In contemporary society, social media is increasingly used to obtain information, share emotions, and participate in social action. Photo: VCG
The second half of the 20th century ushered in an era of great transformation that continues today. Although these dramatic changes are most visible in international relations and politics, their driving forces lie in profound shifts in the social mechanisms through which reality is constructed. The sociology of knowledge offers a theoretical perspective and an analytical framework for understanding this era. This article draws on this perspective to examine contemporary society’s historical development and the social mechanisms underlying it. A fundamental sociological insight is that the reality in which people live is not objectively given or external to society. Rather, it is socially constructed through shared systems of meaning, and people actively participate in this process. The sociology of knowledge focuses on the production, distribution, and legitimation of knowledge, paying particular attention to how everyday experience, social cognition, and conceptions of rationality interact to shape “reality” and, in turn, social action, group organization, and collective action.
Perspective from sociology of knowledge
From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, a particularly important feature of this era of transformation is the dual process of “centralization” and “decentralization” that unfolded during the 20th century. Centralization refers to the process through which social construction brought previously disconnected people, groups, and communities into close connection across their everyday lifeworlds—in their social relations, ideas and consciousness, and institutional arrangements. They increasingly coalesced around a shared symbolic system—that is, a societal value center. Decentralization, by contrast, refers to resistance to this value center and efforts to break free from it. It manifests in tensions, conflicts, and realignments within society that challenge and weaken established social centers, pushing society toward multiple centers.
Understanding this transformation involves tracing the evolution of the social mechanisms through which reality is constructed and examining the different forms of construction they have produced. This article proposes that social construction mechanisms in the 20th century underwent three stages. The first was centralized construction, which accompanied the rise of capitalist economies and modern nation-states and found expression in the state, institutional rationality, and imagined communities. The second was decentralized construction, particularly the deconstruction of discourse and the emergence of identity politics in postmodern knowledge production. The third was the emergence of multiple forms of construction enabled by the internet, expressed through subjectivity, digital media, and the virtual “neighborhood.” This trajectory extends from socialization rooted in traditional organizational structures—villages, families, and communities—to top-down state-building and the emergence of “imagined communities,” and then to the multiple construction mechanisms, forms of social action, and dimensions of social reality that have developed around the internet over the past half-century. Throughout this process, the construction of lifeworlds and intersubjectivity—that is, the space in which meanings are shared—has undergone profound change. These stages overlap and interact rather than following a simple linear sequence.
Another analytical thread concerns changes in social thought. The evolution of currents of social thought and social theory is an important component of the construction of reality. The historical trajectory from the 1830s to the present parallels sociology’s own evolution, from its emergence and development to maturity and subsequent shifts in orientation. Sociology arose in response to the demands of its time and evolved alongside society, offering a distinctive intellectual perspective on the social foundations of historical change. The sociology of knowledge provides a perspective for connecting and interpreting these events and actions. By focusing on everyday lifeworlds and interactions, it helps explain how changing social mechanisms in different periods have shaped relationships between individuals and the state, and between values and behavior, as well as the shared world of meaning that emerges from these relationships.
‘Perfect storm’
In meteorology, a “perfect storm” occurs when several weather conditions converge and interact in an exceptionally rare combination, producing a storm of extraordinary and unpredictable force. In the second half of the 20th century, social currents such as decentralization and subjectivity likewise converged and interacted with the technological conditions created by the internet, giving rise to new mechanisms of social construction. Together, these developments generated the “perfect storm” that propelled the great transformation.
First, decentralization and the turn toward subjectivity converged with the rise of the internet. Social thought since the mid-20th century has involved both “deconstruction” and “reconstruction.” Deconstruction refers to the historical process through which established centers have weakened and reality has been reconfigured. Reconstruction has been driven in part by the growing prominence of subjective rationality. Emerging from the broader process of rationalization that began in the modern era, subjective rationality gave legitimacy to individual judgment and personal development. It also drew on critical currents in social thought, helping drive the turn toward subjectivity in the second half of the 20th century. This trend first emerged in the West, particularly Europe, and subsequently spread to other sociocultural contexts through globalization.
