Aesthetic Approach for Critical Sociology of Contemporary Communication Technology

Introduction

Critical sociology analyzes the contextual factors that structure inequalities by demystifying ‘the roles of power, institutionalized interests, organizations, and the state’ (Tierney, 1999). The discipline provides a better understanding of conditions of subjective figurations while emphasizing power networks in social construction to pursue the preemptions of social justice. In that regard, the perspective of critical sociology for studying media presents a reflexible opportunity to comprehend and advance communication and technology-saturated societies and cultures. The ubiquitous usage of media and communication technologies in everyday life form, change, and reproduce as well as create and contest different kinds of authority formations and subjugations. Indeed, the impact of state, institutions, industry, and the global capital flow on media and communication systems are included in critical sociology’s focus. Besides this, it is imperative today that the critical sociological framework questions the assumingly value-laden contemporary communication technologies following the critical theory studies of technology to uncover the historical role of power relations inherent in everyday life construction of social reality.

Throughout this study, I aim to define points of contribution assets for aesthetics to the critical sociology of media by focusing on communication technology. Aesthetics concentrates on how the order/disorder expresses a regime of the sensibilities and vice versa. The high-speed media and communication technologies shape spatio-temporal aesthetic regimes that affect the societal imagination by defining the terms of sociality. The aesthetic that defines the ‘partition of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2010) regulates the relations through the societal perceptual regime (Shapiro, 2003). I contend that the field of critical sociology must re-establish the convergence of the aesthetic approach with critical theory to reveal the contemporary influence of high technology-enabled media on the subjective perception of autonomy, abilities of socio-political engagement, and social action. Critical sociology emphasizes modes of power dynamics in the organization of society with an emphasis on political economy of media. Long before, the studies of the Frankfurt School emphasized the link of social forces with the culture industry and media sector that align with political domination. In that diagram, the critical theory of aesthetics marked the reduction of all cultural life to exchange value and brutalized nature in an instrumentally rationalized industrial society (Lunn, 1990). Today, institutional and societal dataveillance ‘expropriates, monetizes, and speculates the lives and futures of whoever communicates’ (Dean, 2012: 69; Smith, 2020: 164) through high technology-enabled mediasphere. Contemporary art and design have substantially transformed into computational media and are thus highly instrumental while almost efficiently operationalizable (Berry and Dieter, 2015: 1). Such mechanism of control dispersed by aesthetic mediation necessitates updating while re-examining contemporary means of control, whether for financial gain or socio-political prerogatives of biopolitics. I argue that the critical sociology of media should borrow the epistemological strategies of aesthetics to grasp contemporary subjecthood under the perceptible precepts of communication technology. For this, it is imperative to consider the phenomenological traits of societal dominance through sensory experiences derived from high technology-enabled communication modes. Although this task is undertaken by ‘an open cultural Marxism’ (Fuchs, 2016) that heavily relies on culture and communication to critically in connection with contemporary capitalism, aesthetics designates an indispensible routemap to forsee practical steps for critical sociology.

The contention of this article is how the aesthetic approach can enrich the analysis of critical sociology to study everyday encounters with ubiquitous communication technologies and their subsequent practices. How we make sense of immediate communication, continual surveillance, and big data mediation is a vital overture into the critical sociological dimensions. Critical theory focusing on contemporary media aesthetics can explain terms of domination governing in today’s ubiquitous mediated society. For Bertolt Brecht, estrangement happens when distance enables a reflexible stance regarding the sociopolitical world. Paul Virilio (1995) claimed that the erosion of spatially located times superseded real space. Following the same thought, Baudrillard contended that contemporary media technologies annihilate the distance necessary for reflection (Baudrillard, 2002). The viewing subject neither experiences alienation nor agency later on in its return to the face of screens. Such aesthetic updates derived from high technology-enabled communication reformulate the mediatized society. This article offers a sustained critical sociology in front of ever-increasing communication technology that dominates and constitutes our social reality and its associated aesthetic approach. The study also critically assesses the discussion on the democratization of technology and how the aesthetic approach of critical sociology can be implemented to improve media technologies. In so doing, I pursue below indicated three interrelated projects that follow the principal question of my inquiry:

Throughout these three projects, I define how critical sociology can rely upon a project of techno-aesthetics, enabling reflections upon new affordances generating social value. It can address contemporary societal imagination’s aporia and suggest practical solutions. Such implementation also promises to counterpose the usual points of attacks on critical sociology such as the imbalance of focus on the theoretical side (Golding and Murdock, 1978), neglect of cultural analysis by political economy researchers of media (Meehan and Wasko, 2013) as well as to provide a subjective critical view on the ‘spatialization of the global political economy’ (Mosco, 2015).

