Simmel’s Assessment of Cybersociety

A century after his death, Simmel has returned to haunt the brave new world of the internet, smart phones and social media. He has gained newfound celebrity as the go-to theorist to make sense of and shine light on our myriad interactions in cyberspace. The focus of this paper is to critically assess how Simmel’s work is used in the scores of recent analyses of our digital environment. The author then considers whether or not the society which Simmel examined at the turn of the twentieth century is especially different than our current digitally-mediated world.