Digitized Institutions

Book excerpt: A key sociological insight is that institutions, whether education, the economy, politics or the media, shape the contours of individual life and drive inequality. In this Byte, the contributions take up the way that digitally meditated social processes are transforming institutions. The writing here examines the interconnectedness of institutions and considers digitization across schooling, work, and media, with an eye toward how inequality works. Together, these selections yield important insights into critical features of the institutions that mediate our digitized society, arguing that digital sociology’s greatest challenge is measuring inequalities that are produced by society’s datalogical turn.