Convergences and Divergences: Critical Sociology and Aesthetics of Communication Technology

Communication is the production of humans’ sociality; it mediates society’s production and reproduction (Fuchs, 2020). Aesthetics meets with critical sociology to reveal the social values embedded in assumingly neutral communication technology and its opaque processing. Immediate communication settings have generated new models of sociality, forms of subjectivity, and power operations. However, the technological nature of contemporary mediatized society has been bypassed by considering technology as instrumental (Simpson, 2014). Social criticism denaturalized the aesthetic experience of media technologies while demonstrating the formal bias for the means-ends rationale of sociality, devaluating the sense of social labor.

The mission of critical sociology starts with the de-mystification of relations of domination, which resides in displaying the arbitrary character of the assumingly natural present by bringing up the other possibility. The distinction between aesthetics and critical sociology is that the inquiry does not initiate with ‘the question is not just who profits but what way of life is determined by the market’ (Feenberg, 2002: 163). The compression of space and time and its significance for socio-political aspects exposes the relations under the tyranny of instantaneity. The aesthetics of contemporary automated communication is indeed efficiency oriented as a part of the chain of necessity. Thus, communication technology, like other fields of ‘technology, aims to minimize the time necessary to realize a given goal’ (Simpson, 2014: 23). Automated communication dominating the mediasphere can be framed as a capitalist tool. Thus, it precisely facilitates ‘high-speed calculation, data-intensive analysis, predictive techniques, and manipulative recommendation algorithms’ (Zeilinger, 2021: 13). Yet, the aesthetic mode of critical sociology requires both ways of social critics, namely unmasking the social order to reveal what is falsely perceived as universal or eternal as well as denaturalizing the social world as necessary. In that matter, the perceptual regime does not just designate a signifier of the superstructure of dominance but also critically highlights structure terms while focusing on the design for the role distribution. In other words, just overturning agents’ roles would not disrupt the dominance structure in an aesthetic account.

Here, the emphasis on technology is essential. Indeed, critical theory primarily posits hegemony in the suppression of the individual under the universal where technology extends its reach into the material facts of everyday existence (Feenberg, 2002: 33). Not only media technologies but technology, in the first place, aims to guarantee the mastery and control of external nature, also objectifies in its return the subject’s inner core in Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) account. In that sense, although technological rationale dominating daily life gives freedom from some traditional societal power structures as well as the natural constraints, it also replaces them with new relations of power through abolishing the distance, once guaranteed by time and space, between man and world. In the Marxist view, historically changing material factors have always determined our active relationship with the world. The aesthetic state of affairs in media and communication conditions how we understand our faculties of sociality. The transparency of technological medium conditioned by the immediacy of communication regenerates a sense of subjectivity, society, and livelihood, in other words, social labor. In other words, the famous ‘false consciousness’ is not easy to conquer as much as it is the only way one can derive from the perceptual regime. As Marcuse acknowledged, because ‘historical necessity realizes itself through human action, mankind can miss its opportunities for action . . . it is the task of theory to free praxis through the knowledge of necessity’ (Marcuse, 2005: 9) for the revolutionary turning points of history.

Thus, the iteration of everyday life communication and its gestures of know-how also implement a societal logic of aesthetics. Simpson (2014) declares that reducing all relations to the means-ends schema in the technologically driven society produces ‘the values-perspectives’ (p. 5). The efficiency principle of these values-perspectives translates into the ubiquitous use of automated and accelerated modes of action in communication. This line of thought can also be read through the Heideggerian critique of technical reason, emphasizing the technology’s reductionist revealing of the world as a standing reserve (Heidegger, 2010). A ‘world’s picture’ is required to satisfy efficiency demands. As Simpson (2014) put it, ‘to look at the world technologically is to see it either as resources to be used or as constraints to be overcome’ (p. 15). As Andrew Feenberg (2002: 178) resumes, capitalism separates the object from the context following decontextualization and systematization, reducing things to useful aspects. As a matter of fact, the subject and the object are isolated to protect the actant from the consequences of its actions. In the end, the subject easily navigates among the objects in the process of the capitalist system.

