 Hi folks. I think we'll go ahead and get started. I'm Rob Faris. I'm the Research Director at the Berkman Klein Center, and it is my great pleasure to introduce and welcome our speakers today. We are being live webcast, so be careful what you say. It'll be out there for posterity, and if you want to check out this talk again later, you can certainly do so. So I'm gonna read this because their resumes are so long and impressive, and I don't want to get it wrong. Nick Koldry is the Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics. He's written more books than we can mention now. They include Ethics of Society, Media Society World, and Why Voice Matters. We're lucky to have him in the neighborhood this year because he's a faculty affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center, as well as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. Andreas Hepn is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Center for Media Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen. His books include Cultures of Mediatization and Transcultural Communication. One of these days, I'm gonna be able to say that word fluently, Mediatization. That's one of the things they're gonna talk about. We're here today to learn about and celebrate the recent release of their book, The Mediated Construction of Reality, which is uncomfortably important and salient today in the United States as it is around the world. They're incredibly impressionant in producing that work. So I'm gonna do us all a favor and let the speakers speak for themselves. We have just until five o'clock because they're on a shuttle to New York City. So I turn the floor over to you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rob. It's great to be here. Yes, there are two copies of the book there, and leaflets, so discount leaflets. So please take advantage of that. Yeah, we're really pleased to have the chance to take us through the book and give you a key message, and we're gonna focus it towards the end. I put up there the first sentence of the book. Suppose the social to be mediated, what then? Those of you who philosophers might recognize in there an echo are the first sentence of Nietzsche's greatest work, Beyond Good and Evil, which starts, suppose truth to be a woman, what then? Nietzsche was trying to say the most shocking thing in a profoundly patriarchal society. Let's leave aside the politics of whether he was right about that or not. We're trying to say something shocking here. Suppose the social to be mediated. I suppose is to really take that reality seriously. What does that mean? And the idea of the starting point of the book is that we have to rethink the relations between three things on three levels. On the one hand, something which is quite wrong on classical media sociology, the relation between media and the social. Of course, this is something which is discussed for a long time. But if you look at classical social theory, this is not that long of a fact. With that book, we wanted to go further also to determine the social theory, literally. So the embeddedness of the everyday life and even as a third step to think about data and datafication, how to construction of the social changes when datafication becomes an important part of society. In all, we have to win that book as three-step argument. In the first part, we start with constructing the social world. So this more or less foundation of the further arguments within the book, we develop a communicative approach to the construction of the social world, reflect how mediaization is a lot in history. And then with a three-correction perspective, we'll talk later on about this. So this means how to think or rethink about social relations in terms of deep utilisation. The second part of the book is focused on the different dimensions of the social world, especially the whole argument process. It all goes together nowadays with data. And it's the reason why we think that many of the classical arguments about knowledge doesn't work anymore. And finally, the end of the book with agency and social world, how this changes the possibility of acting on various levels. The media construction of reality. So what do we mean by social reality? Looking backwards to classics, some logics of history, there are always the argument that we have two points or two aspects in mind. First of all, the level of mediation. This is construction of meaning. But on the other hand, the aspect of social relations that means how structure comes with a society. The core argument we develop within that book, which we started in that book, is that the process of constructing society is in all the common of this process. So it's about communication. Communication is a core for constructing the social world. But with communication, materiality plays a role, which means, first of all, that we do not only have to reflect about meaning, but also the built-in environment of this materiality. And first of all, and furthermore, we have to think about how this materiality changes. And this is the point where we come to a core concept within that book. And this is the book. And this is the concept of deep mediation. So what do we understand by deep mediation? Deep mediation for us is an advanced stage of mediation, which all elements of our social world are deeply related to media and then for searches. And there are five points, five dimensions of five trends, which are driving forces of this deep mediation. First of all, the differentiation of media. So in the beginning, there was the idea that the digital media all would converge into some kind of super-media. So what we have nowadays is the diversity of media, the internet of things, so rather plurality of differentiation of media, which on however, and this is the second trend, connected by an infrastructure, the infrastructure of the internet, which interrelates these different kinds of media. Because of mobile communication, the third trend, these media are embedded everywhere. So there's nearly no social situation and even more at least in the western world, in which we do not have access at least to some kinds of media. But these media are, and this is the fourth trend, not so stable anymore like it has been. As these media became all software-based, we're not confronted with the situation that all these kind of media, platforms and so on, are developed ungovernedly. We