Digital Sociology and Social Change

Digital Sociology and Social Change:
AI, Power, and the Everyday Life

Humanities

Location

: Margin Library

: 6 weeks

Duration

Lecturer

: Sheilla Njoto, PhD

Tuition Fee

: IDR 2,000,000

Day & Time

: Mondays, 7- 9pm &

Saturdays, 10am - 12pm

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Currently ongoing

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Overview

A critical study of how digital systems are built, how they govern, and how they reorganise social life.

This course approaches digital technology not as a set of tools, but as a social infrastructure—one that shapes behaviour, distributes power, and redefines what it means to know, relate, and exist in public. What appears frictionless and intuitive is often the result of layered decisions about design, data, and control.

Moving from the construction of technology to the politics of platforms, identity, labour, and resistance, the course develops a way of seeing the digital world as something made and therefore something that can be questioned. By the end, students will not only be able to analyse digital systems critically but also recognise how they have shaped their own habits, preferences, and identities.

The course follows three movements:

Movement I — The Past — Weeks 1- 2

Exploring extant research, theories, and learning through critical debates, book clubs, and forming arguments.

Movement II — The Present — Weeks 3-4

Using extant theories as a lens to sharpen our observation of the world today within our context. This is where students are assigned a writing assignment. Students may choose to complete it and receive formative feedback, develop it further with supervision, or use it simply as a prompt for independent reflection.

Movement III — The Future — Weeks 5-6

Reimagining alternatives beyond today, and learning through collective thinking and workshops, practicing agency to reshape the way forward.

What the course entails:

Each week, students will be assigned academic readings to critically engage with and discuss together. A writing assignment will also be provided as an optional tool for deeper learning. Students may choose to complete it and receive formative feedback, develop it further with supervision, or use it simply as a prompt for independent reflection.

Syllabus

Week 1

Technology as construction: Dismantling inevitability

Inquiry

Digital systems are often described as if they evolve naturally: faster, smarter, more advanced. This framing obscures the fact that every platform, feature, and interface is the outcome of human decisions shaped by cultural values, economic incentives, and political priorities.

This week introduces the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), which rejects the idea that technology develops independently of society. Instead, it emerges through negotiation between different groups, each with competing interests. Winner pushes this further, arguing that technologies themselves can embody political arrangements, structuring who has power and who does not.

However, Latour’s (2005) Actor-Network Theory complicates the boundary between human and non-human actors, showing how technologies participate in shaping outcomes rather than simply executing them. The task is to recognise that what feels “natural” in technology is often the most successfully stabilised form of power.

Readings

Pinch, T. J., & Bijker, W. E. (1984). The social construction of facts and artefacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399–441.
Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.

Week 2

Power through tehcnology: Who gets to decide?

Inquiry

Power in digital society rarely operates through a single person or institution. Decisions are increasingly distributed across governments, corporations, platforms, algorithms, infrastructures, and now AI systems. This week asks how sociology can help us locate power when no single actor appears fully in control.

Foucault’s (1977) account of disciplinary power provides a foundation for understanding how behaviour can be shaped through observation, classification, and norms rather than direct coercion. Winner (1980) allows us to extend this into technological systems themselves, while Gillespie (2018) demonstrates how seemingly technical decisions are also acts of governance.

From recommendation algorithms to generative AI and automated decision systems, we examine how technological power becomes embedded in everyday infrastructures and ask what happens when governance begins to look like a technical function rather than a political decision.

Readings

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.
Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.
Gillespie, T. (2018). Governance of and by platforms. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media (pp. 254–278). SAGE Publications.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.

Week 3

The digital self: Identity under observation

Inquiry

Digital technologies promise increasingly personalised experiences: feeds tailored to our interests, recommendations based on our behaviour, profiles that allow us to express ourselves, and systems capable of predicting what we might want next. Yet the digital self is never entirely self-determined.

Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework provides a foundation for understanding identity as something performed and negotiated in relation to others. boyd (2010) extends this into networked publics, where audiences collapse and expressions become persistent, searchable, and replicable.

Today, the problem extends beyond what we deliberately present online. Platforms and algorithmic systems continuously infer identities from behavioural traces, while AI systems increasingly classify, predict, and represent us. This week asks what happens when identity becomes something we both perform ourselves and have interpreted for us by machines.

Readings

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
boyd, d. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). Routledge.
Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017). We are data: Algorithms and the making of our digital selves. New York University Press.
Baym, N. K. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed.). Polity Press.

Week 4

Digital inequality: When technology meets an unequal world

Inquiry

Technological progress is often accompanied by promises of democratisation: greater access to knowledge, opportunity, markets, education, and now intelligence itself. But access to technology does not necessarily translate into equal outcomes.

van Dijk (2020) demonstrates that digital inequality extends beyond whether someone has access to technology toward differences in skills, usage, and the advantages people are able to derive from it, especially in the Global South. Noble (2018) demonstrates how supposedly neutral technological systems can reproduce existing racial and social hierarchies, while Benjamin (2019) challenges the assumption that technological innovation necessarily represents social progress.

These questions become increasingly urgent as AI enters education, recruitment, work, healthcare, government, and everyday decision-making. Rather than asking whether everyone has access to the same technology, this week asks: who is positioned to benefit from technological change, whose realities are encoded into these systems, and whose inequalities risk becoming automated?

Readings

van Dijk, J. (2020). The digital divide. Polity Press.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.
Graham, M., & Woodcock, J. (2019). The gig economy: A critical introduction. Polity
Press.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.

Week 5

Digital labour & human value: What is work for?

Inquiry

Technological change has always reorganised labour. Yet contemporary automation and AI have revived an older anxiety with new intensity: if machines can perform more of what humans do, what happens to human work?

Terranova’s (2000) concept of free labour demonstrates how digital economies have long depended upon forms of human activity that are rendered invisible or uncompensated. Gray and Suri (2019) expose the hidden human labour required to make supposedly automated systems function, while contemporary AI makes this relationship even more complicated: human knowledge, creative work, data, judgment, and feedback become inputs into systems designed to automate increasingly complex forms of labour.

Rather than simply asking whether AI will replace jobs, this week interrogates a deeper question: how does society decide which forms of labour are valuable, which are replaceable, and which remain worth doing even when they can be automated?

Readings

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.
Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost work: How to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social
Text, 18(2), 33–58.
van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society: Public values in a
connective world. Oxford University Press.
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit jobs: A theory. Simon & Schuster.

Week 6

Digital futures: Resistance, regulation, and redesign

Inquiry

After five weeks of examining how technology is constructed, how power becomes embedded within it, and how digital systems reshape identity, inequality, and labour, we return to where we began: if technology is socially constructed, then its future cannot be entirely inevitable.

Morozov (2013) critiques technological solutionism: the tendency to treat complex social and political problems as problems that better technology can simply solve. Tufekci (2017) demonstrates that digital technologies can simultaneously enable collective action and introduce new forms of dependency and vulnerability. Feenberg takes us further by arguing that technological systems themselves remain sites of democratic struggle.

This final week moves from critique towards agency. Through collective thinking and workshops, students explore regulation, resistance, redesign, alternative ownership, public infrastructure, refusal, and other ways technological systems might be organised differently. What kind of society do we want technology to help us build and what would it take to have a say in building it?

Readings

Castells, M. (2011). A network theory of power. International Journal of Communication, 5, 773–787.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. PublicAffairs.
Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming technology: A critical theory revisited. Oxford University Press.

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The enrolment for this batch has already been closed as we've reached our full capacity. However, please feel free to express your interest below so we can do a headcount for the next batch. If we reach a high number of interests, we may open up another batch very soon!