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summary
The "differences" and "repetitions" of the two texts, The Mediated Construction of Reality and The Social Construction of Reality, constitute the key issues for us to understand digital reality and re-evaluate the phenomenological sociological legacy. Starting from the dialogue between Kurderley and Hepp and Berg and Lukman scholars, this paper will first return to the theoretical context of phenomenological sociology, and discuss the core proposition of "sociology of knowledge" established by Berg and Lukman with the concept of "knowledge" as the core. Secondly, this paper brings the life world into the context of the digital age, and discusses how data can be used as a social distribution mechanism of knowledge to participate in the process of mediating the construction of reality. Furthermore, this article will discuss the new types of agency of individuals in the digital age. Finally, this paper will critically examine the contemporary development of phenomenological sociology.
About the Author
Dai Yuchen is an associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at East China Normal University.
Fund Projects
This paper is the result of the National Social Science Foundation of China Youth Project "Research on the Development Path and New Progress of Communication Theory from the Perspective of 'Materiality'" (Project No.: 21CXW023).
What we need today is not a theory about the new era, but a new theory about the times.
——约翰·B. 汤普森（John B. Thompson）（1995：9）
The forward-looking judgment of the network sociologist Karst in the new millennium is that the pervasiveness of information and communication technologies has changed the traditional social order, so that "the entire social structure is based on microelectronic technology-enabled and digitized information and communication technologies" (Castells, 2009: 24). This trend has clearly been exacerbated by the advent of the digital age, which has not only shaken traditional social mechanisms, but also enabled the formation of new social connections that transcend local contexts. All of this has led to a radical change in the individual and the form of the "life-worlds" in which he lives (Lievrouw, 2001). From the perspective of sociogenelogy, the digital society has brought about a change in the relationship between the individual and society: the "human-mediated" mode of social relationship construction in traditional society has given way to "data-mediated" (Qiu Zeqi, 2022), that is, an individual using digital tools can easily jump out of local relations and localized situations—in short, his/her "traditional" lifeworld, and directly connect with a broader society. This connection, in turn, re-imagines the individual's social consciousness, behavioral norms, cultural values, and so on. How to respond to these empirical changes is a question of both sociology and media studies. It is in this sense that the mediated construction of reality, published in 2017 by two media theorists, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, becomes an attempt to re-understand the "lifeworld" of the digital age.
It's easy to see that "The Mediated Construction of Reality" is a parody of the title of Peter L. Berger's and Thomas Luckmann's magnum opus, The Social Construction of Reality, half a century ago. With the help of Schutz's "phenomenological sociology", the latter brought about a great turning point in the "sociology of knowledge" run by scholars such as Schoeller and Mannheim, returning knowledge to the social context and putting forward a "manifesto of the sociology of knowledge" (Berger, 2011: 88) with phenomenology-hermeneuticism as the direction. While Couldry & Hepp are also open about their inheritance of Schutz's path (Couldry & Hepp, 2017:5-8), in their view, one of the most significant changes in the digital age is that the "living world" that phenomenological sociology focuses on has been reshaped by media technologies, in which the social practices of actors are no longer distinguishable from media practices in the broader sense. Thus, "social theory [in the digital age] will no longer be valid unless it is rewritten by media theory" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017:3). The two scholars use the term "materialist phenomenology" to refer to the new age of the sociological approach to knowledge, emphasizing that "our phenomenological world of meaning-grabbing is being linked to the medium as the infrastructure of communication, and its restrictive, provocative, and power relations are profoundly influencing the way we acquire meaning" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 7), and this epochal situation is precisely the same as that of Berger in the mid-20th century. Lookman could not have imagined.
The "differences" and "repetitions" of the two texts, The Mediated Construction of Reality and The Social Construction of Reality, constitute the key issues for us to understand digital reality and re-evaluate the phenomenological sociological legacy. In view of this, this paper will start from the dialogue between Kurderley and Hepp and Berg and Lukman scholars, first return to the theoretical context of phenomenological sociology, and discuss the core proposition of "sociology of knowledge" established by Berg and Lukman with the concept of "knowledge" as the core. Secondly, this paper brings the life world into the context of the digital age, and discusses how data can be used as a social distribution mechanism of knowledge to participate in the process of mediating the construction of reality. Furthermore, this article will discuss the new types of agency of individuals in the digital age. Finally, this paper will critically examine the contemporary development of phenomenological sociology.
