Introduction

Abstract

The increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies in everyday life has fostered much academic debate about social relationships and social structures in what has been termed an ‘Information Age’. Emerging from these debates is an interdisciplinary field of research concerned with the complexities and contradictions involved in the transformations which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are purportedly bringing about across cultural, political and economic practices (Baym, 2010; Bijker & Law, 1997; Jones, 1995a, 1995b, 1997; Wellman & Haythornthwaite 2003). As sociologists we see exciting and important opportunities for the discipline to contribute to a growing and diverse range of empirical and theoretical work that seeks to map these changes. From cyberselves to online communities, from media war to networked inequalities, from culture to social structure, sociology and our sociological imaginations are confronted by new digital landscapes.