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In Digital Sociology, Deborah Lupton discusses how digital technologies have been incorporated into social contexts, institutions, and notions of selfhood and embodiment. The author argues that we now live in a digital society, and this poses urgent challenges to sociological theory and practice. The said claim is supported by an assessment of recent debates, theoretical approaches, and empirical studies directly associated with the social, cultural, and political dimensions of digital technologies. Lupton defines digital sociology in terms of both professional digital practices and analyses focusing on technology use and digital data, making explicit connections to other areas of knowledge, namely, digital anthropology, cultural studies, mass communication, and media studies. Lupton also expresses her own project of a self-reflective and critical digital sociology that pays close attention to the ways in which such technologies confront academic sociology in professional, epistemological, and methodological terms.

Abstract Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that is increasingly being heralded as a revolutionary technology that can offer verified records of information and value, namely property registration and cryptocurrencies. Its distributed quality makes it easier for individuals to jointly create, control and maintain information records. Blockchain is increasingly underpinning utopian visions of a digitally connected global society, in which frictionless interpersonal interaction and exchange take place without trusted intermediaries such as central banks and property registers. It adds democratic and participatory undertones to what is already a dominant mythology related to the valuation of digital data. Blockchain technology has fueled contemporary imaginaries about digital technologies. Wendy Chun identified "dreams of superhuman digital programmability" as the causal mechanisms behind a contemporary conflation between memory and storage: using digital technologies to combine the transitory and the permanent, and thus arrest the degeneration of memory. Blockchain expands these dreams from perfect memory to interpersonal processual programmability through the usage of smart contracts. These contracts are programs that are inscribed in the blockchain - which may be automatically triggered once certain conditions are met - that inspire a proliferation of utopian discourses about the possibilities associated with algorithmically regulated, blockchain-based forms of interpersonal exchange (known as token economics) and its expansion into unforeseen domains of sociality. Like all ideologies that compete for a hegemonic status, those ideologies which relate to technological solutionism require the effacement of their own self-perpetuating logic - and blockchain is the perfect example of a digital technology that seeks to provide solutions for the pitfalls of the previous "untrusted" and "insecure" digital technologies. Little attention is paid to the uncertainty surrounding blockchain technology, which is ...

The new peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies have impacted the film industry, which advocates sanctions against the downloading and sharing of products found on the Internet. But the economic effect of file sharing on the film industry remains difficult to determine. In this article, we ask whether file sharing networks will affect the survival or potential growth of European cinema. The steady decline in traditional film distribution channels for European productions—cinema theatres and direct sales or renting—is leading to the emergence of new distribution channels. And yet the results of the movie industry's calls—including those voiced by its European players—for stronger legislation against these same distribution channels are making their way through Europe by means of enforcement tools like HADOPI and other graduated response programs. Our hypothesis is that this offensive runs the risk of condemning a potential open distribution network and commons business model at its birth. For this, we start by clarifying the emerging global P2P phenomenon; we then stipulate what we mean by European cinema, outline its peculiar traits, and contrast it with North American cinema. Finally, we compare the consumption of European film in theatres with the availability of seeds and leechers for European cinema in P2P networks.