One
The social construction of knowledge and reality
The relationship between "knowledge" and "reality" is the basic starting point of The Social Construction of Reality. Berg and Lukman make their awareness of the problem very clear at the beginning: since the relationship between the individual and society is the starting point of sociological research, the primary question is how the subjective certainty of truth at the individual level ("knowledge") is condensed into an objective and independent social phenomenon ("reality"). For them, therefore, all sociological analyses should deal with the interaction between subjectivity and objectivity, i.e., "the social process by which all 'knowledge' becomes 'reality'" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966/1991:15). From the perspective of the tradition of academic history, the investigation of the social processes through which knowledge constructs reality should be the object of study of "sociology of knowledge", but Berg and Lukman argue that the term sociology of knowledge has long referred to the tradition of social epistemology represented by scholars such as Scheler and Mannheim. They are more concerned with the form and extent of the relationship between thinking and social structures—knowledge is thus understood as ideas or systems of thought that are independent of social structures (e.g., Manheim, 1980). On the contrary, in The Social Construction of Reality, the two authors draw extensively on the phenomenological Schutz's understanding of the sociology of knowledge.
In contrast to the scholars of classical sociology of knowledge, Schütz emphasizes the inseparability of knowledge and social structure. In his view, knowledge itself is a product of socialization, the basis on which an individual forms all "realities". Structurally, the validity of knowledge comes from the "reciprocity of perspectives" of the lifeworld. It is a minimum idealization in which the individual assumes that the other has the same stream of consciousness and is also acting and giving meaning. Both I and the other refer to a "social stock of knowledge" with an interrelated system, so that the reality we understand can be largely consistent without the differences between individual perspectives. From the perspective of genealogy, except for a few personal experiences, most of our knowledge comes from society. Our experience also comes from a living world made up of our peers. So I have a shared basis of understanding with others. Finally, in the process of individuals entering society, knowledge is also distributed through society, and each person has mastered different levels of knowledge according to different life situations. These knowledge are interrelated, and individuals have varying degrees of clarity and familiarity with them (Schütz, 1962: 61). It is for this reason that knowledge should not be a subjective experience subordinate to a private person, but is itself social, "the social form of meaning" (Knoblauch, 2013: 300).
In fact, Schutz's reference to knowledge is extremely broad: it refers not only to theoretical forms of specific objects (e.g., expertise), but also to various forms of information, skills, methods, and know-how—so unlike Schoeller and Mannheim, Schütz's knowledge is closer to the "common sense" we use in everyday life. In The Social Construction of Reality, Berg and Lukman clearly inherit Schutz's understanding of knowledge, in which they see knowledge not only as a participant in the individual's "reality-defining" work, but also as the basis for "reality-construction": "Knowledge about society is a process of actualization, which has two dimensions: one is to understand the objectified reality, and the other is to continuously produce this reality" （Berger & Luckmann，1966/1991：84）。 The two authors absorb Weber's and Schutz's understanding of social action, and at the same time bring Durkheim's "society as an objective reality" into the dialectical transformation of "individual/society" and "subjective/objective": in the subject pole, the individual understands society and acts on the basis of knowledge; In the object pole, a social structure generated by the externalization of social action is constructed. The interaction between subject and object occurs through knowledge, that is, the definition of reality and the construction of reality.
Specifically, Berg and Lukman use three dialectical links to illustrate the above process: (1) First, the "habitualization" and "typification" stages of individual actions, which are embodied in the fact that a certain type of subjective action subordinate to an individual is cast into a specific "pattern" of action through repetition, and then is reciprocated as a routine among different types of actors. Primary "objectivity" is constructed in this process. (2) The second is the crystallization process of primary objectivity, that is, the "institutionalization" and "legitimation" stages. Among them, the above-mentioned objectivity is further "deposited" in this link, and is inherited as a "system" for granted, and this "system" becomes objectively valid and subjectively reasonable through the "symbolic world" constructed by the actors. After this link, social reality emerges as an objective reality. (3) Finally, there is the process by which objective reality returns to subjectivity, that is, the stage of "socialization". At this moment, individuals are led to internalize and inherit a particular social system through external means such as acquisition, education, and customs. When socialization is complete, sociality/objectivity reappears in individuality/subjectivity. The intrinsic relationship between these three links is shown in the figure below (Figure 1). Through the transformation of these three links, the elements of individual/society, subjective/objective and other elements have obtained dialectical unity.
It is precisely because of this that Berg and Lookman form a radical break with the classical tradition of the sociology of knowledge. If the goal of the sociology of knowledge from Scherer and Mannheim onwards is to lay the foundation for the existence of ideas, then Berg and Lukman "renounce" their work in a dual sense: one is to restore "knowledge" to the everyday context, that is, what Schütz calls the "living world". Knowledge is no longer a theorized extension of a specific thought or concept belonging to a certain group of people, but a "common sense structure" in all daily life. Therefore, "all common-sense knowledge should be the core problem of the sociology of knowledge compared to 'ideas'." It is this 'knowledge' that structures the web of meaning on which society is sustained" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966/1991: 27). The second is to connect the two dimensions of the individual and the society through the element of "knowledge". To a certain extent, the individual and society, the subjective and the objective, the idea and the existential are mutually constructed from the very beginning. Thus, the society of objective facts is constructed by subjective action, and the preconditions for subjective meaningful action are also provided by objective reality. From the point of view of both authors, Durkheim's objectivist approach and Weber's subjectivist tradition are unified in the sociology of knowledge.
