Theorizing the Social World in the Digital Age. Part I

The past twenty years have witnessed seismic changes in how social relations are organized. Specifically, the digitization of our lives has been a catalyst for the emergence of new structures and practices across nearly every aspect of our social existence, from the ways in which we wage war, to how we help each other and connect with our communities through crowdfunding and social media. But our sociological theory has not kept pace with these changes. What are we missing? How might our theories be reconstructed to accommodate the emergence of the new social relations of the Digital Age? What new ideas might we need? And what aspects of Digital Age social relations are worth a closer examination? This panel will provide a space for papers engaging with these and related questions, with the goal of theorizing ways to move forward.