Ben Agger

The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology

Preface. 1. Everyday Life in Our Wired World. 2. Sociologys Encyclopedia. 3. Does Postmodernism Make You Mad? or, Did You Flunk Statistics?. 4. Adventures in Capitalism. 5. Girl Talk. 6. Virtually, a Sociology!. Glossary. References. Index

The decline of discourse : reading, writing and resistance in postmodern capitalism

Theorizing the decline of discourse the absent public what writers write everyone writes, no one reads textless books, busy bookstores academic writing as real estate new journals, better bookstores? writing resistance - toward the post-postmodern or the decline of theoretical discourse?.

iTime: Labor and life in a smartphone era

The smartphone changes everything, or so it seems. iPhones create iTime and fundamentally alter the boundaries between public and private and day and night. We are now online anytime/anywhere, requiring new theoretical understandings of time and place. This starts with the young, who are inseparable from their phones, and has now spread to their parents. Smartphones use us, bending us to their compulsive rhythms and demanding our attention. In a good society, we would be the masters of technology, retaining the connectivity and global reach of our smartphones, but not enslaved to them as many of us are today. As the example of the smartphone demonstrates, the internet requires new social and cultural theory in order to address its transforming potential.

Marxism 'or' the Frankfurt School?

Since the major works of members of the so-called Frankfurt School began to be published in English in the early 1970s, critical debates have flourished in England and North America about the brand of the Frankfurt ’Marxism’. Some sympathetic critics have taken the position that the members of the School advanced one step beyond traditional Marxism, a view often associated with the appraisal of the work of Jfirgen Habermas.1 Others2 argue that the Frankfurt critical theory was an ingenious deepening of categories implicit in Marx, an interpretive line associated generally with the political scholarship of the Telos group. Unsympathetic critics have been equally quick off the mark in assessing the Frankfurt Marxism: here there have also been two prevailing schools of thought, the one viewing Frankfurt theory sceptically when seen through the lenses of analytic philosophy and Vienna Circle empiricism (a view seemingly shared by most practising social science empiricists in North America, who regard theories as valuable only when they can produce testable hypotheses), the other rejecting the Frankfurt theory as an unjustified recanting of what are taken to be fundamental Marxist positions. It is the latter reading that will concern me in this review-essay inasmuch as it informs two recent books about the Frankfurt School, one by Phil Slater and the other by Paul Connerton. While Slater and Connerton differ on many points of substance, it is what they share that is more interesting. Connerton’s, particularly, is a sophisticated attempt to probe weaknesses in the Frankfurt theory from the point of view of a sympathetic materialism. While Slater is also apparently sympathetic with the original Frankfurt bifurcation of traditional and critical theory, his impatience with the ideology-critical focus of Frankfurt work is ill-concealed, emerging in what amounts to a wholesale rejection of the entire Hegelian Marxist enterprise. What they share is a belief, increasingly prevalent among Marxists of a more orthodox persuasion, who are disinclined towards philosophical and psychoanalytic revisions of Marxism, that the Frankfurt thinkers failed to produce a viable response to fascism and to emerging monopoly capitalism because their thought allegedly rejected basic aspects of Marx’s legacy. Of all the readings of Frankfurt critical theory, this is, at least from my point of view, the most interesting. I reject it, but find in it the occasion to raise what I regard as pertinent questions about the present and future of Marxism. What sort of standards of evidence ought to be applied in the evaluation of this orthodox Marxist appraisal of Frankfurt theory? I believe it makes no sense to talk of a single ’Marx’ but only of a variety of possible readings that suit

Current Perspectives in Social Theory: A Research Annual, Volume 11.