Two
Data as a source of knowledge and a mechanism for social distribution
In the phenomenological sociological project inherited by Berg and Lookman, media and various "mediated interactions" through communication technology do not appear in their field of vision. There is no doubt that with the rapid development and pervasiveness of digital media, a completely different form of life world is gradually being configured. As media theorists, Kurdeli and Hepp began their succession of Berg and Lukman when they confessed: "Media has not only changed our 'common world,' but also, in a more fundamental sense, transformed our 'surrounding world,' which Schutz calls 'the social reality we directly experience'" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017:29). Therefore, in the process of "social construction of reality" in the digital age, media has become the basic reference point for any human action. Of course, we cannot interpret this assertion as an empirical reflection that emphasizes the changes in social experience brought about by the spread of a new form of technology (digital technology) – for example, our interactions are increasingly moving away from offline and taking place on media platforms. From the outset, Kurderly and Hepp confronted the phenomenological conundrum of Schütz-Berg/Lukman and, in their view, one of the more far-reaching implications of media technology is that the sources of knowledge and the mechanisms of social distribution are changing.
For Schutz, the "reality-definition" work of the individual relies on the current knowledge reserve, the interpretive model of the "stock of knowledge at hand". It is a cognitive schema accumulated by individuals in the flow of temporal experience, which provides the basis for interpretation of the problems encountered in future life. In Schütz's terminology, the knowledge base at hand is a "sedimented subjective experience" (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974: 304). On the one hand, its origin has an autogenetic basis, that is, the experiences that belong to the "past" in the individual's life experience accumulate as a reference for the action of the "present"—the situation of my "present" can be more or less guided by my "past" experience. On the other hand, the knowledge base at hand also has its social aspect, which is distributed from the social knowledge base. Since the expansion of the living world inevitably involves the differentiation of knowledge structure, a large amount of individual knowledge is distributed from the perspective of society, which is determined by its general position in society. In the essay "The Informed Citizen", Schütz fictionalizes the image of three different knowledge structures: the expert, the passerby, and the well-informed citizen. The expert has a clear and in-depth understanding of a certain field; Passers-by have some know-how that guides them in making decisions in specific situations, but they often don't know much about the ins and outs of the decision-making process. The well-informed citizen falls somewhere in between, with all sorts of life know-hows, but at some point, he also has some knowledge of a particular area. In Schutz's view, the typical "modern man" is often in the middle of a transition between these three images: in some areas I may have very fine expert knowledge, but in others I have very superficial knowledge. This is precisely what is brought about by the social distribution of knowledge (Schütz, 1964: 122-123).
In a digital society where mediation interactions are pervasive, an obvious shift is that the sources of knowledge and the way in which they are distributed are constantly intertwined with all kinds of data. First of all, a significant difference between the digital society and the traditional society is that the large number of "experiences" of individuals do not belong to a large extent, but the experiences of various anonymous/non-anonymous others on the Internet. For Schutz, Berg/Lukeman, social interaction is still dominated by face-to-face interactions, which determines that the accumulation of the individual's knowledge base is based on the development of his or her own "personal" life course. In the digital age, most of our knowledge acquisition no longer depends on our own experiences, but on the personal experiences of various others on the Internet. The density of this information is far beyond what our attention can cover, let alone allow us to participate in it "in person". And, due to algorithmic technology, even if we can experience it "in person" on the Internet, most of these experiences are fragmentary and incomplete. In recent years, concepts such as "filter bubble", "echo chamber effect" and "information cocoon" have emerged in the field of media studies, showing that algorithmic technology can consciously shape the path and type of information obtained by users, thereby affecting the scope and limit of the "experience" we can obtain. Thus, in terms of the source of knowledge, the individual's experience in the network is in fact presented as a "mosaic" fragment guided by various fragmentary facts (Zheng Zuoyu, 2021).