are living in a situation of perpetual data. And finally, there's the trend of datafication. As these media are based on software, they are not just tools of communication anymore, they are nowadays all the time also tools of producing data, collecting data, and communicating data when we use these media. All of this results in what we call the media metaphor, which means a complexity of media, a world or an environment of media in which these media are closely interrelated with each other. And to think about social construction within this media manifold, this is the starting point for our implementation within the world. If you look here back to classics and social theory, like for example Berg and Blöckmann, who wrote a book about social construction for everybody, we immediately got a feeling about the difference of the times when they were writing the book and the times you're now living in. So they still had the idea that it was direct communication, faster face communication, by which the social world is constructed. And they do not reflect media anymore at all. Nowadays, we live in a situation where we can't talk about processes of social construction without having the variety of media in mind, because nowadays communication is not only direct communication, but it's communication which is deeply embedded in that media manifold. Social relations are because of that partly constructed through data and data verification. So, just taking a step back for a moment. There was a classic book written in 1966, a social construction of reality, believe it or not, a best seller in the days when sociological books could be best sellers, and we're trying to echo that 50 years later in a book about the mediated construction of reality. And it was one of the few books that tried to get a view of the whole social world, see it all in one go and see how it holds together. A problem, it doesn't talk about media, because television was already very present in 1966, but nonetheless, it's worth going back to as a starting point. There's just one problem though, that the whole classic starting point of phenomenology doesn't provide us with a secure enough foundation to make sense of what data actually do in the social world. And that's one I want to talk about for a few minutes, because this is a deep problem we had to confront in doing the book. So, we specifically identified data verification, the move to translate every particle of the social into data for further processing, as really the fourth wave of the mediatization of the world over the past two centuries. Digitization was the third wave. We're now entering a new phase, which is datification. We're just at the beginning of that, but what does it mean? Well, it certainly potentially poses a challenge to the classic thesis of social construction of reality, which basically assumed that you could build up a picture of how the social world hangs together by listening to what each person within it says and thinks about it. Add all those together and you get a world that somehow harmonizes into a coherent social world, more or less. Institutions involve two, but basically that's it. That doesn't work for a data-five world. Let me explain why. The first of all is that there's so much data being produced that human beings can't count it and collect it. It has to be done in an automated way. That means something other than human beings has agency in this. That's the first problem. The second problem is that those data processes are not doing what they do for us in a way that we plan. They're acting in accordance with the goals of external actors, corporate actors, commercial actors. Perfectly legitimate goals, but they are not the types of goals that single human beings can have, such as to make profit on the level of tens of billions a year. That's not a specific goal that an individual will have. It's a corporate institutional goal. It's external to what we do. And yet this is the key thing. It's not as if all of this is irrelevant to our lives like the way that electricity current is put together in the wires down which it's sent. Data actually contributes to the making of what we know about the social, or at least it passes for social knowledge. So we can't ignore it if we're trying to see what do we know about the social world. So we've got to think about the status of data-fied readings of the social world for social knowledge if we're going to understand what the social world is in spite of all these problems which are built into what data are for phenomenology. In other words to sum up, there's a whole premise of phenomenology at least in the traditional form that sums up their whole book that everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men sorry, 1966 and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. That's exactly what we all know we cannot assume now because something else which is data is involved in the mix, in the water if you like. That's just the start of the problems though because we know that data is designed to discriminate between human beings that is the point of collecting data. And those discriminations categorize us discriminators between us for various purposes, commercial others, other issues of justice there, but they're core to what data do, the world is remade in this way through the counting and sorting. But we can't see into that process. Some of it because it is commercially sensitive it is protected from us, the doors are barred some of it because it's so complex that even the inventors of Google's algorithm do not know how it plays out at every moment in time because it is machine learning it cannot be unpacked into something humans can know in full detail it's necessarily opaque actually just not staying on the opacity classical social theory thought about opacity. They had an idea that yes we don't know about what's going on and we certainly don't know the future but in the end we know who to ask and in the end the future becomes the present so we find out. So opacity isn't a deep problem in classical social theory, but it's a deep problem now because the social world is necessarily opaque to a large degree as the legal theorists duly co-inemphasize. That's important if we can't see into the way this world is made we can't intuitively understand it in the same way we used to take for granted also our relations the tools have changed