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.

However, power structures are always subject to change based on human actions. In this tradition, there was a profound focus on agency and thereby fundamentally on the freewill and empowerment of individual. You take a few minutes to think about how your life is structured. Where does the power lie in your life? Are you someone who has legitimate power in that people look up to you? Are you someone that has coercive power as in you can't do something to them negatively, if they don't follow what you say,

Speaker 2 (4m 37s): Do you work

Speaker 1 (4m 38s): For an institution that has power? Thus, some of that power is lent to you. What is your role in the world and how does power or your personal power manifest itself in the world in which you live?

Speaker 2 (4m 54s): It's a good

Speaker 1 (4m 55s): Idea to take a moment right here, just to go over that concept and think about where you fit in.

Speaker 2 (4m 59s): We have this, once you do that, I think you'll have

Speaker 1 (5m 3s): A better understanding of how the internet

Speaker 2 (5m 6s): Has

Speaker 1 (5m 8s): Found ways to either compliment the Power you have, or to take away

Speaker 2 (5m 14s): The power that you have

Speaker 1 (5m 19s): Structural view is found in the American sociological tradition of Structural functionalism. Most clearly found in the works of Talcott Parsons and his followers. Here's the society can be explained by a scheme. Parsons was known for his famous agile scheme, a G I

Speaker 2 (5m 38s): L

Speaker 1 (5m 41s): Reference in which humans and organizations are defined by the functions they achieve and perform. Let's think about that for just a minute. This is a reference in which humans and organizations are defined by the functions they achieve and perform. How many people do you know? The first question they ask, I ask, if you meet somebody like, Hey, what do you do? Hey, my name is so-and-so. What do you do? Or I'm a lawyer, or I'm a truck driver, or I'm a teacher.

These particular sets of labels. They make some people feel great. They make other people feel poorly. However, there are just a little bit so on one level, but on another level, they are in fact, a definition of who you are to me. It's I think it's really sad. A lot of people define who they are by what they do in a small area of their life. And if something happens to that small area of them life, all of a sudden, they no longer know themselves.

They can fall into a deep depression because this little small sliver of what they do has gone. And so now they have nothing. The thing to base their life fun. When in fact they probably have all kinds of things. Oh no, you're no longer with that company. Guess what? Your still a dad, you were still a husband is still a brother is still a person on this planet. You're still a good person. You still have this hobby. Like you were still all of these other things because you gave so much authority to this one slice when that's gone.

It can seem as though, so your life is gone where your life is different. Is it? And to think about it is kind of fascinating here. Humans are wheel's in the huge machinery of society. And power is explained by the logic of social structures or a similar view of power. As a secondary phenomenon is also found in the French structuralist tradition, for instance, associated with the famous anthropologist cloud Levi Strauss and sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu here, the exercise of power is seen as embedded and defined by structures, which operate through societal norms and institutions.

While the instrumentalist view on Power clearly postulates the individual capacity to exercise power...