Secondly, as far as the social distribution of knowledge is concerned, the knowledge structure of individuals in the digital society is also distributed by algorithms. On the one hand, the various types of behaviors in our daily use of the platform are annotated by the data in a typical, highly abstract categorization (e.g., likes, shares, indifference), in this way "each user's actions are flagged as discrete data-tokens" (Couldry & Kallinikos, 2018: 146). Similarly, the various usage records of individuals in the platform (e.g., browsing history, search history, chat history) will be automatically recorded by the system and classified in a typical way (e.g., the behavior of repeatedly clicking on a certain content will be coded by the platform as of interest to the user). Through these types of data identification, individual actions also constitute a type of knowledge in the network, which is endowed with a unique "digital meaning" by the algorithm. On the other hand, algorithms can draw the "digital image" of an individual through this digital knowledge, make predictions about their future behavior, manipulate the cognition they may obtain (such as "precise push", "relevance marketing", "political advertising"), and shape their way of action, so as to "establish dynamic interactive scenarios in user choices and online sociality" (Couldry & Kallinikos, 2018: 147). In other words, algorithms can identify, classify, predict and control network users through unique data labeling methods, and the meaning of individual behavior is "authenticated" through data and algorithms to a certain extent. The differentiation of knowledge caused by the differentiation of social structures in traditional societies has been replaced by the distribution mechanism shaped by data.
Therefore, compared with traditional society, data and algorithms have begun to replace traditional "knowledge" to classify actions, draw the trajectory of individual historical activities, construct individual social identity, and finally give "data meaning" to all behaviors. In Kurdley's and Hepp's view, all of this shakes the two foundations on which phenomenology rests: one is that the lifeworld is subjectively grasped by the actor and is "meaningful" and "explainable", and the other is that the lifeworld is a "objective reality" that is taken for granted and maintained by actors through meaningful social action. In the process of digitization, a new "form of knowledge" begins to emerge through the mediation of data. It (1) is "self-evident to the actor", and the actor cannot grasp the subjective meaning of the action assigned by the algorithm, thus impacting the subjectivity of the living world; At the same time, (2) because of the black box, it has a relative "objectivity", which has become a stable social mechanism, which can shape and even construct the "ontological meaning of social interaction" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 126), and then damage the "objectivity" of the living world. In the lifeworld, data becomes what Schutz calls the (new) "social distribution mechanism of knowledge", which challenges the phenomenological logic of social interaction in both objective and subjective dimensions. It is here that Kurdley and Hepp admit that social theory must be systematically integrated to examine "these alternative forms of knowledge that are self-evident and uncontrollable to the actor but have profound implications" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 126). More precisely, to describe how these forms of knowledge participate in the mediated construction of reality.
Three
The mediated construction of data and reality
In the context of Schutz-Berg/Lookman's theory, most of the knowledge is distributed through society, except for the knowledge acquired by individuals based on practical interests. The mechanism by which this distribution occurs is largely determined by the individual's position in the social structure (Berger & Luckmann, 1966/1991:59). The typical feature of the digital society is that data can be used as an alternative mechanism to produce knowledge and play a role in the social distribution of knowledge. Considering that knowledge is the interpretive basis for individuals to define and construct reality, there is no doubt that the way reality is constructed will change dramatically as a result.
Specifically, the dialectical relationship between the individual and society has undergone new changes through the mediation of data: in the digital platform, (1) the individual's actions are first "automated abstraction" into typed data, in which the meaning of the actions is strictly extracted from the individual's own context and crystallized into a kind of digital credential that only conforms to the coding logic. A new "primary objectivity" is constructed in this process. (2) Second, the scattered data is aggregated by algorithms, and "black-boxed" is a basic "data-infrastructure". A black box means that the way it operates and the logic in which it operates is completely opaque to the end user. Thus, in this process, all "sociality" is extracted, and the data is removed from the life world in which it was originally generated, and an independent objectivity is acquired. (3) Finally, as a real data infrastructure, social action is restricted, through "classification" and "categorization", and the "objectivity" of data is returned to the "subjectivity" of the individual in such a way. However, unlike the "socialization" of the original actors, "categorization" is more of a forced classification of data and algorithms. Therefore, such categorization is mandatory and lacks reflection for actors—individuals cannot obtain specific social meaning in it, and can only passively accept the positioning of algorithmic classification on themselves. The internal relationship between the three links is shown in the following figure (Figure 2):
In the pre-digital society, the real social construction activity is embodied in the dialectical interaction between the individual and the society: that is, from the conventionalization and typology of social actions, to the crystallization of objective reality through the process of institutionalization and justification, and then to the cyclical process of returning to the individual through the link of socialization. In this construction process, the "social knowledge base" as an externalized other provides support at the level of "social meaning" ("knowledge") for what individuals think, experience, and adopt (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974: 99-118). In the digital society, the individual not only participates in the social construction in the general sense, but also enters the mediated construction process of reality due to a large number of his digital actions (relatively passively): his/her behavior is first automatically abstracted into a data token in the general sense, and then summarized into data infrastructure through algorithms, and finally returns to the individual through categorization to locate its digital image. In the same way, the social knowledge base as an externalized other is inevitably mediated by data.
