Afterword: Mediating the Digital

Abstract

This pair of essays combines effectively to constitute an invitation and a corrective, but they also pose a set of provoking questions. They invite the reader to ponder if and how technological innovations congeal around contemporary mediated practices in ways which recast our understandings of social and cultural relations. Here, both war reporting and social networks require a distinct sociological treatment, but one which treads delicately between the Scylla of modishness (the uncritical waving of the web 2.0 banner, for instance) and the Charybdis of absolute stasis, where little has changed. In this sense, they show why it is important to resist imprecise characterisations of digital mediations which replace fine-grained examinations of situated material practices with flabby sloganeering. That they do so whilst insisting on the importance of framing concepts reinforces the necessity of a theoretically attuned sociology of the digital that never loses sight of local relations. To bring together networks, mediations and communications is, after all, to associate three complex and multi-layered terms that have abstract qualities as well as evoking palpable, concrete, material worlds.