Dr Chris Till

Sociologija. Mintis ir veiksmas (Sociology: Thought and Action) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal published in Lithuania and dedicated to the critical study of contemporary social and cultural change – including the shifting status of sociology itself – from a variety of perspectives. It covers subjects such as social theory, social research and research methodology, political sociology, gender issues, nationalism, sociology of art, social stratification and social identities. In addition, the journal is open to contributions that engage with wider debates within and across social psychology, philosophy, history, political science and anthropology, and provides a forum for reviews of recently published or translated sociological texts.

The use of self-tracking (ST) devices has increased dramatically in recent years with enthusiasm from the public as well as public health, healthcare providers and workplaces seeking to instigate behaviour change in populations. Analysis of the ontological principles informing the design and implementation of the Apple Watch and corporate wellness (CW) programmes using ST technologies will suggest that their primary focus is on the capture and control of attention rather than material health outcomes. Health, wellness and happiness have been conflated with productivity which is now deemed to be dependent on the harnessing of libidinal energy as well as physical energy. In this context ST technologies and related CW interventions, have been informed by “emotional design”, neuroscientific and behavioural principles which target the “pre subjective” consciousness of individuals through manipulating their habits and neurological functioning. The paper draws on the work of Bernard Stiegler to suggest framing ST as “industrial temporal objects”, which capture and “short circuit” attention. It will be proposed that a central aim is to “accumulate the consciousnesses” of subjects consistent with the methods of a contemporary “attention economy”. This new logic of accumulation informs the behaviour change strategies of designers of ST devices, and CW initiatives, taking the form of “psychotechnologies” which attempt to reconstruct active subjects as automatic and reactive “nodes” as part of managed networks.

This paper explores how individuals use streaming services to support exercise and wellness practices, proposing that the primary motivation is not merely functional fitness goals but the attainment of a state of resonance or a meaningful connection between body, media, and the world. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance and theories of sonic environments and self-formation, the study uses semi-structured interviews and diary-elicitation methods with 16 participants to investigate how streaming platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, and others are integrated into everyday wellness routines. Thematic analysis revealed that participants used streamed audio and video content to structure time, regulate tempo and emotion, and create embodied experiences of motivation and energy. Rather than simply facilitating normative discipline or algorithmic self-optimization, streaming platforms enabled users to create resonant encounters—dynamic, affective alignments with their bodily states and environments. These findings provide nuance to existing analyses of media use as utilitarian or consumer-driven, highlighting instead how people appropriate digital technologies to navigate affective, temporal, and existential challenges. This research contributes to sociological and media studies debates on digital culture, self-regulation, and health, offering insights into how platforms might be better designed to support meaningful engagement and subjective well-being.

The growing influence of digital data, technologies, and networks in health management has prompted renewed scholarly interest in the power relations shaping this shift. Central to these analyses are Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, the management and administration of life, and governmentality, the rationalities and strategies of government. This chapter introduces Foucault’s frameworks and explores their application to digital health. It considers how self-tracking technologies reflect neoliberal modes of governance, where individuals are responsibilized for their health through disciplinary mechanisms. Yet, power today increasingly operates through more abstract, data-driven forms of control, distancing itself from direct intervention. These developments have expanded corporate influence over health, fostering new ontologies and managerial methods. Advances in digital imaging and genetic analysis have also reoriented biopolitical focus from bodies to biological life itself. However, these shifts have intersected with racist discourses, enabling exclusionary practices and the production of new bioinequalities. While Foucault’s analysis remains foundational, contemporary scholars have extended it to address the evolving dynamics of digital surveillance, corporate power, and datafied health governance. The chapter highlights both the enduring relevance and necessary adaptation of Foucault’s thought for understanding the complex entanglements of power, politics, health, and digital technologies today.

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from São Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on ‘Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, paying particular attention to the discourse of responsible innovation from a cross-cultural perspective. We describe a number of important tensions, paradoxes and opportunities that emerged over the three days of the workshop.