Compared with the traditional social knowledge base, although data-based knowledge is also an alien and quasi-natural objective reality, its interaction mechanism with individuals is different from the past. This change manifests itself in three aspects in a phenomenological sense. First, the traditional social knowledge base is derived from "the objectivation of subjective knowledge", that is, "subjective experience is embodied as objects and events of everyday life" (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974: 264). However, in the mediated construction process of reality as understood by Kurdeli and Hepp, data-based knowledge is generated by the automatic abstraction of individual digital actions by algorithms. The generation of this knowledge by individuals is always passive and unreflective—and there are even cases of resistance to algorithms and domestication of algorithms (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 125). Therefore, the organic connection between the social knowledge base and the subjective experience of the individual as understood by Schutz has been blocked by various algorithms in the digital age.
Second, not all objectified knowledge makes it to the social knowledge base, it must also go through a process of "socialization" that determines what objectified knowledge can be accepted and what should be eliminated. According to Schutz, the factor that determines whether objective knowledge can be socialized is its "relevance structure." That is, whether the way in which the "I" objectifies a particular problem can be related to the "other" of an interacting subject (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974: 288). Therefore, the process of socialization is the process of acknowledging the subjectivity of interaction, that is, the individuals in the interaction jointly accept a certain type of "knowledge" as a reality. The social knowledge base in the digital age is built based on the automatic operation of algorithms, and it is not the association structure of the interactive subjects that determines it, but only the coding logic of the algorithm. Therefore, it has nothing to do with not only the subjective experience of the individual, but also the recognition of the interactive subjectivity of the life-world. As an objective reality, it has an extreme "opacity" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017:131). Essentially, it has become a black box for the materialization of all kinds of digital actions.
Finally, the knowledge in the social repository must be returned to the individual through subjective experience, which Schutz describes as a process of "subjective association of the social repository." In his view, the individual always enters the living world with a natural attitude, so the social knowledge base itself is "take-for-granted" for him. Its subjective connection is the process of understanding and experiencing the living world of the individual (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974: 323). In contrast, "social knowledge produced through automation is strictly external to the process of generating the individual's daily sense of reality" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 142), and to some extent, it becomes a purely externalized object that cannot be experienced and comprehended. More importantly, the circular production process of digital knowledge itself is also oriented to a specific goal, which is related to external economic and political drivers. In events such as "Big Data Killing" and "Cambridge Analytica Scandal", we can see that specific interest groups can use this digital knowledge to structure social life, shape individual cognitive methods, and influence individual behavior and decision-making. If we continue Schutz's assertion that the appropriation of social knowledge by individuals is understood as a process of subjectivity generation (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974: 319), then it is clear that digital knowledge has the same social implications: it "requires that social actors must adapt to this process...... thus producing those subjects that fit into that social order" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017:142).
In summary, in the three stages of source, socialization and subjective association, the mechanism of data-based knowledge is different from that of traditional social knowledge base. This has led to a fundamental break in its connection with the individual in the digital age. It is in this sense that Kurderley and Hepp very clearly distance themselves from the theories of Berg and Lookman: the mediated construction of reality with the participation of data presents a "paradox of knowledge" in contrast to classical social constructions, in which "knowledge is negating itself, and those who claim to be able to 'access' this knowledge are very different from the way in which social knowledge was formed in the past" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 194). Thus, for phenomenological sociology, if Verstehen/understanding, i.e., the interpretation of social action, remains its first principle, the thorny question of the digital age is: how does the actor experience the action itself when it is disconnected from the social knowledge base on which it depends?
Four
Understanding Digital Actions:
The (new) basis for the construction of reality
Due to the emergence of data as a (new) social distribution mechanism of knowledge, individuals in the digital world not only participate in the process of social construction of reality, but also enter the mediated construction of reality based on the data-based knowledge base. This makes the actions of individuals in the lifeworld present two specific aspects: one is the traditional "social action" (Schütz, 1964: 3-19) as the basis of phenomenological sociology, and the other is the large number of "digital actions" in the digital platform as understood by Kurdley and Hepp. The relationship between the two and the construction of reality is shown in the following diagram (Figure 3):
By its very nature, the primary difference between social action and digital action lies in its change in "intentional objects": the former interacts with others with "reciprocity of perspectives" in the living world, while the latter directly or indirectly confronts various data. This makes it possible for a platform or digital infrastructure to codify the digital actions carried out by all the individuals in it. In Kurdley's view, once social interactions are digitized, they automatically enter a process of "simplification" and "typification." In other words, platforms are able to define the types of digital actions (e.g., for, against, disinterested) in specific categories and categories, "and then use them as operational means for the subsequent evaluation and calculation of social activities" (Couldry & Kallinikos, 2018: 152). In the process of encoding, the "social meaning" contained in the digital action itself will be extracted and replaced by the specific "digital meaning" assigned to it by the platform.