Yet, aesthetics primarily engages with the potentialities of the object. It is not a vocation of ‘“unmasking” the interests of those who have an interest in the conservation of this order’, as Bourdieu (1998: 17 as cited in Desan, 2023: 4) claimed for a realist branch of critical sociology. The aesthetic experience involves a dialectic engagement of sensory perception and reflectivity (Matteucci, 2016). Thereby, critiques of technology mentioned primarily claim that contemporary media aesthetics no longer allow reflectivity. The reification (Lukács, 2017) of media aesthetics reduced the complex social labor of communication and dynamic social relations among isolated individuals of a ‘reified’ society from each other. The technocratic mode of media aesthetics presumes the nullification of surplus objects, subjects, and parts of those without a role in the perceptual regime. Thus, Gilbert Simondon defines technocracy as distancing material relations from the idea of progress (Chabot, 2013: 44). Technocracy abolishes the ways in which one can relate the world of perception in the historical sense. In Simondon’s view, techno-aesthetics, in contrast to technocracy, is not contemplative yet is the contemplation of action (Chabot, 2013: 142) that resists the reduction of the livelihood.

I contend that techno-aesthetics follows a parallel logic with a dissensual aesthetics that Rancière defines as the gap in the sensible in the technological realm of relations among the produ(s)ers. For Rancière, politics is ‘the capacity for dissensus’ (Arda, 2019: 312). In this diagram, the politics is ‘policing’ as long as it does not carry a new sensorium to reconfigure the political. As such, a critical sociology that only projects equal dignity and freedom of every subject with different interests in the given political reality (such as a class society is policing rather than doing politics). That is because politics is the democracy that ensures equality in perception rather than equal rights for reaching the interests. In that matter, dissensus promises to remedy fixed consideration of power, aka disrupting perceptual logic. As such, a techno-aesthetics that disrupts the ways of perceiving ‘the technology’ is politics. It abolishes societal reification while it omits alienation through motivating for the contemplation of ‘action’.

In contrast to critical sociology, a dissensual aesthetics focuses on intervention in the distribution of the sensible rather than deconstruction relations of domination. Although these two precepts are highly related, their divergence can mostly be defined as Rancière puts it in a slogan: ‘Move along! There is nothing to see here’ (Rancière, 2010: 37). Hence, the police is not the law interpelling but defining the space of circulation for the subject’s apparition in the realm of aesthetics. Following the rule of supposed efficiency, technocracy consolidates modes of perception and forms of partaking in everyday encounters of mediatization. Techno-aesthetics assumes to provoke different logics of circulation in other ways that disrupt the contemporary mediasphere. Distinct modes of critical sociology can be defined as realist critique and historicist mode of analysis (Desan, 2023). In this essential schema of sociology, Desan (2023) argues that the realist mode claims what the social world really is through, while the historicist critique suggests otherwise and defines the emancipatory route.

Thus, aesthetic social criticism investigates and resists societal reification as much as critical sociology. However, the aesthetic approach offers an alternative epistemology that engages in everyday life of perception rather than the superstructural organization paradigm. In this sense, the aesthetic framework can provide the points of connections and notions of the sense spectrum to which a more extensive public can relate through everyday practices that the critical sociology of media and communication focuses on in the context of social forces dynamics.

Here, the critical theory also differs from the aesthetic approach in presuming a fixed political aesthetics, thereby omitting further surplus sensorium and democracy. Thus, the critical theory holds that power asymmetries can be transcended. Aesthetic politics do not derive from revealing the truth behind some illusionary social world and inherent conflicts from one group segment to the other. However, it inhabits the intervention of this surplus sensorium in the media relations not assigned in the logic of the reified communication technology process. Thus, an aesthetic dimension rejects any reification on the part of social relations, including the technological imaginary issue. However, in its reasoning, the aesthetic approach does not aim for a better, new, yet fixed system, although it harbors the clues for counter-dominance that critical sociology searches for.

