Media and the social construction of reality

In this chapter, the authors argue that a phenomenological approach to sociology only can be preserved if a version of sociology is developed that takes seriously the existence of media and the entanglement of digital media technologies and interfaces in every aspect of daily life. That means, in turn, taking seriously the roles that data extraction and data processing play in both the operations of digital media and the production of what counts as knowledge of the social world. If so, then some adjustments to other key assumptions must be made, for example about the social world’s transparency. But those adjustments are worth making in order to preserve the project of phenomenological sociology, which still has much to contribute to a sense of the tensions at work in the social world and its forms of knowledge. To outline this, the authors first discuss the consequences of a mediated life for social theory, then reflect on how digital media and data changed processes of the mediated construction reality, and finally introduce “deep mediatization” as a “sensitizing concept” for such an analysis.