tools are always black boxes to some degree but that doesn't matter whether you know how your car works you still know how to drive it. However there are different types of black boxes today. The tools we have today the digital tools are black boxes in the sense that as we use them we know they are already using us for their own purposes which are the collection of data as I said. So that's what we call in the book tool reversibility. Tools are meant to be things we put in our hands to achieve what we want. Now at this very same time they are already achieving something through us because of the fact we pick them up that's a radical change in what a tool can be and that changes again a basic assumption of classical phenomenology which creates a new way of thinking about complexity the world has always been complex but it's now complex in a very different way so the question is what concepts can help us understand that complexity back to Andreas and if you look here so for theory it is the concept of the network on the other hand the concept of fast and flash for sure those concepts have the strengths but the core argument we develop is that they are too weak to reflect what's going on and there's a reason why we go back to another concept the concept of affiguration originally developed by more liars and try to rethink so why that? If you look at network as a concept this is about structural lens and more or less it is not a concept which allows us also to in our analysis questions of meaning production we remain at that level of structural lens if you look at the concept of fast and flash like it is for example discussed by Latour and others the core thing which came into the discussion by this concept is on the one hand that we also have to reflect things and technology when it comes to the construction of social life or the social world the idea is that we have to follow the actors life so we follow from the various kind of actors processes constructed in the social reality integrated within that analysis also things, machines and as a certain kind of actors never the last this concept remains weak because it is linked to an idea that society would be flat consisting only out of us in parts and by that it does not become possible to integrate questions of power power relation and how society in total is feeling if you look now at the concept of figuration it is a different kind of thing it is also a concept that has a certain link to the idea of network so it is about the interrelations of different kinds of actors but it more reflects the tensions between these different kinds of actors the power relations between these different kinds of actors so the idea of figuration like a group for example like a dance for example these are the examples not well enough to use is that within a figuration you always have a certain kind of power balance between these different kind of actors which are involved in that figuration furthermore you already integrated network analysis the analysis of the construction of social meaning so for him the borders for the borderlines of the figuration are always defined by the meaning of this figuration and because of that it is not just an abstract structural thing like networks are just look at the diagram again just to summarize what Andrew is saying the arrows go both ways there's pulling I'm pulling on you, you're pulling on me and we're doing that because something matters about the game it's not just a link something's at stake something has to be got right something means something this is a dynamic way of thinking about complexity an amazing discovery we made there we're adding in it's not just between us because of course we're also being pulled by social forces Elias had the idea not only we're pulling on each other but each of us is being pulled laterally by society so there's a very complex play of forces and here's the amazing discovery we made in writing the book that Norbert Elias had conceptualized this at least 10 years ahead of La Tour actually it's more amazing that he had the concept of the figuration in the 1930s when he was in exile from Germany it's in the civilizing process in other words he was about 40 if not 50 years ahead of what we think is the most advanced thinking about social complexity today and that is sobering let me take you through how amazing his idea is it's a model of processes of interweaving within networks he stresses the networks like a game of cards but that's only the most simple example social interweaving with that special kind of order La Tour could have written this that starts from the connections the relationships and works out from there to the elements the elements are produced out of the connections and the key thing the behavior of many people intermeshes to form interwoven structures I think that metaphor is really important because when something meshes it's not just linked there's a pulling which gives the strength to the lattice work he actually uses the concept of lattice work from chemistry this is a very dynamic way of thinking about complexity it's not an engineering model well that's dynamic too operating in higher dimensions let me just bring that out because it's clearly not just to think about particular card games to understand contemporary society we have to move from there to complexity so in the book we develop the concept of figurations of figurations higher dimensional figurations all of them pulling on each other to produce higher dimensional tensions that intersect in our bodies and we have to live here's a diagram that explains that so there's the simple figuration but something's pulling it from outside another figuration and another figuration each of them being pulled there could be a hundred a thousand dimensions societies made out of many many dimensions and the tensions at the higher dimensions it's no good just looking at one dimension to see the complexity and that's I think familiar it helps us think about as it were wicked or insoluble problems we're now facing but Elias had already grasped this with a little addition from us so what does this mean for social order well the first thing we say in the book to get the handle on this difficult concept of figurations of figurations i.e. higher dimensional tensions is that Facebook is a clear example of this Facebook is both an infrastructure and it's a site of many levels