Aesthetic Account of Media and Communication Technology

In our contemporary time, we essentially experience society more through media and communication technologies than in earlier phases of history. Once Plato’s Socrates stressed that writing in static form replaces speech, which enables the improvisational exchange of ideas (Plato, 1961). Today, the ubiquitous instantaneity of messages without any delay overpopulates our everyday communication thanks to the technological abilities of communication media. Thus, the earlier distinction between mass media and interpersonal communication (Peters, 1994) cannot be constructed in the same way now in the high technology-enabled interactive speed communication era. Sociality is performed and mediated through computation-integrated media technologies (Berry and Dieter, 2015). It is no longer a representation of society but the society itself that we perceive through the screens. That is why the field of contemporary critical sociology of media and communication has become broader.

Our technical equipment of everyday life in the mediasphere creates by mediating the social reality constructed. In Paul Virilio’s terms, the vision machines substituted the human sensorium and captured the faculty of perception (Armitage, 1997). The societal construction subject–object relationship has been immensely changed by repositioning the viewing subject and the world viewed in the mediatized society. Bruno Latour’s (2007) Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has already defined the notion of ‘actant’ and ‘network’ that work with quasi-objects, human, non-human, or both (Van Den Eede, 2011: 147). Such contemporary media formations linked to the realm of subjectivity mark a further step in the dialectical understanding of the critical theory framework. The ever-increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in media creation and consumption can be interpreted as the end of the Anthropocene and the emergence of the posthuman era (Feng, 2021: 531). While the importance of such progress does not need to refer to a phenomenological Marxism (Marcuse, 2005) of Dasein as historical being-in-the-world, it merits reflection on the material world we perceive. In contrast to Fuchs’ thesis of the Anthropocene and the posthuman to be the reductionism of dialectical thought (Fuchs, 2020: 338), such updates in the perceptual regime cannot be left uninvestigated by their sensorial impact on livelihood. That is because historical formations can contribute to the reification of the material world and our social relations by treating the world as a mere object (Bell, 2014: 9). A ‘lived experience’ means engaging with the object rather than prioritizing what is ‘human’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002) and disgracing the thing.

The aesthetic approach seeks to capture how representational modes, perceptional habits, and formations construct the order of relations. Although aesthetics is primarily assumed to focus on art objects and the cultural realm, aesthetic analysis has always existed extensively in all areas of life. The collaboration of aesthetics with critical sociology focused on the possibilities of oppositional art and influenced the subsequent avant-garde movements. In contrast to Benjamin’s (1986) more optimistic account of the mechanization of art, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) critically assessed the question of the commercialization of art through its mass consumption. The increasing aestheticization of everyday life used to project a decreasing potential for art that was supposed to be separated from capitalistic relations. Today, the encompassing texture of aestheticized media essentially poses more questions about emancipatory art. However, the aesthetics of contemporary communication technology posit a closer insight into the connections of the posthuman with its material relations.

Contemporary terms of aesthetics of society are eventually sensed through media technologies. The algorithmically defined connections of media platforms regenerate the conventional viewing position; it also designates new relations of power, new authorized, traditional, or correct viewing positions while discarding others. AI automation of culture and art production saves us time and effort, making us survive under instantaneity domination (Virilio, 1995). Guided by the previous corpus of societal and individualized preferences, AI-assisted movie trailers, web designs, photos, artworks, essays, and stories influence the multitude and decide our aesthetic judgments while predicting future decisions and likes (Manovich, 2018). Thus, selection, editing, and creating have become mainly automated in mediatized society. In addition, the automated oral and written discourse mechanizes communicative and affective labor while replacing conversation among humans (Reeves, 2016). User experience design of social media buttons, like/retreat in the case of Facebook or Twitter, translates friendship into quantifiable assets (Van Dijck, 2014). Yet, the communicating subject also appropriates the rhythms of the object viewed and transmitted by communication technology devices. That is why a posthuman quasi-object subject beyond anthropocentric account reformulates what it means social reciprocity in our everyday mediatization. Ubiquitous self-production in online meetings, chat rooms, social media platforms and virtual playgrounds eliminates the gap between self and the other. The screen creates an ‘idealized machinic continuity that naturalizes the appearance of the device as a seamless extension of the body’ (Mackinnon, 2016: 163). Such phenomenological event of today’s communication defines ‘loss of orientation regarding alterity, in other words, a sense of a disturbance between the other and the world’ (Virilio, 1995). The posthuman’s realm of subjectivity designates a complex circulation of mutually inclusive social forces.