Second, another difference between digital action and social action carried out by individuals with a "natural attitude" lies in its extreme "opacity". The numerical meaning of an action is often the result of an algorithm running automatically and cannot be perceived by the actor. Therefore, the emergence of digital action types is not just a supplement or replacement of the original social action—because the data infrastructure is accompanied by "objectification" and "black boxization", the connection between the individual as an actor and the data generated by his action has increasingly lost the "hermeneutic basis" in the phenomenological and sociological sense—the individual can no longer fully understand and control his own data action. As far as "sociality" is concerned, it gradually moves away from its original meaning due to its decoupling from "social meaning". In this sense, "the ontology of 'society', which is built from data accumulated in isolation from individuals and their interrelationships, is not at all 'social', but only a materialized rejection of sociality" (Couldry, 2014: 895). This makes the actions of the individual to some extent (at least partially) "anti-hermeneutic", i.e. "non-social".
From this perspective, individuals in the digital age are faced with a different situation from the traditional living world: the actions of individuals and the meaning of their actions are separated by the process of digitization. This has brought about two more far-reaching societal implications: one is the problem of "tool reversibility" of technology; The second is the emergence of a new type of "agency" for individuals.
On the one hand, one of the distinctive features of digital action is that the data generated by an individual's every use of media technology will become a digital image of him/her, and then become an important reference indicator for predicting his or her actions in the future. In other words, when we use tools (data) to participate in the living world, tools also "use" us to some extent. From Schutz's phenomenology, tools are channels through which the human subject "typifies" the external world. In contrast, Kurdley and Hepp discern a striking difference in the digital age: "Today's data-based tools themselves act as means of 'typifying humans,' often for commercial gain or surveillance...... We call this phenomenon 'instrumental reversibility'" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 131-132). The challenge with data practices is that tools are not just for actors – but also for external others (often interest groups). The more the individual uses the tool, the more it provides a way for others to position themselves, for example, capital can use this "reversibility" to classify and categorize consumers accordingly. In this sense, data is far from being the result of mere digital action, but rather an "institutionalized social practice" (Hepp, 2020:75) – itself an important means of participating in and constructing social processes.
On the other hand, once an individual becomes aware of the process of the reversibility of tools (in fact, every user of a digital medium is aware of it), he will "take it for granted" (in the phenomenological sense) to take a "reflective" action to coordinate, adapt, and even attempt to control the aforementioned digitization process. For example, in the digital age, it is inevitable that digital presence, whether voluntary or not, has become an inevitable process for every actor: information about companies, organizations, and groups will appear on specific web links for others to consult. In the same way, individuals will also leave various digital traces due to their digital actions, and thus become the object of search by specific interest groups. More commonly, presence can also become an autonomous "digital presence", such as individuals sharing their lives, itineraries, opinions and opinions on social networking sites or apps. Even in some specific situations, the individual's "body" will be connected to the network due to the needs of practical practice, such as "human flesh purchasing", "express delivery", and "takeaway delivery" (Liu Hailong, Xie Zhuoxiao, Shu Kairong, 2021). A common feature of these phenomena is that effective "presence" in the digital age implies a kind of "searchability", that is, an individual's digital traces and digital information can be registered on the network and can be effectively retrieved. The problem lies precisely in the fact that, as soon as the actor realizes this, he takes a corresponding "reflexive action" to adapt/counter such an algorithm-search mechanism. For example, before posting information on social media, users will engage in a series of "algorithmic imaginary" – imagining how to apply strategies such as typography, titles, and posting times to get the maximum algorithmic recommendation and exposure, so as to adjust the way they publish information accordingly (Bucher, 2018). Similarly, media agencies will adjust their "content arrangement" and "data resources" in order to increase the number of views and be more prominent in online search rankings (Fotopoulou & Couldry, 2015). In addition, some online advocacy movements have adopted the same "hashtag" because of the need to attract traffic and gain greater social influence (Saxton, Niyirora, Guo & Waters, 2015). These phenomena reflect the emergence of a new type of reflexive action: actors begin to autonomously choose to coordinate, adapt, and confront in response to the automatic computation of data and algorithms—and may even use algorithms creatively to achieve a specific social demand.
From a phenomenological point of view, if all the "presence" of an individual is (forced) to be connected to the processing mechanism of data automation and classification, how does he experience this relationship? As can be seen from the above examples, actors are beginning to try to "establish a reflexive relationship with data analysis" and then change the way data works "by designing and customizing these data analyses to coordinate their actions and presence through the lens of data" (Couldry, 2017: 71). In this way, the occurrence of action is no longer simply based on the "social meaning" of the sociology of knowledge, which is lost by the "anti-hermeneutic" and "black box" nature of the data infrastructure, but is bound to the so-called "data mechanism", and actors begin to consciously coordinate their digital actions according to the algorithmic mechanism. Thus, for social actors, they "do not completely lose their reflexivity in algorithmic power, but turn to 'algorithmic conditioning'...... a kind of reflexive control over it" (Couldry, Fotopoulou & Dickens, 2016:133).