meaning making it's both together not one or the other and it's being pulled and it's pulling in multiple directions and it gets into a lot of problems it will come to at the end of the talk so the question is what does a social order look like then if it's built out of many entities that have this sort of property as we know now today it is well one very striking thing about the platform the digital platform is that it's a space we can't draw a line anymore between the social and the economic of course the economic has always been a little social and vice versa but now when we are acting socially hanging out with our friends we are in the economy that is a radical shift in social space and economic space and it's part of increasing interdependence which is creating for good or ill new types radical new types of tension let's take the case of the law the law itself is a complex figuration emerging from many many competing parties pulling on each other but of course there are new parties platforms far beyond the state are doing whether they want to or not the work of regulating their content they may not want to do this but this is de facto what they are doing and they are being pulled on as they do this it creates a massive complexity because law has to try and be the attempt to regulate the whole social order that amounts from all of this but how is it going to do it how is it possible even to conceive of this problem well again this is the problem that facebook faces we had the global policy director of facebook here two or three weeks ago and I was struck by her answers which offered credible procedures for trying to decide certain things that are totally reasonable but the real problem that facebook faces is where does it get its authority from how can we imagine an institution that has a constituency bigger than even china two billion people now on facebook that has the authority to make legitimate decisions about the way the public world could be no government can yet do that why should we imagine that facebook can are we clear about the size of the problem in other words unless we start to see it from a social theoretical point of view this is not a technological or legal problem it is a profound problem about what social order can be so we want to leave with three questions and then have some discussion all of this leads in the last two chapters of the book focus on this once you get beyond the details of the concepts that get us to this point so some really urgent questions for thinking about the types of social societies or let's say social orders they go beyond national boundaries for sure that we're living how can governance either regulation for good human ends of this social how can it be effective anymore where does the effectiveness come from what resources can it draw on does it have the resources even if it's effective it still needs in the long run to be legitimate because I can hit you over the head and that's very effective in the short term but it's certainly not legitimate and you will hit me back and that's unstable effective governance has to also be legitimate but where does the legitimacy come from on the scale on which our platforms are now operating I genuinely don't think we know the answer to that question and it's a question that only starts to become clear when we put all this in social theoretical terms and think about the social relations we're talking about not just the mechanisms and that raises the third question society in the general sense any human society the social order we're trying to live now can it be governoral what are the consequences if it is no longer governable how is that compatible with democracy order I mean order not in the sense of closing things down but a basic order which we can live while remaining sane those are the questions we think that social theory forces us to ask and we don't have the answers but we hope they're interesting questions thank you for listening we look forward to your questions maybe we should go and sit on these wonderful chairs we do have a couple of mics floating around just in case we just want to make sure we get any questions a question that I'm not going to attempt to answer those those are really powerful important questions I hope we'll come back to those but I was struck at the confluence of datafication and reality in your talk and I realized that intuitively I would have thought that more information more data would more firmly root us in reality or at least a shared reality of some sort and we seem to be in interesting ways moving in the other direction is that consistent with what you would have expected or what your travels have led you to believe does it make sense well you could be right in the long run about the direction of travel if these gaps we're seeing these fissures if you like in the world that's offered to us through data get filled in we start to trust all sources of data we start to understand better how it's generated we understand how Facebook's algorithms work validly to present us with the news feeds and other things they present us to understand if those things can be filled in, patched up you could be right but at the moment these are big cracks and their cracks link to the very different way that the information is now sourced I mean Berger and Lukman had the idea which wasn't sentimental it was quite hard headed however complex institutions are in the end they're made out of human beings broadly are calling to rules we roughly understand and we can somehow ensure it okay that's how the government somehow reached a decision like that or that's how my school rejected my child and so on and so forth and on that basis we trust those institutions it's pretty obvious we're in a situation where trust in data platforms is at least uncertain at the moment it's being worked on earned uncertain and the reasons are not because these are bad institutions or bad people they're linked to the fundamental nature of what they have to do which is to deliver legitimacy for something that goes far beyond what human beings are doing it has to be automated this is a really big problem that Berger and Lukman could never imagine so you may be right in the long run we may solve all this right now we're not solving this is an example large parts of the stock market are based really on software negotiations which take place are not human actors