So, what does dialectical relation mean for the posthuman incorporated with the media network? Dialectical tradition prescribes that any aspect of the life-world must be analyzed through its opposites and opposite forces rather than in isolation (Carr, 2000; Ogbor, 2001). However, the aesthetic constituents of the everyday life encounter with screen interface assign a continuity that problematizes object–subject relation. Such phenomenological update resumes a disorientation that removes alterity, which embodies a dialectical basis. This also coincides with the simultaneous loss of the difference between the public sphere and the private sphere, where there is no boundary left behind between them in the fully mediatized society. Simulation surpasses representation. This removal of the distance between subject and object as well as the private versus public sphere, dissolves reflexible positioning from the agenda of perception.

The availability of a high volume of information and the possibility of reaching multiple spaces in every direction complicate the problematic of dialectical analysis for the posthuman under the critical sociology account. Thus, immediacy completes the mechanization of communication that removes coexistence from the sociality schema. Baudrillard (2002) declared that obscene contact with the screen does not promote communication. For Baudrillard, the screen is a space of circulation and transient connections, while exchanges are just a succession of instants because ‘the body, language, time all progressively disappear as scenes’. Hence, immediacy cancels alienation, and a consequential agency following as an outcome of alienation. Daily life transforms into the satellitization of the real with the hyperreality of simulation transmitted through screens (Baudrillard, 2002: 130). From this perspective, deterrence of referent renders sociality to an implosion of radical indifference while the search for meaning is irrelevant (Chen, 1987: 71–72). Virtual events are portrayed as selected images, whether real virtual, or mediated real. Baudrillard claims that ‘real events lose their identity when they attain the velocity of real-time information’ (Patton and Baudrillard, 1995). Such aesthetic update in the perceptual realm dominates the posthuman’s regulation of everyday’s participation in private–public life.

This argument follows that experiencing the world through visual mediation, enabling seeing and perceiving in our place, decreases human ocular capacities and disseminates the view that public spaces are appearances on screens. The contemporary perceptual regime has inserted ‘simultaneity’ in the social sense of time (Luke, 1991: 355), namely iTime (Hand, 2016). Yet, simultaneity as social time also delivers ‘nowness’ that gives the temporary aspect of sociality. ‘Instant’ is primarily detached from a spatial sense of time and hence human thought; thereby, it reflects ‘the end of shared time’ (Virilio, 2012: 34). Thus, Virilio especially defines the citizenry as well as democracy as dependent upon a concrete place, the city (Virilio, 1995). Real-time of nowness in iTime (Hand, 2016) wins over real space. The temporal configuration of ‘now’ through instantaneous communication generates a discontinuous understanding of subjectivity. Dromology as chrono-diversity forms ‘arrhythmic’ (Virilio, 2012: 27) societies under the tyranny of instantaneity (Virilio, 1995). Consequently, what counts for participation and, subsequently, what means for collective action change while ‘subjects do not consider themselves traditional historical subjects’ (Luke, 1991). In this sense, accelerated aesthetics of mediasphere provoke the ‘dematerialization of subjectivity’ (Armitage, 1997) and negate in its turn the progress with human thinking of history.

In a broader context, the digital sublime experienced instantly daily constitutes the aesthetics of contemporary mediatized society. A new sublimity, ever-evolving, and rescaling, defines human collaboration with communication technologies and its horizon of perception. Kantian sublime (Kant, 1987) used to evoke a negative pleasure at the end through the human positivist capacity of transcendence. When the viewer encounters the sublime of quantifiable grandiose, an urgent demand for expansiveness in self-imagination follows and translates with a risk of self-loss (Arda, 2016). However, contemporary mediated sublimity resonates from a perception unlocked through a technologically mediated eye view. This enabled perception permits contact but does not allow comprehension. Here, communication technology remains ‘an other’ while it does ‘not come to view at all’ (Van Den Eede, 2011: 148). Sherry Turkle (1995) announces that the user-friendly graphic interface enables opacity for the underlying processing in a way that ‘we have learned to take things at interface value’ (Sherry, 1995: 23) without inclusive comprehension underneath. The difficulty of determining with clarity all the automated, algorithmic governance behind and activities engaged instantly to be extracted as data constitute the sublimity in the mediated contemporary human sociality. Big data abstractions obtained and circulated make questions about ontological assumptions between people producing and data produced by them (Markham et al., 2018). Sense of overwhelming fear across differentiated communication technology capabilities can offer and spare while instrumental rationality requires all the members to engage, benefit, and contribute to mediasphere. Unsurprisingly, most of the data gathered along media interactions do not even seek the consent of produ(s)ers. In addition, ‘analytics’ operations are opaque to non-expect social actors’ (Couldry and Powell, 2014: 2) that engage with the mediasphere. Sublime is the terror, the fear of self-loss, in Edmund Burke’s (1998) terms, without redemption of Kantian humanist sublime. The totalizing media communication, both encouragement and obligatory act, aims to create content yet disregards contextuality and meaning-making processes. Sublime of contemporary media aesthetics is self-loss without negative pleasure of transcendence at the end.

