Digital Society, Social Media, and Surveillance

The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed social organization, economic production, political participation, and everyday interaction, creating what sociologists variously term the information society, the network society, or the platform society. Manuel Castells, whose three-volume The Information Age (1996-1998) remains the most comprehensive sociological treatment of the digital transformation, argues that a new social morphology based on networked organization has emerged, powered by information technology and restructuring capitalism, labor, culture, and politics around the logic of the network.

In the network society, power resides in the ability to program and switch between networks rather than in traditional hierarchies, and social inclusion depends on connection to relevant networks while exclusion means disconnection from the flows of information, wealth, and power. The digital divide refers to the unequal access to digital technologies and the skills to use them effectively, stratified along familiar lines of class, race, gender, geography, and age. While initial conceptualizations focused on the binary distinction between those with and without internet access, subsequent research has identified multiple levels of digital inequality.

The first-level digital divide concerns access to hardware, software, and internet connectivity. The second-level divide concerns skills and usage patterns: even among those with access, significant differences exist in the ability to use digital technologies productively for education, economic advancement, and political participation versus passive consumption and entertainment. The third-level divide, identified by researchers like Eszter Hargittai, concerns the tangible outcomes that different users derive from their online activities, including economic returns, social capital, and civic engagement.

Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell's concept of the platform society describes how online platforms have become the dominant infrastructures organizing social and economic life. Platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft mediate communication, commerce, news, entertainment, and public discourse, operating through proprietary algorithms, datafication of user behavior, and business models based on advertising and data extraction.