anymore who do it? it's a software program so you get a completely different point of view to social construct it's not just by the humans it's a delegation to technology humans cannot over human and then you end with another perspective of regulation this kind of market completely different kinds of dimension you have to regulate together for example, stock markets like you have like Berger and Lukman imagine a market where people, human beings come together and engage and if you look at the financial crisis partly this is also driven by data vacation because of this really deep transformation of the stock market I have a question about the slide going back to hidden social discrimination so there were two two lines that you had summarized one being that the world now being remade through counting and sorting and another which is that algorithms are necessarily opaque and... necessarily partly opaque so I'm thinking back on for example early efforts of cartography where the world is actually made more legible by measurement through procedural abstraction and perhaps I think algorithms are not opacity is not a property of algorithms themselves right but incentives they're incentives to keep them opaque and so my question is from your from the social perspective how can we organize societal pressures to push for more transparency, for more equity and accomplish through market incentives or what other incentives or regulations can actually make a difference in the heavy agency well I'd step by one point I think there's one reason why we said that algorithmic produced knowledge is necessarily partly opaque which is because of machine learning there's an element of complexity which is non-linear which can't fully be unpacked and we might know what generates it in broad terms but it cannot be unpacked even by the engineers themselves so that's always going to be a problem maybe we can find ways of living with that and tell stories to ourselves that allows that to work the commercial force is massive because I think it's very interesting to do a historical comparison I've been doing this in the past month or two well I've been here 19th century you had a parallel explosion in social knowledge the birth of statistics the discovery there were means and averages there was an average man who behaved with this astonishing regularity this transformed what policy could be it led to new concepts of poverty and so on it got to an extraordinary revolution but as I was reading that history and that's where the quote about making the world comes from Ted Porter's book that was primarily a public infrastructure of knowledge people were pretty clear and out in the open they were intensely debated even Dickens and his novels made fun of it it was out there and it was debated we now know that's not the type of public space we're in at the moment maybe we can imagine a greater shift with an increase in literacy so that we start debating those issues but think about the issues around blockchain or something like that the structure itself is so complex that only a small number of people fully understand it it is not something that straightforwardly translatable in other words what put it at its crudest because of these greater interdependencies we're reaching a level where the complexity that underpins the infrastructure on which we rely just to live our lives is so complex we cannot fully see into it because of the complexity however hard we try and I think that makes it a different type of world it's from the ones with classical social theories assumed that you could there's always an element of opacity but it was solvable what if it's not solvable anymore that changes the basis on which we can trust that world which in the end tests its stability unless force is applied to which is not what we want to talk about we want to talk about democratic solutions you could be right but I don't see my progress at the moment you may be more optimistic you may can see more light I think there was a question at the back yeah thank you it's sort of a question towards methods so I'm quite struck with what's it like to develop social theories on these issues as they are evolving what both are perhaps the biggest challenges including in communicating them to people to get understanding to sort of have the relationship especially to topics that are so politically politically discussed so what's both challenging and also rewarding about that you want to start okay well Andres is being modest he's actually doing some very interesting empirical work on some of these things on the ground the quantitative by itself you might want to I'll start if you like because theory I love doing theory I do enjoy doing it I feel a new urgency in doing it when I am not understanding the situation of things around me and I feel we're struggling to get a sense of it that's what theory has to be useful there's no value in itself unless it gives us tools in our hands so we had to work on those tools for constant debate but we draw on a lot of secondary literature and try and distill the lessons from that and that's where the empirical comes into this especially for me many of the main parts of the books are based on a theoretical result and so for example what we did is compare different media generations how the community both have changed on our recently pioneer communities one defined self-maker movement and so on again from the point of view how getting more of the processes of change in the social construction and if you have this point of view in research or this perspective in research you you are confronted with the question which integrating concept might you use to compare really very different fields of society and then looking at a general discussion you and first of all either by network glasses and in empirical research of course we did network analysis and of course the idea to integrate technology in the analysis and follow the actor and so on like it is done in ANT or in other large concepts is a hell but as an integrative concept to compare so different things like community building in the everyday life the pioneer communities already there it falls short and this is the reason why we ended because of this empirical research with a figuration approach so for us it was a practical help to integrate various kinds of network with other forms of analysis which are more based on