and to solve different problems under different conditions.

The mission of Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes that Bind Us Together is to explore some of the main theoretical challenges that digitalization poses to core concepts of sociological theory, and to point towards ways in which the latter may be revised and adapted to remain relevant and valid. It offers attempts to rethink core theoretical concepts such as interaction, power, social capital, social networks and labour as their referents transform in digital societies, in order to adapt them to the changing sociotechnical realities and enable them to account for social transformations associated with digital technologies. Some of these attempts are relatively modest, whereas others are more far-reaching. Indeed, digitalization may compel us to rethink sociology’s research object itself – ‘the social’, social structure, social relations, social interaction and so forth. The fact that the last sentence offered a list is important: sociology, unlike Kuhnian ‘normal science’, does not have a single set of theoretical underlying assumptions: instead, we share several competing sets (Alexander 1987). This means that it is not ‘sociological theory’ that must be revised to stand to this challenge, but rather multiple theoretical traditions, each having to cope with different challenges. This book indeed offers revisions to different theoretical frameworks, including symbolic interactionism, Marxism and Bourdieusian theory.

The theoretical traditions discussed in this book rely on very different assumptions: whereas Marxists view the social as determined by macro-structural features, interactionists view the social as open and constructed through micro-level interactions (with Bourdieu’s view of the social as shaped by the distribution of different forms of capital and the struggle over them offering a middle point). While interactionists and other humanists view humans as inherently different from objects and ascribe the latter very different roles in their accounts, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) scholars strongly disagree, claiming an equal status for objects in shaping sociality. Social network analysts, interactionists and Marxists all say that the social world consists of relations, but mean very different things (formal structure of ties, concrete interactions, or relations of production and exploitation respectively). Other traditions use different building blocks to construct and represent the social, including capital in its multiple forms for Bourdieu, and the collective as a level irreducible to the individual in the Durkheimian tradition. These differing assumptions have resulted in different ways of producing sociological knowledge. But different as they might be, these sociological theoretical traditions are all challenged (albeit in different ways) by emerging digital sociotechnical realities, and these challenges deserve our attention.

While all sociological theories can be used to study digitally mediated social phenomena,¹ this book focuses specifically on theoretical assumptions that are challenged by digitalization processes, and on concepts that might need to be redefined. This rationale (alongside unfortunate material limitations on book length) has guided the choice of topics. I synthesize existing work and develop original theoretical solutions in order to revise these theoretical concepts and assumptions, and allow them to retain relevance and validity and help us understand new social phenomena, structures and dynamics. While every chapter deals with a different core concept of sociological theory and with a different theoretical tradition, each chapter builds on insights and concepts developed in earlier chapters. A main focus of the book is the translation of interactions into digital data objects, which I find to be at the core of what distinguishes digital societies from their predecessors. This transformation is addressed from different perspectives throughout the book, as it poses very different challenges to different theoretical traditions. I also discuss a theoretical development that goes beyond adaptations of existing traditions, the emergence of a new social ontology of the ‘connective’.

And yet, this book does not aim to develop ‘a theory of the digital society’, or a theory of the ‘social implications of the internet’ and mediatization,² as I do not consider digitalization, algorithms or the internet to be simply new objects for sociological research, or new spheres of social life in need of theorization. Instead, I suggest that digitalization processes remould the social in complex and non-deterministic ways across social spheres, and hence require a much more ambitious endeavour – revising general sociological theory (or rather, theories). In this sense, this book goes against the endeavour to construct ‘digital sociology’ as yet another subdiscipline not unlike the sociology of education or the sociology of finance, organized around its own object of study, the digital as a sphere, segment or dimension of social life (Daniels et al. 2017; Lupton 2015; Orton-Johnson and Prior 2013; Selwyn 2019), and around its unique digital methods (Marres 2017). Indeed, revising sociological theories and concepts to adapt them to contemporary digital societies sometimes improves their capacity to theorize other aspects of social life which have little to do with digital technologies.

Chapter 2 explores the challenges digitalization poses to the symbolic interactionist tradition. Digitally mediated interactions constitute a growing share of all interactions; and they are self-documenting, hence they turn into the shared production of evidential data objects. This transformation challenges some of the most fundamental premises of symbolic interactionism: that the basic building blocks of social life are situated interactions, which are well-bounded in time and space; that these ‘social situations’ consist of a finite known number of participants who mutually monitor one another within situations and move from one situation to another; that situations and roles within them are defined through situated negotiation; and that the self develops and emerges through interaction with human alters. Some of the challenges involved in adapting interactionism to a world in which interactions are increasingly mediated can be easily met if we only reformulate core interactionist concepts such as ‘co-presence’ and ‘the looking-glass self’ by generalizing and thus expanding them. Other challenges are more fundamental: when digitalization translates interactions into durable digital data objects (which may become available to unknown and theoretically unlimited audiences), it blurs the very analytical distinction between interactions and objects. To address this challenge, I develop the concept of interaction-object duality, explore some of its empirical and theoretical consequences (e.g. for the presentation of self; for the ‘bracketing’ of interaction as a theoretical and epistemological strategy; and for the temporality of social life), and draw outlines for a post-situational interactionism, that is, symbolic interactionism for the post-situational order of the digital era.

