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Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new Information and communications technologies (ICTs) as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or other-worldly, these tools and technologies were framed as extraordinary. But digital media are now mundane, thoroughly embedded - and oftenunquestioned - in everyday life. Digital ICTs are enmeshed in health and wellness, work and organizations, elections, capital flows, intimate relationships, social movements, and even our own identities. And although the study of these technologies has always been interdisciplinary - at the crossroads ofcomputer science, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and communications - never has a sociological perspective been more valuable. Sociology has always excelled at helping us re-see the normal. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology is a perfect point of entry for those curious about the state of sociological research on digital media. Each chapter reviews the sociological research that has been done thus far and points towards unanswered questions. The 34 chapters in the Handbook are arranged in six sections which look at digital media as they relate to: theory, social institutions, everyday life, community and identity, social inequalities, and politics& power. More than ever, the contributors to this volume help make it a centralizing resource, pulling together the various strands of sociological research focused on digital media. In addition to providing a distinctly sociological center for those scholars looking to find their way in the subfield, the volume offerstop sociological research that provides an overview of digital media to explain our quickly changing world to a broader public. Readers will find it accessible enough for use in class, and thorough enough for seasoned professionals interested in a concise update in their areas of interest

I informally examine how the idea of public sociology has been affected by the rise of social media. New social media platforms disintermediate communication, make people more visible, and encourage public life to be measured. They tend to move the discipline from a situation where some people self-consciously do "public sociology" to one where more sociologists unselfconsciously do sociology in public. I discuss the character of such "latently public" work, the opportunities and difficulties it creates for individuals, and its tendency to be associated with academic fields that believe in what they are doing.

Sociology was the first social science to investigate communication empirically. A review is offered of sociological research into the mass media, which is often multidisciplinary in approach. Concepts important in this area are those of medium, communicator, content, & audience. Investigation of mass media action & influence leads to study of the functions of these institutions in society & culture. Recent trends in this field have led to dissatisfaction with the present position; without loss of accumulated knowledge, a shift is needed both toward interpretation of the past & concern for the evolution & future changes of society. W. H. Stoddard.

This article advances the scandalous argument that we live in a post-social class modernity, and that the perpetual reinvention of class as the key concept for understanding social inequality is untenable. Class is not only a zombie concept but also an ideology that reflects a set of normative attitudes, beliefs and values that pervade sociology. Its starting point is that, sociology, once adept at imagining new ways to interpret the world, has become a subject field that wants to claim a radical space for itself while simultaneously relying on outworn theoretical frameworks and denying the work radicals do. The article begins by suggesting that the problem of class has its roots in the deep structure of sociology. Taking its cue from Jacques Rancière's classic study The Philosopher and His Poor it develops the argument that if class was once upon a time the fundamental issue in the study of social inequality, today sociology urgently needs an alternative cognitive framework for thinking outside this paradigm which it uses to open up a critical space for its own intellectual claims rather than reflecting society in the round. After arguing that we a living at the 'end of Class', the critique explores the limits of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who has replaced Marx and Weber as sociology's key theoretician of class. It is argued that in Bourdieu's sociology, contentment is permanently closed to 'the working class' that thumps about like a dinosaur that survived extinction, anachronistic proof of the power and privilege of the theorist and his sociology rather than proof of the usefulness of his ideas. The key to understanding the limits of this interpretation, it is argued, is that it assumes a 'working class' that has little or no agency. It is subsequently argued that sociology and the bourgeois media are coextensive. The specific function of the bourgeois media-sociology hybrid is to provide ideological legitimation of class inequality and of integrating individuals into sociology's interpretation of social and cultural life. Focusing on the work of two self-identified 'working class' journalists who have successfully made the transition into the bourgeoisie and who seek solid validation of their new found status in the bourgeois media it is demonstrated that social inequality is neither expressed nor examined in a convincing way. Framing 'working class' worlds even more 'working class' than 'working class', the bourgeois media, at best, lay them bare for clichéd interpretation. Here the article argues vis-à-vis Quentin Skinner that words are not so much mere 'reflections' of the world, but 'engines' which actively play a role in moulding the worlds to which they refer. Drawing on Rancière's idea of the partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible) it is argued thereafter that here thinking ends up as the very thought of inequality because by posing social inequality as the primary fact that needs to be explained the bourgeois media-sociology hybrid ends up explaining its necessity. The final part of the article offers some suggestions about how to rethink social inequality after class, and it concludes with the observation that the predicament facing sociology derives not just from its theoretical limits but also from its failure to give social inequality human meaning and the people who suffer it the proper respect by acknowledging their own interpretations of their own lives.

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key international figure in the study of media and sport within the sociology of sport, David Rowe, reflects on the field as a whole and the role for studying media and power within it. Rowe considers how some development in the sociology of sport within the larger discipline of sociology may be seen as 'gestural and instrumental'. In considering the challenges of the field, Rowe notes how the media serves to situate and amplify sport's inherent powers of 'liveness', whether sport is manifest in mega-events or in 'extraordinary ordinariness'. The closing section of the essay focuses on questions of media and power, foremost those concerning spectacle and commodification and their intersection with politics and the transactions of nationalized identities with those of race, ethnicity and gender in a globalized media sports cultural complex.