Thus, although media technologies of today, as in the case of social media, allow self-affirmation, it makes it flow in the bombardment of content while it conceals the processes. Rethinking posthuman agency and its deliberative potential in communication has become indispensable because of the complexities of the posthuman political realm. Contemporary sublime media aesthetics precisely incline the envisioning capabilities of the (post)human, such as its self-understanding of civic duties. Ironically, Manovich mentions that the AI effect is ‘when we know how a machine does something “intelligent,” it ceases to be regarded as intelligent’ (The Washington Times, 2006). Although Fuchs celebrates ‘the internet as a technological public sphere that will allow for the realization of inherent cooperative potentials of disembodied information’ (Garlick, 2013: 227) with many others, it is urgent to question the perceptual regime of mediatized political action critically. Following this line of thought, Virilio already mentioned the synchronization of emotion that surpasses the power of standardization of opinion through mass media of the 20th century (Virilio, 2012: 20). Thus, the contemporary mediatized society creates a ‘community of emotions’ as an after-effect of affective relations rather than interest-based communions. Supposing this transfer of interest to mediatized emotion is an improvement, it is still controversial whether it promotes an emancipated self-understanding with others. Thus, the obscene contact through screens does not permit a sense of community but the reification of isolated individuals only connected for the emergency of ‘now’ happening events.

The hypothesis of the impossibility of politics in the current mediasphere resides in the sublime aesthetics of media denouncing produ(s)er’s ability of complete access yet permitting the short encounter with the many. This also coincides with the distinction between compassion and pity (Boltanski, 1999) in the sense that the perception of distance interrupts one’s responsibility for another. Yet, the destruction of the sense of distance through immediate communication also disperses such disillusionment with e-citizenship. Immediacy does not secure an association. The sublime aesthetics that ubiquitous media content presents for the subject viewing and immersing into the image world do not constitute a common world but many worlds to engage with. This overwhelming contact with many worlds designates the sublimity of politics.

The spatio-temporal aesthetics of mediatized society constituting contemporary perceptual regimes drive us to think through the lens of critical sociology. Whose interest is served by the contemporary perceptual regime mediated by high-speed and ever-omnipresent communication technology? Why do we need to save time? What do we miss under the tyranny of instantaneity in comparison to the earlier phases of historical aesthetics of society? To assign ways of agency in this schema of mediatized society requires an aesthetic quest. This updated vocation that critical sociology can undertake reformulates the value of dialectics to discuss the potentialities of a prospective ‘unified’ human existence as the critical theory can urge. Any projection for politics that these disciplines, aesthetics, and critical theory, although differing from each other, converge on the ‘emancipation’ of societal perception through phenomenological means of social value.

An Aesthetic Social Criticism of Communication Technology: Possibility of Political Action?

Revealing the value-laden drive of communication technology necessitates questioning the emancipatory uses of technology. The aesthetic approach can be indispensable in recontextualizing prospects for communication technology use. Thus, critical sociology does not just involve diagnostic premises concerning how the “masses” are pacified and become ready to be exploited in capitalist democracies. Social criticism also discusses social forces to re-engage with social labor with the contextual use of communication technology. Such route map also demonstrates how critical theory reconceptualizes reason rather than rejecting it (Feenberg, 2002: 165). In this account, the aesthetic approach also reveals a politics based on the democratic free play of sensorium absent in the current realm of the technocratic mediasphere.