Drawing on insights from feminist and Science and Technology Studies writing on care and vulnerability, this paper will critically explore conceptualisations of responsibility, care and vulnerability in relation to contemporary approaches to Responsible Innovation (RI). Drawing on examples of some of the social and ethical challenges of precision medicine, we highlight the on-going, distributed and complex nature of innovation and responsibilities in relation to markets, patient and carer experience and data practices associated with these new technologies to highlight some of the limits of RI. We end by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for the social and ethical challenges of precision medicine and RI more generally.

Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’.

The ways in which Anorexia Nervosa (AN) has been described and explained has differed drastically over time although since it was first named in 1874 it has been primarily associated with women and girls it is argued in this paper that it came to be more fundamentally associated with femininity due to certain disciplinary changes in the psy sciences. The influential psychiatrist Hilde Bruch lamented the loss in clarity of the clinical picture that was the result of psychoanalytic interpretations, to remedy this she reformulated AN into a pathology that was the result of the individual being too determined by external influences. Bruch’s changes increased the emphasis that psychiatrists placed on the relationship between women and their social context and the lack of individual autonomy that many felt. Feminist writers adapted Bruch’s theory to suggest that patriarchal culture was colonizing the lives of women and that social rather than individual change needed to occur. Psychiatrists subsequently developed scales for assessing gender identity which switched the emphasis back onto individuals and rendered gender as an individualised, quantifiable, manipulable object. When reified and individualised in this fashion it became more legitimate to discuss femininity as causative of, and masculinity as a protection against, AN.

Three of Zygmunt Bauman’s recent books are assessed to present insights into the recent development of his thought and the challenges it poses to the social sciences, humanities and the wider public. By reading Bauman’s recent work through the influence he takes from Georg Simmel, the former’s disparate recent work is understood as an attempt at the cultivation of critical and ethical engagement through the externalization and objectification of his own subjective culture. The more radical elements of Bauman’s work are emphasized in his attempts to stimulate a counter-culture through encouraging critical analysis of society. It is proposed that he achieves this through ‘polylogic’ discourse and engagement with the public. Sociology is presented as a tool of freedom through ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’ and Bauman’s most powerful tool in this is the demonstration of his particular critical view of the world. The broad-ranging engagement with diverse topics in his recent books enables him to place this critical perspective, rather than a particular topic or issue, at the centre of his work. The metaphorical and other literary devices used by Bauman to stimulate critique and in particular to spur on the radical potential of youth are highlighted as some of his most powerful contributions.

This chapter proposes that companies are taking a new biopolitical interest in health which is leading to a convergence of work and health. When digital self-tracking (DST) devices are used in corporate wellness (CW) programmes, they form a socio-technical assemblage which enables companies to improve health through encouraging higher levels of activity while increasing productivity. Economic interests and an incitement to health are merged with an ethical concern for the population and a drive to ‘do good’ as part of social responsibility. This dual concern with commerce and health improvement, enabled by the development of DST, is causing healthiness (and virtuousness) to become increasingly associated with ‘activity’, which becomes a general arbiter of moral value.

This paper introduces a project to develop a digital academic writing tool at Leeds Beckett University (LBU). Essay X-ray is an interactive online tool designed to help students get to grips with the structure and style of academic writing and was developed using the Articulate Storyline 360 platform. The aim was to expand LBU’s academic skills support for students tasked with essay assignments, especially at Level 4, enabling independent learning using a self-paced format available open access and 24/7. This would complement existing academic skills provision (one-to-ones, workshops, drop-ins, static online resources), with the interactive element facilitating active, hands-on learning (Lumpkin, Achen and Dodd, 2015). Following a successful development, review and rollout process, the utility of Essay X-ray as an independent learning tool but also as a classroom resource was reported by students and colleagues. Tentative talks about additional versions (Dissertation X-ray, Report X-ray) have taken place, indicating its potential for rollout to other subject areas and assessment types. Finally, in-house digital academic skills tools like Essay X-ray are posited as a potential response to the recent upsurge in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools. Essay X-ray requires users to think critically about essay structure, style and content to create their own original pieces of writing, thus responding to questions about the maintenance of academic integrity in a digital world. These features enable users to develop their essay writing skills, in contrast to passive engagement with a GenAI programme that merely writes an answer for them.

