Digital sociology
Wlochy, R. (2025). Digital Sociology: On the Socialization of Technology and Technologies of Socialization [Unpublished manuscript].
This is a book about why, in the world of platforms, data, and AI, "social" can no longer be analyzed without technology—and what concepts can be used to capture this tangled reality without simplification.
Algorithms and digital infrastructures are not the backdrop to social life, but one of the mechanisms that organize it—from relationships and work to power, knowledge, and institutions. This is a guide to thinking sociologically about datafication, algorithmization, and platformization as "digital" becomes everyday reality.
About the book
The author builds her argument from theories of technology and sociological debates about the materiality and agency of technical tools and systems, before turning to the specifics of digital technologies: their affordances, generativity, and role in transforming forms of socialization. The key shift here is that digital technologies are treated as technologies of socialization, meaning they co-create relationships, norms, practices, and institutions.
The central axis of the analysis are three interdependent contemporary processes: datafication, algorithmization, and platformization. The author shows how these translate into real mechanisms of power and inequality, new forms of control, changes in work and the organization of everyday life, and the production of knowledge and public policies.
What does it bring?
- It organizes the language of description of digitality: it combines social theory, the sociology of technology, and approaches to data, algorithms, and platforms into one coherent framework.
- It shows how digital technologies are transforming social relations and everyday practices (from hyperconnectivity to the infrastructuralization of life).
- Provides tools for critical analysis of power and inequality in conditions of algorithmization (black boxes, selection, classification, risks of discrimination).
- It combines theoretical reflection with institutional consequences: how the "digital" is reshaping organizations, the market and the state.
- He formulates a thesis about the need to update sociology – including methodologically – if it is to maintain its explanatory power in the conditions of datafication.
Key themes
Sociology of technology; the socialization of technology; technologies of socialization; affordances and generativity of digital technologies; hyperconnectivity; deep mediatization; datafication; algorithmization; black boxes; platformization; platforms as infrastructures; power, control and inequalities in the digital.
Ideal for
- for social science researchers who need a framework for analyzing digitality
- for students of sociology, media studies, communication sciences, political science and technology studies
- for people working in public policies, regulations and institutions in the context of AI and platforms
- for practitioners (NGOs, administration, think tanks) who want to describe the effects of technology in precise language
- for people in the data/tech field (research, analytics, product) who want to understand the social consequences of systems
What you will find inside
- Introduction: why sociology must consider digital technologies as co-creators of social life.
- Theoretical foundations: the dispute over the materiality and agency of technology and its consequences for social analysis.
- The specificity of digital technologies: affordances, generativity and mechanisms of shaping practices.
- The axis of contemporary change: datafication, algorithmization and platformization as processes organizing society.
- Consequences: work, inequality, control, institutions, knowledge and public policies in a world of platforms and data.