In chapter One: “Everyday Life In Our Wired World,” of Ben Agger’s, The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology, Agger discusses the relationship between people’s everyday lives and their social structure. He argues that the self is directly connected to your everyday life, and can be directly connected to the social structure that results therein. He describes the Internet as playing a key role in our social structure and how it “…alters the distinction between self and society.”
“Virtuallity is the experience of being online and using computers; it is a state of being referring to a particular way of experiencing and interacting with the world.” Here Agger speaks to the topic of how the Internet is largely a part of our daily lives. He argues that we need it in order to communicate with the rest of the world. In many ways, Agger goes on to say, the Internet has begun to dictate what we do with our lives. Agger points to the example of: school, work, what we eat, what we buy, schooling, parenting, traveling, etc. The internet, Agger says, is a postmodern world in which people all around the world communicate.
In a sense Agger is using Sociology to better prove his point. “Mine is a different kind of Sociology, one that addresses virtual selves living in postmodern worlds.” Agger would like people to enter this postmodern world and “de-professionalize” sociology by using this world to encourage conversations of sociological insight. In short, use the Internet to share opinions about different things going on in the world today. Being able to enter this postmodern sociological world and being able to go anywhere at any time, Agger calls worldliness. The Internet talks about many different topics from all over the world, and for a person to go on and engage in a conversation of sociological insight on any topic at any time, shows this person’s “saturation to popular culture.”
Though we are in a very progressive age Agger, was able to argue that “…our moment in civilization is perhaps less postmodern than meets eye as a result of ‘fast capitalism.’” According to Agger it makes sense for people to go online and talk about their everyday routines, but there can be certain things that can unsettle or as Agger said “jolt” the everydayness. A jolt could be any of the following: war, natural disaster, the economy, etc. It is because of these jolts that Agger says that our moment in time is not as postmodern as it could be. Agger discusses some of the “jolts” that went on in his life time; from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and his brother to the more recent September 11th disaster.”
With all that is happening in the world, all these “jolts” that we run into, all the media and online sociological conversations of insight, Agger explains that it is hard to comprehend how we have any order at all. Agger then uses his definition of Social repression to explain the origin of the social order that we have. “Surplus repression goes beyond what is necessary for peaceful coexistence; it bends people’s creative energies in destructive and self-destructive directions, thus creating the existing social order.” So in a sense, Agger is attempting to explain that naturally people as a group strive for order, and end up achieving it through a sort of chaos.
Agger then goes on to “examine the relationship between everyday life and enveloping social structure[s]” in our society as a whole.” He goes on to discuss how structure does not just happen, but rather, as we mentioned viz., it works through the self which in turn recreates the order that we seek. But then Agger states, that in the same way, the self is able to “disobey social laws, overthrowing them through the force of will and leverage of social movements.” So, in a way, the self is able to make or break us (to borrow the colloquialism) in the way that we can use it to create or, on the other hand, destroy social structure by getting involved in a “jolt” (viz.) that may cause some social tension on the Internet and/or in society.
“Everyday life plays a crucial role in people’s diversion from politics… they are discouraged from theorizing their everyday lives which are influenced by these powerful yet invisible structures.” All Agger is saying here is that a person’s first inclination is not to go online and start “chatting” about world or local politics; it simply does not come natural to a person. Unless of course, these politics are somehow connected to a “jolt” that directly influences that person’s life in some way that allows them to want/need to engage in a sociological conversation in the postmodern world we call the Internet.
In short, Agger has used the postmodern Internet as a way of showing and discussing the relationship between the everyday lives of people online or not, and their social structure. So from reading this we see that the Internet, though we often times take it for granted, plays a crucial role in how we formulate or destroy our social structure through the self, as it pertains to the goings on around us in the world.
Works Cited
Agger, Ben. The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology, Chapter One : “Everyday Life In Our Wired World”. Chinchester, Wiley-Blackwell, Dec. 18 2007. Print.
