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Structural Power in the Digital Age: Networks, Control & Influence
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Based on a phenomenal book by Jakob Linaa Jenson: “ The medieval Internet”
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Transcript:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/54901077
Speaker 0 (0s): See, hope you are ready for the next episode. Hey, welcome to the next episode.
Speaker 1 (8s): We're getting into the medieval internet here. This particular chapter is going to be specifically about instruments of internet. Power I'm going to get into the micro as well as the macro level. So let's jump right in here. Instruments of internet Power in the digital age, this is part of three of the series. The sociological study of communities and the public sphere has aimed at looking at what forces bind people together and how society emerges in that framework to play the necessary role of mediating between individuals in nature, another influential approach, which is sometimes correlated to the above approach and sometimes competes with it is to study power.
As it constitutes social relations, regulating actions and institutions, finding subjects to rulers and penetrating the entire social order from government and the family life. Let us try to figure it out how the internet, which was touted by futurists in the 1990s and the two thousands as the ultimate tool have freedom. The liberating WEPAN giving the grassroots a voice and a space against the oppression in all its forms has been more coolly seen in the last decade as a means to exorcize various forms of Power strengthening rather than weakening Power relations.
That keep the social order as strictly hierarchized and controlled. We are going to define and identify and describe a range of online Power mechanisms from the direct and instrumental to Structural and algorithmic. Let's talk a little bit about the power. I'm sorry. The concept of Power power and the way it binds social relations is among the most discussed topics in sociology, as well as in political theory, the mini diverging concepts of power might be summarized on a scale from actor based to structure based in short, from an instrumental view to a structural view on the one side of the scale Power can be ascribed to individual agency.
Whereas two, the other side of the scale power is embedded in structures and agency, which has a definite force and effect in the eighties and nineties, many most notably Anthony Giddens attempted to give a more complex account of the dialectic between agency and structure by viewing structure itself as structured by the changing the result of the continual course of agent structure relations in which agents find and exploit holes and structures and thereby change the structures imminent form.
The actor based instrumental view is often found in the liberal tradition, for instance, by Robert doll, it is also a dominant in the American sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism for instance, in the works of George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blummer here, power is a product of human habits, norms and actions that are ultimately turned into rules and institution Governing the power structures of society in this tradition. <