established qualitative methods like calculation per example or qualitative index it is an integrative concept which fits from our point of view very well with different kinds of empirical analysis and we had a quality research unit on that which really tried this approach, this figuration approach to compare very very different domains of society and how they change with media data application, things like for example school journalism organizations of journalism or for example communities all of them you can understand in some way as figurations with this kind of tensions and you can reflect or do an analysis how these different kinds of tensions change when certain kind of new media are involved in that and always it's not only one kind of media, it's a variety of media and by this you have a tool to compare very different social domains and how they change with media dataization so in core or in essence this figuration approach is for me especially an analytical approach to do empirical research on various social domains and compare how these social domains transform changes with the latest media but I have a question about your questions the term governance seems to preempt the object because in general I think certainly usage I'm acquainted with that governance points away from states as the origins of regulatory frameworks and towards mixed frameworks like let's say where we are internet governance which involves a huge variety of disparate bodies from corporations to expert bodies to international groups and nation state actors have you preempted the answer to your question by effectively saying the state isn't going to be the central actually I don't like the word governance I feel a compulsion to use it because it has become so now I completely share your critique of the word I don't like it because if we give up on the idea the state the only so far successfully means of representing a large number of wills has something to say they were in trouble so I couldn't agree more we used it for convenience could have put it in scare quotes if you like but there's no doubt and Julie Cohen's work is particularly strong here from the Georgetown Law School that and I've been doing separate work with her is that like it or not the regulation for the public good of this world we call a public domain which we want to be good rather than bad is increasingly being done by institutions which are driven by their own perfectly valid local as it were commercial ends not by entities that in any sense need or claim to represent a public wider interest we've operated with that market for while you mentioned the market and of course that's a very important philosophical position to say the market must be able to provide that I think at this scale it's extremely difficult and we're seeing that tension around entities like Facebook to give you an example of the Facebook manifesto published on 16 I think it was the 16th of February this year by Mark Zuckerberg which I'm sure everyone's read it if you read that addressed to the global community virtually every sentence is ambiguous because he's having to face two audiences at the same time he's having to say you are the real human beings who are independently choosing to use Facebook you're independent and and you are our community I've studied it closely he keeps sliding between the community which must be real beyond Facebook and our community and this is a serious problem that I have some sympathy that they are on this and it goes to these social theoretical roots we don't know how an organization that should be and yet we criticize it we're angry with it because we haven't modeled we haven't thought the complexity through to that level so yes you're right the thanks for drawing me into that governance is precisely slippery and difficult here and we've got to get a grip on it we cannot let down there the figuration perspective so when it comes to regulation this perspective is helpful in double sense first of all we can think about the agencies of regulation as a certain kind of figuration that changed a lot it is not just the state anymore when it comes to that governance for example we have a completely new kind of figuration and at the same time as the other level the problem is how to regulate this complexity of figuration and again it is not something you can think and work in the borders of a state if you talk about Facebook for example and so thinking in this figuration perspective allows us to have an analytical tool to grasp what changes within regulation so it is for us on one hand it is this normative aspect he was talking about on the other hand it is this analytical aspect to think about how regulation changed and when it comes to internet governance regulation of the internet the interesting thing is that partly these new forms of regulations new figuration of regulation only work because they are also mediated in a certain way so within that media and technologies they play a role so when this is the double complexity you have when it comes to internet or the internet governance which is completely different if you compare the problems of governance regulation at say 50, 60 years ago when classical social theory thought about these problems so I have a question about where the individual fits into this framework so we with deep mediatization we have a stronger centralization of information of data states corporations platforms like the Facebook, Twitter where does the individual fit and solely as a consumer of data source for data neither a sheep in the pack I'm just curious if you take this perspective the individual is never thought as isolated it is always in the crossing of various figurations and these figurations are nowadays also figurations which are mediated so the individual is always part of social groups within face of other kinds of social media and how he or she is constructed itself as a person as an individual has a lot to do with the tensions and the kinds of figurations he or she is involved in and by this means that you never can think about like for example datafication or commercialization which is outside of you always from the beginning the construction of the individual relates to processes like that and so the idea is of that kind of perspective not separate the individual from society but see from the beginning it's always as he or she is embedded in certain