This article outlines a sociological agenda for the era of "tech," a period when digital technologies have come to dominate our social lives. It argues that we should break "tech" down into two parts, the production side and the consumption side. The production side concerns the ways in which these technologies are made, the social actors involved on the design, financing, and production side, and the consumption side refers to the ways in which ordinary users make use of these technologies and the ways in which their use is transforming everyday life. The article maintains that this is an area of research to which sociologists need to pay much greater attention if they are to understand the contemporary world satisfactorily.
Keywords: Algorithms; Attention economy; Basic income; Digital technologies; Gig work; Surveillance capitalism.
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020.