DEBATES EN SOCIOLOGÍA Nº 65

Deadline: 15 April 2027

Guest editors: Dr. Luis Sujatovich (Universidad del Este / Universidad Siglo 21, Argentina), and Dr. Alfredo Barrales Martínez (Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, Mexico).

The expansion of digital platforms, algorithmic systems, and connected interfaces has significantly altered the forms of communication, as well as the conditions shaping social experience, interpersonal bonds, identities, and participation in the public sphere. The digital realm no longer constitutes merely a set of media or devices intervening in previously established social practices; it has become an everyday dimension of contemporary life where people work, consume, produce, build relationships, construct visibility, and participate politically.

These transformations present a challenge to the categories traditionally used by the social sciences to study communication. Concepts such as receiver, audience, consumer, and even prosumer continue to offer relevant tools, yet they hit limits when trying to understand experiences simultaneously characterized by production and consumption, exposure and intimacy, autonomy and algorithmic conditioning, and participation alongside dependence on private infrastructures.

The issue is not simply determining what technologies do to people or what people do with technologies. Between these two questions lies a dimension worth examining: how one inhabits a social life increasingly organized through platforms, interfaces, algorithms, and digital infrastructures. Inhabiting implies attending both to individuals' practices of appropriation and production and to the technical, economic, temporal, and political conditions that bound their possibilities for action.

This perspective allows us to question transformations extending beyond the study of technological uses. Acceleration and instantaneity alter our relationships with waiting, attention, and memory. Interfaces organize access and hierarchize possibilities for action. Algorithms classify, recommend, and distribute visibility. Exposure shapes contemporary forms of recognition and identity. Platforms mediate sociability and political participation while concentrating infrastructure, data, and decision-making capacity. Consequently, digital experience is constituted at the intersection between everyday practices and structural conditions that cannot be analyzed in isolation.

These issues are particularly relevant in Latin America, where the expansion of digital communication coexists with persistent inequalities, varying connectivity conditions, hybrid forms of cultural consumption, and a growing dependence on transnational infrastructures and platforms. Rather than assuming a homogeneous digital experience, it is necessary to examine its situated configurations and the specific forms that appropriation, inequality, participation, cultural production, and power relations take.

This dossier invites theoretical and empirical contributions that critically analyze these transformations. Papers from sociology, communication, and other social science disciplines are welcome to help review existing categories, discuss contemporary perspectives, and produce conceptual and methodological tools for understanding current conditions of digital social experience.

THEMATIC FOCUS

• Inhabiting, consuming, and producing: A critical review of the status of the subject in digital communication; limitations of the categories of receiver, consumer, and prosumer; everyday practices of appropriation, creation, resistance, and resignification.
  
• Temporalities of digital experience: Acceleration, instantaneity, the culture of brevity, and fragmentary consumption; transformations of attention, waiting, memory, and the continuity of experience.
  
• Mediations, interfaces, and infrastructures: Interfaces as conditions of access and organization of experience; algorithmic classification, regimes of visibility, architectures of participation, and the material infrastructures of digital communication.
  
• Subjectivation and social bonds: Extimacy, exposure, and the performativity of the self; recognition, belonging, intimacy, and care; digital communities, emerging sociabilities, and forms of connected solitude.
  
• Public sphere and political action: Transformation of public deliberation, digital construction of leadership, personalization of politics, networked mobilization, activisms, cancellation practices, polarization, and institutional disaffection.
  
• Political economy, platforms, and technofeudalism: Concentration of digital ownership, data extraction and appropriation, dependence on private infrastructures, monetization of attention, and new forms of rent and subordination. Scope and limitations of technofeudalism as an explanatory category, in dialogue and discussion with the perspectives of platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, and digital colonialism.
  

Deadline: 15 April 2027

Publication date: 15 December 2027

Submissions: revistadebates@pucp.edu.pe or via this link.

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