It is precisely because of this that the types of actions in the digital age have the characteristics of duality: one is "direct" digital action, that is, the activities carried out by actors on digital platforms in order to achieve a certain social goal (such as making friends, reading knowledge, retrieving information); The other is "reflexive" digital action, in which actors aim to design and customize the digital meaning of their actions in order to coordinate, adapt, and counter various digital mechanisms (e.g., creating online personas, attracting traffic, seeking exposure). In Kurdley's view, the task of phenomenological sociology today is precisely to provide an appropriate analytical language for the intentions and goals of the actors in the digital actions described above (Couldry, 2017), and to examine the new "sociality" that accompanies this "mediated construction".
Five
Summary and Remainder
Sociology has always pursued the discussion of social mechanisms, which is doomed to phenomenological sociology, which focuses on the individual and adheres to the hermeneutic direction, and cannot fully enter the mainstream. Even for Schutz's followers, Berg and Lookman, after completing their magnum opus, The Social Construction of Reality, they gradually turned to more empirical or trivial research (e.g., Berger & Kellner, 1981, Luckmann, 2013; see Vera, 2016). Theoretical construction engineering seems to have lost enough of its appeal to them. In reflection 25 years after the book's publication, Berg admits that in the mainstream sociological world where structural functionalism is prevalent, talking about a phenomenological reconstruction of social theory is as anachronistic as "playing classical music at a rock festival" (Berger, 2013: 13). An undeniable reality of the digital age is that the "living world" that phenomenological sociology is concerned with is undergoing a drastic transformation as a result of the widespread use of data technologies. The nature and status of knowledge changes with the digitization of the living world. All of this shakes the fundamental way in which the individual phenomenology acquires meaning and acts. From this point of view, the materialistic phenomenology proposed by Kurdley and Hepp inherits and develops the classical phenomenological sociological approach: "phenomenology" implies the adherence to an interpretive analytical path based on human action; "Materialism" is embodied in the reaffirmation of the fundamental role of media technology and data in the development of human action—it is the mediating mechanism of media to reality that shapes the process of social experience.
In addition to the above-mentioned theoretical advancement, in the opinion of this paper, Kurderley and Hepp's emphasis on "materialism" seems to be a deliberate misinterpretation of Berg and Lookman. Using materialistic phenomenology rather than phenomenological sociology, they aim to show that the process of construction is not a purely spontaneous subjective activity as conceived by Berg and Lookman, but is bound to be subject to various objective "material conditions"—in the time of Kurdley and Hepp, that is, the "digital technological environment". This can also be linked to the subsequent textual discussion between the two authors. But in fact, even in the original context of Berg and Lookman, the material element of social construction has never been ignored by them. A persistent criticism of The Social Construction of Reality in the past is the question of the sheer spontaneity of the construction process, which seems to become a spontaneous process in which the actor "comes out of nothing". To this end, Berg deliberately responded: "The word 'construction' is ...... It can be misunderstood as a creation out of nothing – as some understand it, 'nothing but our construction'. This is obviously not what I and Lukman meant, what we want to convey is that all social reality derives from socially endowed interpretive actions" (Berger & Zijderveld, 2009: 66). Since the action on which the construction process depends is itself "social" – or the "knowledge" that the individual understands and constructs reality is itself socially distributed, it is naturally limited by the "material conditions" of the time in which it lives. In other words, "materialism" itself is a theoretical premise inherent in social constructivism. From this point of view, the theories of Kurdley and Hepp are not a theoretical system of their own, but at most a "contemporary version" of phenomenological sociology.
More importantly, Kurdley and Hepp's treatment of the core categories of their theoretical construction also makes such a contemporary version of phenomenological sociology suspicious. Discussing the difference between "mediated interactions" and "face-to-face interactions," they vaguely state that the problem is not that digital technologies extend the general direct experience through various mediated experiences, but that the lifeworld has always been "the product of a mixture of direct and mediated experiences" (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 29). They can thus contrast their theories with Schutz's discourse in an attempt to discern the vast differences between mediated experience and experience in general phenomenology (Couldry & Hepp, 2017:27-29). However, in the view of this paper, Kurdelli and Hepp are still trying to solve the problem of Schütz's epochal limitations in an empirical sense, rather than in a theoretical sense. In other words, despite the differences in their time, the authors Kurdley and Hepp follow the same path as Schütz, treating the problem of "mediated experience" as a question of "degree of anonymity" rather than an analytical category.
