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Content: 1. Introductory considerations; 2. The functional universality of digital computer systems as a starting point; 3. Is Cyberspace spatial?; 4. Implications of Cyberspace for the level of Social Interaction and Social Systems; 4.1 Ease of exit and absence of density pressures; 4.2. The Softened Dictatorship of Time; 4.3 The absence of locational anchoring, bodily contacts and primary interpersonal perception; 4.4 The leveling and blurring of Real World status differentials; 4.5 The predominance of volatile, monothematic and project-related social relations; 4.6 The need for highly prespecified codes, symbolic patterns, problem definitions and environmental conditions; 4.7 The rising salience of credibility and trust; 4.8 The facilitated social integration of "strangers"; 4.9 Expansion of highly voluntary social interactions, relationships and roles; 4.10 The softened incompatibility between "egocentric" and "altruistic" action; 4.11 The intrinsic "softness" of digital social systems; 5. Implications of the Internet for the Cultural Level; 5.1 The softening of artifacts and the deletability of the past; 5.2 From producer-guided to receiver-guided culture; 5.3 The demise of stable ex ante classification schemes; 5.4 Toward a "Sampling Culture": from molecular to molar forms of production; 5.5 High mutual "permeabilities" as a condition for blendings and "crossovers"; 6. Implications on the Individual Level; 6.1 From offline individuals to online "dividuals" emanci-pated from body and space; 6.2 Freely chosen and freely modifiable self-constructed identities; 6.3 Support for "externalized selves" and microsocial cultures; 6.4 The blurring distinction between productive and receptive roles; 7. For conclusion: some epistemological and meta-theoretical consequences of Cyberspace for the social sciences; 7.1 The concepts of "Virtual Reality" and "Vireality"; 7.2 The Internet as a "hypersocial" space.

How is the Internet produced as an infrastructure in post-socialist Lithuania? Migle Bareikyte contributes to the growing field of STS and media studies with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. She situates the Internet development in Lithuania's telecom industry with the exploration of its labor practices, geopolitical imaginaries, and critical negotiations from a bottom-up perspective. Bareikyte further explores how fieldwork-based research can foster new theorizations of media infrastructures. Finally, she argues for a situated investigation of new places and actors beyond the United States and Western Europe-such as post-socialist regions-in order to explore the diversity of media infrastructures.

Zygmunt Bauman's 'liquid sociology' confronts the awesome task of reminding individual men and women that an alternative way of living together is within our eminent capabilities, if only we start to think differently about our world. The metaphor of 'liquidity', which has become such a prominent feature of his writings since 2000, provides us with just such a new interpretation, with a novel 'way of seeing'. Each chapter in this unique collection takes seriously Bauman's analysis of modernity as 'liquid', throwing new light upon global social problems, as well as opening up a space for assessing the nature of Bauman's contribution to sociology, and for understanding what may be gained and lost by embracing an artistic sensibility within the social sciences. With contributions from internationally renowned scholars, this book will appeal to all those interested in Bauman's work, especially within sociology, social, political and cultural theory, and to anyone curious about the value of metaphor in interpreting the social world

This contribution will hint at a few characteristics, belonging to all the theories dealing with sport (in that perspective) and illustrate the fact that the sociologist cannot and must not forget the space and time context.

The analysis of violence is an important part of sociology. While it has sometimes been pushed to the margins of sociology, nevertheless, violence emerges repeatedly in the analysis of both everyday life and momentous social change; interpersonal relations and crime; governance and resistance; relations between states, north and south; and multiple varieties of modernity. New ways of making violence visible unsettle old notions of the nature and direction of violence; challenging assumptions that the disadvantaged are more violent than the powerful; and that modernity is increasingly less violent. The new research on violence against women and minorities and in the global South makes a powerful case for the inclusion of violence as a core issue in sociology. This article introduces the articles in this monograph issue of Current Sociology, situating them in a new paradigm of 'violence and society'. The articles identify the specificities of violence, its non-reducibility to state, culture and biology, while outlining the interconnections within this emerging field.