Critical theorists have already mentioned democracy as a political action for technological progress. For instance, Feenberg’s proposal of ‘radical’ democratization of technology involves revising critical theory with methodological innovations of science and technology studies (STS). Such a proposal mainly focuses on case studies rather than broader socio-political concerns. This proposal aims for “technical integration of a wide range of life-enhancing values, beyond the mere pursuit of profit or power” (Feenberg, 2002: 35). Although Habermas does not blame technology for the value-laden drive, his review of the critique of communication integrated into communication theory also invited to prevent technocratic consciousness from ruling the social life-world under values of order, quantification, and efficiency (Habermas, 2010). As such, Habermas accentuated that technological advances without the mediation of practical knowledge cannot be translated to the action-orienting self-understanding of social groups. Historical processes, aka local narratives, possess the potential to contextualize technology. In the Habermasian view, a learning process can transcend the contingency of local histories to achieve universally valid results (Feenberg, 2017: 188). According to Feenberg, this implies openness to revisions and dialogue rather than a postmodern relativism to define once again progress (Feenberg, 2017: 203). In that sense, although Feenberg and Habermas own divergent views on the ontologies of technology, they propose a grassroots universality for the democratization of technology.

Indeed, such grassroots universality pronounced is incompatible with the sublime aesthetics of the contemporary media perceived in the everyday practices of the mediasphere. It contradicts the opacity of communication technologies that dominate mediatized sociality. Thus, such a proposal for the democratization of technology requires practical assets that disrupt the sublime media aesthetics while securing distance and critical apprehension in return for the participant. Here, contemplation of the action enabled by material, reflexible mode of media interactions project dissensus (Rancière, 2010), aka surplus sensorium, because it intervenes with the dominant sublime aesthetics that contemporary technocracy spreads. A grassroots universality means contextualizing while humanizing contemporary media perception. Thereby, it promises a democratic transcendence.

In that sense, the aesthetic framework captures this project of democratizing technology. Marcuse contends that the ‘recontextualization of technological drive’ (Tassone, 2002: 211) can remedy the technocratic society for good and reformulate techno-aesthetic potentialities. These potentialities reconcile a phenomenological understanding of being with each other with the validation of social labor of communication. Marcuse defines human freedom as liberating inner and external nature by relinquishing domination impulses through nonlinear interactions (Garlick, 2013: 228). Critical aesthetic sociology involves a projection of an emancipatory ‘technological society based upon the values of freedom, justice, equality, happiness, and beauty’ (Tassone, 2002: 191). Communication technology as well as technology, ‘organizes the world by creating centers within it, privileged points and moments’ (Chabot, 2013: 139). Techno-aesthetics can surpass the current technocratic rule of communication by disrupting grids of signification through democratizing sense perception.

Returning to Rancière’s view, democracy is aesthetic in the way of politics, which consists of blurring and displacing the limits of the political that accords with a modality primarily attuned to the process of sensory awareness (Rancière, 2010: 55). The embodiments of speed politics consist of inscriptions of positions, roles, and acts connected to subject–objects through which the communication is processed rather than apprehended. Simondon declares that the proprietors are equally alienated similarly to the classes they exploit due to their relationship to the machine as a mere abstract representation of profit (Chabot, 2013: 41). Here, the technocratic activity does not involve the perception of beauty in a tool adapted to its function. In contrast, techo-aesthetic society relies technically on meaning to be formulated through the contemplation of the technics. In Simondon’s view, this project signals to retitle the true progress as reconciliation (Chabot, 2013: 133) through re-establishing communication beyond the technocratic sphere of reduced aspects under instrumental rationale. Techoaesthetics, in this vein, also promises a social regeneration in terms of a harmonious reunion of nature and technology. The optimum form of technology must be aesthetic contemplation of action, namely, to reconcile with genuine commons-based progress.

Techno-aesthetics is about enabling reflections upon new affordances of communication technology that can offer implications of alternatives and permit the generation of meaning and social value. Indeed, the democratization of technical institutions with electoral controls does not seem to present a better option. History has witnessed many populist rises of authoritarian elected governments worldwide. Feenberg claims that technology will be democratized if a new public sphere can embrace the technical embodiment of social life with a new rationalization mode (Hickman, 2006: 80). Although engaged with the empirical studies of STS, aesthetic democratization of media technology does not necessarily inserts just developing user-friendly products. The user experience research for easygoing media technology use explores and communicates design propositions through context (Kurvinen et al., 2008). Yet, such endeavor aims to triumph design for media use rather than the emancipation of societal perception. As Marcuse (2013) stated, the instrumental rationale of media processing directs the viewer to the means-ends logic of engagement rather than contemplating action. Thus, democratic free play in the aesthetic realm applies to the potentiality of challenge, distance, and self-understanding. However, the user-friendliness of media communication can inscribe in the formal bias of already in-use communication technologies that save time for production or consumption.

