ABSTRACT

In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

The technologisation of the social: A 21st-century megamachine?

chapter 1|16 pages

Communication as theatricalisation

Self-presentation in the digital age

chapter 2|15 pages

Parasites of the social

Digital disruptions of the labour market

chapter 3|19 pages

Possessed by technology

The metastasis of absence

chapter 4|18 pages

Technologisation of the social

Symbiosis, parasitism or predation?

chapter 5|14 pages

J'accuse zéro

The technology of zero and the making of a personal void

chapter 7|16 pages

The smart womb

Digital technologies and the maze of trickster politics

chapter 8|11 pages

Brave new industry?

The dark side of dematerialisation and Industry 4.0

chapter 9|14 pages

‘What have you caught?'

Nannycams and hidden cameras as normalised surveillance of the intimate

chapter 10|19 pages

Coercive visibility

Discipline in the digital public arena

chapter |4 pages

Conclusion

Is there a way out of the technologisation of the social?