Spotify dominates the audio streaming industry and offers an almost limitless library of music and other ‘sounds’. They have recently made various interventions into health, exercise and wellness with the development of curated and personalised playlists focused on activities such as running, weightlifting and meditation and guided workouts interspersed with algorithmically generated playlists. This article suggests that the company are developing new means of datafying health, exercise and wellness practices such as monitoring activities, heart rate, mood and broadly the rhythms and tempos of their lives. While this is presented as beneficial to users to provide a more personalised experience, analysis of patent applications, financial statements and promotional materials targeting advertisers and investors suggest other objectives. Audio consumption is combined with the newly datafied activities to ‘bundle’ users into ‘audience commodities’ to be sold to advertisers. Furthermore, such innovations, and the potential to attract advertisers, form the materials through which Spotify construct stories to potential investors about the future profitability, or at least growth in market value, of the company essential for firms integrated into ‘financialised capitalism’. This represents a further opening up of aspects of everyday lives to commercial exploitation through datafication and contributes to an attempt to reposition health-related practices as assets which can be packaged for investment portfolios. The publications analysed in this article demonstrate some of the ways in which Spotify seek to both monitor and shape practices of users to make them more amenable to financialisation.

Based on: Digital Capitalism and Distributive Forces, by Pfeiffer Sabine. Beilefeld, DE: transcript publishing, 2022. 282 pp. $70.00 paper. ISBN: 9783837658934.

Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’.

The nature of reality has been a central concern of philosophy and the social sciences, but since the proliferation of social media, psychological operations have taken on greater visibility and significance in political action. ‘Fake news’ and micro-targeted and deceptive advertising in elections and votes has brought the tenuous character of political reality to the fore. The affordances of the Internet, World Wide Web and social media have enabled users to be mobilised to varying degrees of awareness for propaganda and disinformation campaigns both as producers and spreaders of content and as generators of data for profiling and targeting. This article will argue that social media platforms and the broader political economy of the Internet create the possibilities for online interactions and targeting which enable form of political intervention focused on the destabilisation of perceptions of reality and recruit users in the construction of new politically useful realities.

This chapter will investigate the ways in which self-tracking (ST) systems are presented as a means of enabling corporate wellness (CW) initiatives to mobilise the productive potential of “the social”. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to unpick how good managers and organisations are construed as those who find ways to stimulate social interactions and invest them with meaning while directing them in a way which will serve the overall interests of the employer. ST interventions are presented as a key tool for reconfiguring social networks in a productive and healthy fashion with individual subjects presented as automatic and reactive. ST CW is thus aligned with a “connexionist” philosophywhich is already prominent in management discourse.

This book raises questions about the changing relationships between technology, people and health. It examines the accelerating pace of technological development and a general shift to personalized, patient-led medicine.

This editorial summarises a series of eight papers for the Sociologija. Mintis ir veiksmas special issue, ‘Sociology and Contemporary Critical Theory’, the impetus for which came out of a symposium held in April 2017 at Leeds Beckett University, entitled ‘Critical and Philosophical Issues after Post-Structuralism’. The event was organised by the Critical Theory Research Group, its members’ intellectual interests spanning social and cultural theory, political theory, visual culture and social psychology; their aim was and is to reflect upon various tactics for politically engaged and socially active theoretical writing in the wake of a fundamental questioning of knowledge and certainty, and also more recently of the rise of cultural and political developments that would deny the rights of the Other.