Politics means democratization; in Rancière’s view, the distribution of sense perception reifies tacit knowledge of capabilities, while democracy is the ‘free play’ of senses. Practice-based critical affordances align with the proposal of democratizing technology to make the aesthetic aspects of communication technologies explicit. These active pro-social media countermeasures aim to critically examine while contextualizing everyday communication practices (Saifer and Dacin, 2022). These include collaborative transparency movements for open data (Johnson, 2014) that promise to distribute the meaning through expression and interpretation rather than processing metadata (Couldry and Powell, 2014: 3). Citizen science projects also inhibit the idea of science communication through online multiple-player game engagement enabling some limited collaboration of scientists with people. Studies of ‘calm technology’ (Case, 2015) also invite re-engaging with the world through communication technologies. These practical engagements of democratizing technology correspond to the material relations of the posthuman to contemplate action. These are evidently what commons-based society can engender throughout the aesthetic emancipation while they rely on ‘co-ownership co-production in knowledge-creating’ (Fuchs, 2020: 347). Yet, indeed, a digital socialist humanism (Fuchs, 2020) without the means of perception cannot be obtained by human praxis in the contemporary ecosystem of high technology-enabled communication.

Conclusion

Critical sociology based on critical theory has a long past on utopic imagery for the historical drive of progress and a commons-based society. Technical design standards encompass a significant part of social livelihood. Being a lived experience political economy cannot be reduced to the precepts of empiricism as well as historical materialism. The task is removing the imaginary divide between object and subject. Marcuse’s phenomenological Marxism has already problematized the neutral consideration of political technique and technology. The decisive point is generating practical commons-based initiatives of contemporary communication technology that concretize democratizing technology. An updated critical theory can remedy the disconnect between phenomenology and political economy, aesthetics, and media studies. The latter needs to engage with techno-aesthetics, an aesthetic approach to technology that can challenge the reification of technical decisions in communication. Technical means to fulfill such inquiry resides in recasting communication technology in line with the aesthetic study of social criticism. For the practical means of democratizing technology, such a project must appropriate the empirical urge of communication and media studies to be aligned with critical sociology. This also requires interdisciplinary research of critical sociology with media and communication studies and aesthetic analysis. The critical operation consists of demarking the contingent character of perceiving technology. While denaturalizing the social world, the historicist (Desan, 2023) branch of critical sociology centrally provides the tools for comparison with earlier phases of media and communication technologies for aesthetic analysis to capture lines of relations that mediatized society evolves.

An alternative account of social transformation necessitates constructing a critical analysis connecting shared historical space and perceptions of contemporary life. The epistemological alternatives to technological use for communication depend on the critical sociology pairing with the aesthetic approach. Today, the sublime aesthetics of media intensifies the isolation of the participants while decontextualizing progressive drive from our practices. Technology’s democratization relies on revising sociality capabilities under techno-aesthetic logic. Critical sociology’s challenge today is that mediatized sociality inherently annuls alienation indebted in the everyday encounter with the other and the reflectional vocation from the meaning-making process under the necessity drive. Interface, screens, possibilities time-space compression replace the interpersonal experience of society while facilitating non-communicated sociality for maximum production. To intervene with the perceptual regime of mediatized sociality means that critical sociology should not only reveal the social forces of domination but also provide analysis to think through spaces of circulation for techno-aesthetic intervention. The democratization of technology and communication technology predominantly necessitates offering other ways of relating that do not count in contemporary speedy capitalism. Without critically assessing high-speed media’s contemporary influence on social action’s subjective perception, there is no concretization of the necessary steps for democratic communication technologies. A sense of commonality between the other and the world cannot be uttered without giving proof in the perceptual realm. For this, a grassroots universality for the idea of progress in the technological drive can associate material relations with contemporary social reality. Thus, the primary confrontation to the democratization of technology is the sublime media aesthetics and its overwhelming effect limiting political capabilities and isolating the posthuman.

I propose to situate the critique of technology on the question of communication technology under an aesthetic, historical analysis of media for social criticism encompassing social, economic, and ecological justice as well. In doing so, it may be possible not only to better understand the everyday joint historical pressures that make for the mediatized societal reality but to evaluate more adequately the practical ways of setting historical conditions of being-with-each other in motion. Genuine participation in the world is the goal of progressing in communication technology.