“Everyday Life in our Wired World”
Ben Agger writes about how media and technology control the lives of human beings in our modern world.
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The author of “Everyday Life in our Wired World”, Ben Agger, writes about the relationship between the everyday lives of people and their social structure, especially in the virtual world. Agger begins by explaining that the “virtual self is connected to the world by information technologies that invade not only the home and office but the psyche” (1). He says that it is important to realize how the media culture and technology control human actions and everyday lives so that it is easier to see the relationship between our technological surroundings and us. Sociology is a perspective through which the relationship between people, their actions, and larger institutions can be seen. He also describes that technology is a “dense set of social relations defining the uses of machinery, electronics, media” (Agger 6). The author doesn’t believe that sociology is a science. In fact, Agger explains that sociology is “a writing style… a way of arranging certain words and images on the page. It’s a writing style that makes arguments” (2). In his efforts to de-professionalize sociology, Agger begins to clearly define historical aspects of Marxism, which he believes follows closely to the aspects of sociology, and other views that he grew up with in his lifetime, often relating his experiences with his values and beliefs. Agger goes more into depth on the self. He says that sociology is an explanation of what he calls “the worldliness of selves- their ability to go anywhere/anytime, their saturation with popular culture… their tendencies to change jobs, spouses, their bodies” (Agger 4). The current generation is introduced to much more information, virtually, than their parent’s or grandparent’s generation. The current generation is deficient in knowing the real value of life, and people are continuously trying to search for themselves and a community in which they can belong.
Agger goes on the explain the relationship between self and community by explaining the views of Karl Marx, whom he considers one of his inspirations. Karl Marx, according to Agger, said that “social being conditions consciousness but that consciousness, expressed in critique and action, can change social being, bringing into being a new society” (6). Agger goes on to explain his own story and his experiences in his life because he says that sociology “arises from experience, and the way we tell its story depends on how we remember who we were, and how we came to be the way we are” (9). Everyday life in this wired world that we live in has turned into a fast-paced and compressed life that people often rush through. When people go shopping, for example, “they are in a rush and perhaps do not have a complete and legible list of what they need” (Agger 19). He then tells the reader that this everydayness is a useful sociological category, even though people have forgotten to slow down in life and think about their self. Therefore, he agrees with Marx with the fact that everyday life has turned into a false consciousness and “a wellspring of revolutionary energy” (Agger 23). Even though we live in a capitalistic society, capitalism only survives because it asks its citizens to follow the roles of a twenty-first century person and also because wealth depends on the exploitation of people. Agger calls this the wired capitalism and explains that even though socialism to some has failed, there is more to come in the future where socialism can definitely show its true colors. The internet doesn’t “set men and women free” and the “self is… scattered on the vectors of virtualization” (Agger 27). And that is why Agger introduces to us his first chapter of his book to explain the importance of a virtual sociology in order to make some meaning of out scattered virtual selves.