figurations part of society and the society as such as this complexity of figurations but never ever beyond these or beyond individuals so it's the kind of thinking which starts fundamentally from the argument that you cannot separate society from the individual you have always analyzed both together and that's the answer that Elias says is a very rich one but I think you've also asked a moral question in effect we could have the most complex theoretical vocabulary but if it's losing touch with the realities of everyday experience something is dislocated and actually Elias said that in one of his books he said that we can analyze as much as we want these figurations but if we don't understand in the end what matters is human beings in the figurations and this is why that diagram was so important because whatever the brilliance of Latour and other writers to tell us about linkages and non-human objects in the end when we have a serious conversation about the lies and whether it's good or not it's the human objects we care about and whether the lies will have been good in the end and that comes down not just to how they're linked but the meaning of those links and so on and these pushing so the individual is absolutely in there struggling, pulling, being pulled and that's I think how we start to get a sense of how deep these contradictions are we could have talked about time as well turns out that Elias used this theory to explain time pressure through system pullings that happen to be intersected with the person who has to be at the airport at 7 o'clock and you feel this absolute tension but so we're caught in this so it's both and but it's really important to ask that question where is the individual this a lot of social theories lost that moral ground in the past 20 years in my view so I'm glad you asked it, thanks I think we have time for one more question awesome maybe two quick ones take them together and then we can try and ask them together great and I'm sorry I don't mean to backtrack there's a lot to pick up on with the discussion just started about the role of the individual but I wanted to go back to the question of governance because it was one of two of your main concluding questions around the effectiveness and legitimacy and I take on board and I don't want to be the defender of the framework of governance but I think that your response to that question kind of presumed a level of functionality dare we say like democratic and functioning governments in this to play that role of regulators or as entities that are having something to say about regulation and I think that one of the appealing things around governance and one of the things that was supposed to be something that was positive in this power dynamic shift is when it comes to authoritarian countries or even liberal democracies like Britain France UK that are struggling with some authoritarian like policies especially when it comes to pressure on social media companies in particular that changes how we how we look at this a little bit and so I will stop there and just say I'd like to ask for you to say a little bit more about that in one sense I'm also not trying to come across as defense of the companies in this space because I think they're when we look at governments and corporations we have to look critically at both but at the same time I think one of the big pieces is the kind of collusion collaboration and the relationship between those two and how do we how do we approach it from that perspective electric and you ask a quick question to read good to hear see if we can actually I think it was quite related my question was I'm intrigued by what you say about companies that act for their own purposes and not the purposes of the community and not not that I disagree but I'm also I'm interested in the sort of rhetoric that you were mentioning about Facebook saying our community and trying to actually reflect the interests of the community and I think it plays into the question on governance so have you thought about whether a community such as the Facebook community could become a sort of form of self-organization I don't know yeah well these are great questions so let me go to the question what is it to do social theory what is it to a try we're trying to develop a general model of the minimal level of complexity of the problems we're dealing with today basically now you're adding quite rightly the additional levels of complexity which is a lot of governments don't work institutions don't have the resources and so on and so forth some on the other hand can fight back and can great but what we're trying to get at the social problems we face today are at least this complex and if they're at least this complex then we know we don't have any off the shelf solutions to problems this complex we've got to think at that level of complexity to understand there are these sort of tensions of order built in to the very baseline from which we're starting today that doesn't mean to say that things aren't a lot more difficult and we don't we try to abstract from the political debates around Trump and all the things and everything collapse of government in Britain you name it because those are the additional level of problems but they're linked to these baseline problems that we don't know where trusting government is coming from anymore we don't know how governments can function at this level of pressure to deal with the speed and so on we could go on and on and I think we need to get that baseline clear which is in no way to neglect the importance of the specifics but hopefully theory like this gives us a starting point to thinking where do we start to get into the empirical cases which you know Andrews does in his own work a lot and I do in other works so I think we'll but coming to the end where our own time complexities will force us to get the taxi we've carefully arranged but thank you for coming and for your questions and thank you to the online audience and the people watching at some later point in time. Thank you so much for joining us today. You've blessed us really a lot to chew on. I wish we could continue the conversation right now but not at the cost of you missing your flight but this is a really important material for us in the community to chew on and we will continue the conversation online as we see each other first so please join me in thanking professor