Overview

agency and reflexivity in contemporary social life. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s social realist framework, it moves beyond treating platforms merely as tools or environments to conceptualise them as distinct sociotechnical structures with emergent properties and powers that shape human action without determining it. The book develops the concept of platform and agency to explore the temporal dimensions of sociotechnical change, tracing how platforms condition personal and collective reflexivity through mechanisms of distraction, cultural abundance and multiplying communication channels. While affirming the analytical distinction between structure, culture and agency, it demonstrates how platforms constitute a fourth dimension necessary for understanding contemporary social morphogenesis. Through the conceptual pairing of psychobiography and personal morphogenesis, the book offers a nuanced account of how individuals become who they are within platformised life worlds. Rather than announcing an epochal break with previous social forms, the analysis illuminates the accumulating consequences of platform mediation across biographical timescales. This book will interest researchers and graduate students in social theory, philosophy of technology, digital sociology, platform studies, media and communication studies, critical data studies, internet studies, surveillance studies, sociology of knowledge, digital anthropology and social informatics.

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9781032895970

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Reviews

'With scholarly attention now focused on digital platforms, we find a reprise of the old structure-agency debate: To what extent are social effects due to the platforms and to what extent to what people do with them. From the beginning, Mark Carrigan has been a leading scholar helping us navigate our way through the digital age. Now with this important new book, he addresses a central question lurking in all the talk about platformization.' Professor Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, USA. 'Social change, reshaping us and being reshaped by some of us, is even harder than usual to understand at the heart of a new ""industrial revolution"". This book offers a new sociological vantage point from within the eye of the storm. It starts from a reassessment of reflexivity, individual and collective, in human agency. It offers new insights into social processes, especially learning and socialization in a platform society, not just productivity and control. This sociotechnical perspective really helps understand the nature and scale of changes triggered today by the rise of pseudo-autonomous agents, generative AI algorithms included.' Professor Emmanuel Lazega, Sciences Po, Paris.

'With scholarly attention now focused on digital platforms, we find a reprise of the old structure-agency debate: To what extent are social effects due to the platforms and to what extent to what people do with them. From the beginning, Mark Carrigan has been a leading scholar helping us navigate our way through the digital age. Now with this important new book, he addresses a central question lurking in all the talk about platformization.' Professor Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, USA.

Author Information

Dr Mark Carrigan is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester where he is co-lead of the Digital Education Manchester group. He jointly coordinates the Critical Realism Network and is council member of the International Association for Critical Realism and a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism.

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