Agency, social relations, and order: Media sociology’s shift into the digital

Abstract

Abstract Until the end of the last century, media sociology was synonymous with the investigation of mass media as a social domain. Today, media sociology needs to address a much higher level of complexity, that is, a deeply mediatized world in which all human practices, social relations, and social order are entangled with digital media and their infrastructures. This article discusses this shift from a sociology of mass communication to the sociology of a deeply mediatized world. The principal aim of the article is to outline a new media-sociological imagination: media sociology as a cross-sectional sociology, a sociology of entanglement, and a new critical sociology of technological deep structures.