A Review of Rogers Brubaker, Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents. Hoboken, NJ: Polity, 2023, XI+264 pp.

Abstract

Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents by Rogers Brubaker scrutinises hyperconnectivity, the socio-technological condition, in which everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time. The book aims to capture the panorama of the hyperconnected world through an analysis of changes within the grand social domains — the production of the self, social interactions, culture, economics, and politics. The author brings together academic publications and opinions of journalists, politicians, and specialists in the field of new technologies, in order to calibrate their observations and statements in agreement with the new role of digital systems and their wide dissemination. As in his most renowned monographs, Brubaker uses the critique of categories as a key analytical technique, and not just a formal theoretical section. Reconstructing the historical and intellectual contexts of the emergence of our language of description and analysis of digital environments, he demonstrates that uncritical use of categories such as sharing, platform, or forum leads to both academic blindness and political and economic miscalculations on a global scale. The review seeks to put Brubaker’s book in a discussion about the methodological and theoretical foundations of internet fieldwork with a focus on Russian-speaking digital anthropology.