The recent increase in the use of digital self-tracking devices has given rise to a range of relations to the self often discussed as quantified self (QS). In popular and academic discourse, this development has been discussed variously as a form of narcissistic self-involvement, an advanced expression of panoptical self-surveillance and a potential new dawn for e-health. This article proposes a previously un-theorised consequence of this large-scale observation and analysis of human behaviour; that exercise activity is in the process of being reconfigured as labour. QS will be briefly introduced, and reflected on, subsequently considering some of its key aspects in relation to how these have so far been interpreted and analysed in academic literature. Secondly, the analysis of scholars of “digital labour” and “immaterial labour” will be considered, which will be discussed in relation to what its analysis of the transformations of work in contemporary advanced capitalism can offer to an interpretation of the promotion and management of the self-tracking of exercise activities. Building on this analysis, it will be proposed that a thermodynamic model of the exploitation of potential energy underlies the interest that corporations have shown in self-tracking and that “gamification” and the promotion of an entrepreneurial selfhood is the ideological frame that informs the strategy through which labour value is extracted without payment. Finally, the potential theoretical and political consequences of these insights will be considered.

In this paper we decode virtual people and digital labour within the Higher Education (HE) sector. Virtual people can be produced by motion-capture recordings of human physical movements and speech patterns (to create a virtual twin or clone) or by animating digital imagery. In some cases, human operators write scripts which are then presented by virtual people, but in other cases they are autonomously animated through artificial intelligence programs (Schroeder and Craig, 2021). Our research relates to learning, life and work pedagogy series since virtual people are more than just software programmes embedded in chatbots or digital assistant devices because they have an uncanny resemblance to human beings (Pillai, R. et al., 2023). Instead, their uncanny resemblance to human beings is crafted for commercial purposes to perform their roles, which may displace or replace human labour and social interaction. The use of virtual people in Higher Education is promoted as offering staff and students benefits such as speed, efficiency and convenience. However, the use of virtual people in such roles raises important questions about privacy, misinformation, and exploitation (Putoni, 2021). Our research seeks to interrogate the implications, opportunities and risks arising from the use of virtual people to perform tasks and services currently performed by human workers such as lecturers, professional and support staff. To do so, we will draw on debates in critical theory surrounding the fourth industrial revolution (Schwab, 2016; 2017) cognitive capitalism, labour studies and creativity (Fuchs, 2021, Johannesen, 2018; Jarret, 2019; Lee 2022). There are now several synthetic media companies who produce virtual people including Colossyan, Hour One, Rephrase AI, Synthesia, Soul Machines and UneeQ. Notably these synthetic media companies create software that mimics social interaction and makes these technological systems available to public and private sector organisations around the world. Virtual people are already used in HE, for example, Maryville University in the US uses two digital life coaches Mya and Emma to guide new and prospective students (https://magazine.maryville.edu/meet-emma-and-mya/). In addition, Adtalem, a commercial global education provider uses virtual people to create training content for therapists. Synthesia has also produced a video featuring virtual people for Bolton College in the UK about the importance of student attendance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iho99u1JH_I). We will also create and evaluate learning and teaching content using the technical walk-through method of data collection and analysis (Light, Burgess and Duguay, 2018). This will involve making field notes, analysing screen shots and critically examining software features (design, layout) and functions (menu options). Keywords Artificial sociality, virtual people, digital labour, higher education

This article applies Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity to understand the dynamics of temporary communities through the branded strength and conditioning programme of CrossFit (CF). By drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews across 4 different UK CF gyms, we argue that to some participants CF offers a temporary return to a modified version of the strong social bonds associated with older forms of community (described by Ferdinand Tönnies as Gemeinschaft). These close communities, however, are modified by their intermingling with contemporary capitalist relations and their service to the development of individual identity and body projects consistent with recent re-conceptualizations. These new forms retain some Gemeinschaft characteristics, such as a space for friendship and camaraderie, while also providing opportunities to work on individual life and body projects. Ultimately, due to their temporary character and focus on self-development, we argue they are best categorized as what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as ‘peg communities’.