Reflexivity of the technological forms of life in Scott Lash

Abstract

The present article has as objective to establish an analysis of the problem of the reflexivity of the technological forms of life exposed by Scott Lash, through the identification of its central approaches with respect to the concept of reflection exposed in his theory of the doubles of reflective modernity. This is locate the main theses of the author on the diagnosis of the modern society in the terms of the reflexivity as one of its constituent elements, in order to characterize some of the “new forms of life” developed in the global culture of information that, among other things, are constituted by the deployment of the technological systems of computing base. This is intended to provide a typology enlarged about the technological forms of life that Lash presents only in descriptive terms, with the idea of contributing to a major sociological comprehension of certain dynamics of contemporary interaction, taking as a guiding axis two concepts linked to the work of the author: reflexivity and information structures. We review some points in common in discussions between Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Lash itself on the theory of reflexive modernization, in order to identify the starting point of the author in the description of the concept of technological lifestyles and an extension of the proposed word.