Disciplinary sociology in the united methods of empiricism - marking the boundaries to keep the poachers out, Tugrul Ilter testing Gouldners coming crisis thesis - on the waxing and waning of intellectual influence, James J. Chriss the making of serious speech - a social theory of professional discourse, Steven C. Ward reading Deleuze and Guattari fast, Allen Shelton the birth of the cinematic, surveillance society, Norman K. Denzin culture, social structures and discursive fields, Lyn Spillman critique, conservatism, ideology - the Frankfurt schools critique of the sociology of knowledge revisited, Goran Dahl can symbolic interactionism really contribute to macro sociology, Jonathan H. Turner morality, free will and transcendence in Parsons action theory, Jan Ajzner regulation theory and the politics of global restructuring, Sara Schoomaker between democratic populists and bureaucratic greens - the limits of liberal democratic responses to the environmental crisis, Timothy W. Luke the evolution of systems of social interaction, John Skvoretz and Thomas J. Fararo.

Time, Motion, Discipline: The Authoritarian Syllabus on American College Campuses:

In this paper, we read college course syllabi as material objects that shed light on larger issues, specifically conflict between faculty and students. We explore the commodification of ‘college labor’ where degreed labor and credit hours are produced. Under these conditions, the syllabus becomes a labor contract detailing faculty expectations of students. Rather than merely introducing the course subject matter or providing only basic information, the syllabus increasingly spells out the precise conditions under which student work will be evaluated and credit hours awarded, and the behavioral and attitudinal expectations of students. By observing how power is transacted through the syllabus, we better understand the role that faculty/student relations play in further undermining academic community.

The Pulpless Generation: Why Young People Don't Protest the Iraq War (or Anything Else), and Why It's Not Entirely Their Fault

Young people today appear politically inactive. Is this so? The Obama phenomenon suggests otherwise. This article examines subpolitical or prepolitical activism on the part of the young—their politics conducted outside traditional political boundaries. I also read young peoples frenetic text messaging, instant messaging and MySpacing as literary and even political activities worth considering. Young people have been off the social-science radar for too long, and this article seeks to remedy that.

Book Reviews : Antipositivist Theories of the Sciences. BY NORMAN STOCKMAN. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984. Pp. 284.

table, one may accept that if the concept of counting is understood certain activities must take place if ’counting’ is to occur. But... books? Exercise books? Books of the Bible? Titles? Works in more than one volume? Pamphlets? What counts as a book to be counted will depend on the context in which the question is asked. One could certainly put the same objects on the table and convince individuals of widely different answers to the question, ’How many books are there on the table?’. The different answers will be relative to the problems and theories assumed to lie behind the question! Whether, and if so how, Popper avoids or can be made to avoid positivism and relativism remain important issues as, of course, do much the same questions regarding science itself. I suspect that Dr. Burke has run successful courses for his students, using Popper’s writing as a springboard for discussion. Whilst it contains some interesting material, it is a little difficult to see for whom the book of the course is intended. As an introduction to Popper’s philosophy for students or, for that matter anyone else, it is too partial, there are better accounts (especially Magee 1973), and the original is in any case highly accessible (particularly with the recent volume edited by David Miller [1983]). As a critique intended for those already familiar with Popper’s ideas, it does not pursue the individual issues far enough, as the author himself acknowledges. It is not an interpretation of the chief principles lying behind Popper’s writings, and it fails to engage itself directly with most of the rather lively debates which have surrounded Popper’s work for the past half century.

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Oversharing refers to disclosing intimate details of ones personal life, especially via electronic means of communication. The causes and consequences of oversharing are examined as a sociology of self-disclosure (or presence) is developed. Of central issue is the fading boundary between private and public life, which is a distinguishing feature of postmodern capitalism. Lacking close friends, people use social media, texting and tweeting, to stay connected. Children and adolescents inhabit a nighttime cyberworld of their own, protesting their overburdening by parents and teachers by disclosing their needy selves. Oversharing might be protest against performativity – the expectation that ‘everything counts’ and must be graded.

Oversharing: The Eclipse of Privacy in the Internet Age

The printing press helped end the Middle Ages. The Internet is on the verge of ending books, as we have come to know them. By “book” I mean considered reflection on the world that is produced as a readable object. To be sure, computer downloads may count as books, even if they remain only on the screen. But books, to earn that name, must be considered slowly and at a certain distance from everyday life. They must have a spine, which holds them and their arguments together. For a book to have a spine promises distance from the everyday world required to consider its writing carefully and to formulate a rejoinder, the essence of dialogical democracy and community.