Contesting Digital Formations In Turbulent Times: From Internet and Social Media to Generative AI

Digital formations from Internet and social media to Generative AI and robotics are reconfiguring the world, deepening inequalities, allowing unprecedented surveillance, and disrupting older models of communication, truth, attachment, identity, work, and social struggles. The bleak prospects of dependency on oligarchically controlled platforms and intensifying surveillance replaced the euphoria that the early Internet and later the early ‘social media’ inspired. The diverse social forces that create digital formations draw on differential access to resources, political-legal frameworks, and imaginative agency. The erosion of democratic institutions, worker protections, and international norms, the spread of authoritarianism and military conflicts, and escalating wealth and power disparities are changing the context in which digital technologies are being formed. The turbulences of intersecting crises raise the stakes of the digital formation’s contested shaping.
This session aims to bring into systematic dialogue scholars of communication, participation, STS, digital sociology, and futures research. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions from the Global South and North that tackle questions such as:
- Why makes the capture of productive gains uneven?
- Who are the social actors that emerge to challenge current trends, expose preventable implications, and produce alternative visions?
- What leverage do users and activists have in concrete cases?
- How are regulatory agencies intervening or failing?
- How do approaches in different countries and groups of countries differ?
- How can social science research discover the leverage that exists for countering hegemonic trends, or how such leverage can be created? What research priorities should social science pursue?