@incollection{2020:ruppert:doing_word,
title = {Doing words with things of the Internet},
year = {2020},
note = {Much of social and political life is now conducted through the
Internet and social and power relations are ever more entwined with
digital life. How might digital sociology then attend to fundamental
sociological questions of power and subjectivity as people variously
act through the Internet? There are of course many studies of how the
Internet is remaking sociality, social networks, publics, politics,
identities, subjectivities, or human-technology interactions. In
various ways, they attend to how the Internet is altering relations
not only between people but also between people and vast arrangements
of sociotechnical conventions that have become part of everyday
language, such as tweeting, messaging, friending, emailing, blogging,
sharing, and so on. Interpreting the digital data that these
‘registers of action’ generate and their different forms of
subjectivity represent an interpretive challenge for digital sociology
and its emerging digital methods. In response to this challenge, I
offer a conceptual framing that starts from Bruno Latour’s account
of ‘how to do words with things’ to interpret the various ways
that subjects ‘do words with things of the Internet’. The framing
builds on the formulation that when subjects act they perform
different subject positions that are composites of obedience,
submission, and subversion. I then focus on subjects who perform
digital acts by subverting conventions of the Internet to make rights
claims and in doing so bring a political subjectivity called the
digital citizen into being.},
booktitle = {Soziologie des Digitalen - Digitale Soziologie?},
pages = {467--479},
edition = {1},
author = {Ruppert, Evelyn},
publisher = {Nomos},
address = {Baden-Baden},
series = {},
volume = {}
}