Rise Of The Avatar
Introductory Essay: Through the Looking-Glass of Facebook
Our Facebook profiles provide a glimpse of the collective foundations of our individual selves. Mead and Simmel lay the foundations for thinking about the social origins of the self, and Goffman, Foucault, and others provide provocative takes on what identity means in today’s complicated world.
Gender Trouble
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From p. 501 in Social Theory Re-Wired 2e
Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms—that is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control, and even “protection” of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent and retractable operation of choices. But the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures.
The Stranger
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From p. 478 in Social Theory Re-Wired 2e
The stranger will thus not be considered here in the usual sense of the term, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow—the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going.
Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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A fascinating look into the social and cultural origins of human consciousness from the perspective of evolutionary theory.
Simmel, Georg. 1907. The Philosophy of Money, edited by D. Frisby. New York: Routledge.
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Simmel’s groundbreaking study of how the advent of money shapes individuality and the social order.
Schwartz, Barry. 2004. The Paradox of Choice: How Less is More. New York: HarperCollins.
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Social psychologist Schwartz discusses how choice overwhelms us and leaves us dissatisfied. A great contemporary expansion of Simmel’s ideas on the personal consequences associated with the proliferation of cultural options in modern societies.
Rose, Nikolas. 2006. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
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Rose explores the consequences of twenty-first-century medicine’s ability to alter our selves at the molecular level. Takes Foucauldian thinking on identity into the age of the human genome.
Rose, Nikolas. 1998. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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A leading Foucault scholar argues that the discipline of psychology has played a huge part in the construction of contemporary personhood. Psychology, he provocatively argues, does not discover who we are. It invents who we are.
Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, ed. The Contemporary Goffman. New York: Routledge.
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This collection of fifteen essays from various Goffman scholars discusses his lasting legacy in contemporary sociology. Manning’s chapter on the interaction order of two Boston campus taverns may be of particular interest to Social Theory Re-Wired readers.
Hessler, Peter. 2007. “China’s Instant Cities.” National Geographic, June.
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This award-winning article and photo essay explores the construction sites behind the jaw-dropping urbanization of China. Read it alongside Simmel’s Metropolis and Mental Life. Full text and photographs available here. The New York Times also has a photo essay on Chinese cities.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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In an age of virtual reality and advanced biotechnologies, Hayles has us ponder whether our identities now extend beyond the human.
