Afterword: Digital Technology and Sociological Windows

Abstract

It seems that the sociologies of education and health in the ‘digital age’ don’t really ask us to do much ‘re-thinking’ — at least not of sociology itself. While both chapters offer a critical rethinking of technology, they do so via a fairly traditional deployment of the canons of sociological critique — examining the contingent (messy), inequitable, and non-determinate nature of e-technologies while recognising that these same technologies offer new media through which conventional boundaries and hierarchies might be displaced or at least challenged and short-circuited. Both chapters also emphasise the resilience of structural and cultural processes through which social advantage and power are distributed and only partly reconfigured through the democratising possibilities of the digital.