The question is, how did Berg and Lookman solve the problem of anonymity? In The Social Construction of Reality, the authors refer to face-to-face interaction as the basis of "paramount reality" on the one hand, but also to "other realities" outside of non-face-to-face interaction, emphasizing that they appear in the form of "finite provinces of meaning" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966/1991：39-40）。 As a vassal of the supreme reality, the ontological status of alternative reality can only be presented through the objectification process of language (for example, the "alternative reality" constructed by dreams must be interpreted through everyday language). As a result, language becomes crucial in Berg and Luckerman's work on the construction of reality: "Because of its ability to transcend the 'here and now', language can bridge the scattered realms of everyday life and condense them into a meaningful whole...... Language has the power to 'presence' those things that are far removed from the 'here and now' in spatial, temporal and social dimensions" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966/1991:54). If we look at it from this perspective, many of the "mediated experiences" mentioned by Kurdeli and Hepp do not constitute a problem in themselves, and individuals are still able to objectify many "finite domains of meaning" through the medium of language, and to relate and integrate various fragmented mediated experiences in the "here and now" – for example, in my daily life, I can still use "online dating" as part of the development of my real social relationships.
But on the other hand, some of the "data black box" phenomena that Kurderley and Hepp discuss are indeed experiences in which language cannot be objectified. Due to the existence of algorithmic mechanisms, individuals are often unable to experience and comprehend all the "digital meanings" contained in their digital actions. Even in the dimension of "temporality", the meaning of digital actions subordinate to the "past" must be activated by the algorithm at a certain point in time in the "future" (for example, the algorithm can collect digital traces of the past to predict the future actions of individuals). These digital experiences of the individual are no longer subordinate to the structure of everyday life in which the two types of temporal streams (natural time sequence and multiple intrinsic time) defined by Berg and Lukman intersect. To some extent, the problem of data black box brings about the emergence of a third time structure in the living world, that is, "algorithmic time". These difficulties are supposed to be fundamental questions for understanding phenomenological sociology in the digital age, but they are precisely the ones that Kurderley and Hepp's "mediation construction" project has not been able to and does not intend to address. The reason for this is that in the first chapter of The Social Construction of Reality, Berg and Lukman give the socio-philosophical basis of all subsequent social theoretical narratives by explaining the dialectical relationship between knowledge and reality. On the other hand, in The Mediated Construction of Reality, Kurdeli and Hepp lack this key link, and it is difficult for them to explain the changes in the types of knowledge in the digital age and their (new) interaction with reality, which weakens the theoretical self-consistency of such a "contemporary version".
Along the way, phenomenological sociology in the digital age must reconsider the substitution of data and algorithms for language if it is to "live up to its name". In the section "Sedimentation and Tradition", Berg and Lukman clearly identify the great role of language in the process of objective institutional inheritance:
Language objectifies shared experiences so that they are accessible to all who use them. It is both the foundation and the tool of the collective knowledge base. Moreover, language also provides a means for the objectification of new experiences, allowing them to tap into the existing knowledge base. If a collective objectification and objectification are to be inherited, language is the most important medium. （Berger & Luckmann，1966/1991：85-86）
In the digital age, the dual functions of "objectification" and "objectification" of language are blocked by the black box mechanism, and algorithms, not languages, are the medium that objectifies a large number of digital experiences and preserves them as an objective system. That is, "technologically generated 'information' is being transformed into 'knowledge', which is not subordinate to the subject, but is a product of society" (Knoblauch, 2016:196). So, what are these social knowledge bases, which are detached from the "life world" of individuals, and how do they play a role as an alternative mechanism to traditional "knowledge". These will constitute thorny issues that have to be dealt with in the contemporary development of phenomenological sociology.
Of course, it is undeniable that the "reflexive action" that has emerged in the digital age with codes, digital clones, and algorithms as interactive objects is not in the problem domain of classical phenomenological sociology. This makes the discussion between Kurderley and Hepp more contemporary than that of Schutz and Berg/Lookman. At the same time, in terms of social science methodology, in order to describe and analyze the reflexivity of digital actions, Kurdelli et al. have proposed a research method called "real social analytics" based on phenomenological sociology, which aims to capture "how specific actors use analytical data to reflexively control, adapt to their online presence, and act accordingly" in the digital age (Couldry, Fotopoulou & Dickens，2016：119； See also Couldry, 2017). This allows their analysis to move beyond purely theoretical construction and point to social experience in general. From this perspective, Kurdley & Hepp also provide an authentic basis for the intellectual legacy of reactivating phenomenological sociology – the digital society as our "living world".
This article is an abbreviated version with references omitted, and the original article was published in International Press, Issue 2, 2024.
The cover picture comes from the Internet