Chapter 3 explores the challenges that digital technologies in general and social media in particular pose to the concept of ‘social networks’ on the one hand and to social ontology on the other hand. I show that whereas social network sites (SNSs) are often viewed as concrete manifestations of the social networks studied for decades by social network analysis (SNA), SNS networks actually have a very different ontological status. Social networks turned from a theoretical construct, a model used by sociologists and anthropologists to represent and understand social relations, into a material infrastructure and performative data objects, representations of social ties that are used by algorithms to regulate and reorganize social life. By doing so they offer sociology a new ontology and an alternative object of research, the connective. Like the collective, the connective offers a way in which individuals, their external actions and their internal mental states are intertwined and linked into something bigger which is irreducible to its parts. Like collectivity, it relies on a certain material infrastructure. The chapter reviews the literature on two connective phenomena, connective action and connective memory (and briefly discusses other connective phenomena), while building on these cases to theorize the connective (the computational aggregation of audiences, individual actions and attention, through algorithms that rely on objectified representations of social networks) and its social ontology.

Chapter 4 discusses social capital in the digital era. Social capital is a key concept in both Bourdieusian theory and SNA that helps us understand power and inequality. My main argument is that digitalization in general and SNSs in particular transform social capital dramatically in ways that require significant theoretical revisions – transforming its modes of accumulation, operation, maintenance, appropriation and control, and its (in)dependence of symbolic power, as well as its relative importance vis-à-vis other forms of capital. After briefly presenting the theoretical role of ‘social capital’ in different traditions, I discuss in detail how the materialization of social networks has transformed social capital and the theoretical implications of this transformation. I then develop the concept of generalized social capital to refer to this new digital form of social capital, and discuss its growing importance across social spheres and its emerging status as a new form of meta-capital. I show how multiple fields are reorganized around the accumulation of generalized social capital and competition over it, and how its meta-capital status leads to the concentration of social power in the hands of digital platform operators who turn into social capital banks or mediators.

Chapter 5 goes deeper into the sociology of power. After briefly discussing the increased governability of social life in the digital era (as ever-larger chunks of social interaction become digitally mediated and leave digital footprints as they transform into data objects), I focus on algorithmic power in order to make two main arguments. First, I suggest that as algorithms play an increasingly central role in the exercise of organizational power, the sociological theory of power must shift its focus away from the problem of free will that preoccupied it for much of the twentieth century. It should also take the material dimension of power more seriously, since unlike other forms of social power, the effective exercise of algorithmic power is not dependent on human consciousness. The chapter reviews and critically discusses several theorizations of this shift in the relations between power and consciousness. Second, I show that algorithmic rules challenge the distinction between potentiality and actuality. By doing so they shed new light on the old central theoretical debate on whether power is potential or actual, that is, whether power exists before it is exercised. I suggest that by blurring the potential/actual distinction, algorithmic power makes it much more difficult to claim that power does not exist as a potentiality between the moments of its actualization. In order to make these arguments, the chapter discusses in detail the unique characteristics of algorithmic power and its generative rules, while comparing them to earlier forms of rules in law and bureaucracy. I discuss the shifting relations between power and abstract rules, consciousness, legitimation and categorization; and the rise of ‘generative rulers’ who wield algorithmic power.

Chapter 6 explores how digitalization compels us to rethink work, labour and their relations. Work is not a universal category but a historical social construction. The notions of work and labour were devised for different sociological tasks, but could be used as synonyms in the twentieth century due to unique historical circumstances which have recently changed. I explore how digitalization processes helped transform (in different ways) both waged labour and unwaged labour (that is, unremunerated production of economic value), and review the debates on whether the use of social media and smart devices should be classified as labour. I present the ‘Google Glass diagram’ behind surveillance capitalism and show how this new mode of accumulation relies on the interaction-object duality, which has rendered social action and interaction more productive than ever. Can a productive activity undertaken without consciousness of its productivity, and which lacks purpose, exertion and instrumentality, still qualify as labour? Can the Marxist labour concept retain its critical power even when departing from work in its lay common sense? To answer these questions, I develop the notion of ‘workless labour’, as the digital economy continuously widens the gap between these once-synonymous terms, and precludes us from continuing to view labour as a subcategory or a special case of work.

Finally, the conclusion (chapter 7) discusses the contributions of the different chapters together, pointing to the commonalities they share and the main features that should characterize sociological theory for digital society in the future.