The deconstruction of the old world left open the question of what form reconstruction would take. As deconstruction and reconstruction intertwined in the second half of the 20th century, and the old gave way to the new, the internet emerged as a major technological development reshaping the conditions of social life. Its arrival fundamentally transformed the mechanisms governing information flows and social interaction. Individuals were no longer confined to the “neighborhood” of physical space or passively incorporated into existing processes of socialization and institutionalization. Instead, by actively selecting social interaction platforms and participating in them, they could construct their own realities.
The sociology of knowledge once again directs attention to intersubjectivity, or the construction of shared meaning. One dimension of this social transformation is the shift from institutional rationality toward subjectivity. Social reality and knowledge are no longer understood as independent of interpretive frameworks, agency, identities, and power relations, nor are they assumed to provide universal, unified knowledge in the manner of scientific rationality. Instead, they emerge within specific situations and contexts, grounded in intersubjectivity—that is, the symbolic universe of shared meaning.
Second, social life has shifted from “bowling alone”—Robert Putnam’s metaphor which demonstrates a drop in social capital in contemporary America—to participation in virtual communities. From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, this shift reveals profound changes in the mechanisms of social construction. The grand narratives constructed from the top down during the 20th century no longer command the same public attention. New media—including information flows, social platforms, communication intermediaries, and channels of communication—has become a crucial mechanism of social interaction. In the social world shaped by the internet, new organizational mechanisms are reshaping everyday lifeworlds. The first mechanism is self-selection grounded in subjectivity. The second is the sociological principle of “homophily”—the tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to associate with one another. Activated and amplified by the internet’s expanding reach, this tendency has played a major role in the differentiation and recombination of social groups. The third mechanism is the active participation of algorithms and intelligent digital models in social construction.
In recent years, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models, has raised even more pressing questions about social construction mechanisms. Through large-scale information processing, symbolic systems profoundly shape information channels and spaces of thought, making AI increasingly inseparable from the construction of social reality and the interpretation of meaning. Changes in social construction mechanisms have reconfigured lived realities and everyday lifeworlds, thereby reshaping processes of socialization and institutionalization.
In contemporary society, social media is increasingly used to obtain information, share emotions, and participate in social action. Networked communities organized around individuals either overlap and reinforce one another or remain parallel and mutually isolated, displacing traditional forms of vertical socialization and horizontal institutionalization. Individuals may perform formal roles and respond to formal authority in the workplace, yet step outside these roles in virtual worlds, assuming different identities across separate lifeworlds. Face-to-face interactions in everyday life and selective flows of interaction in virtual worlds together produce a multidimensional and internally contradictory reality. This stands in sharp contrast to the unified information sources and singular channels of meaning-making that characterized earlier social arrangements.
Third, the great transformation in China. Since the 1980s, China’s rapid economic and social development has compressed transformations spanning over a century in many developed countries into a much shorter period. Consequently, Chinese society has experienced more rapid and profound change. In recent decades, dramatic changes have unfolded across numerous domains, including urbanization, urban and rural communities, the diversification of social groups, intergenerational relations, marriage and family, and emotional relationships. In recent years, as internet development, digital platforms, and intelligent digital technologies have advanced rapidly in China, a growing sense of subjectivity and new forms of group identification have provided diverse social mechanisms for constructing individual realities.
These far-reaching changes across Chinese society are reflected in a substantial body of research. The considerable attention devoted in recent social science research to topics such as digital media and emotional labor indicates that these intellectual currents are resonating widely. Such everyday practices and theoretical interpretations, viewed from different angles, corroborate the central argument of this article: Contemporary society is living through an era of great transformation in which the social mechanisms underlying the construction of reality are undergoing profound change.
In this historical process, “neighborhoods” are being reconstructed through self-selection. The new “neighborhood” is no longer defined primarily by physical space but increasingly by virtual space—it is shaped less by face-to-face interaction than by exchanges mediated through linguistic and symbolic systems. The diversification of information sources, the multidimensionality of subjectivity, the differentiation of lived experiences, and the growing role of self-selection all indicate that webs of meaning now extend far beyond traditional face-to-face interactions and everyday social encounters. A new era of meaning has emerged in which reality and virtuality increasingly converge, near and far become interconnected, and the foundations of intersubjective meaning-making undergo profound change. These developments are reshaping the configuration of reality and giving rise to new groups and new forms of social action.
Zhou Xueguang is a professor from the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. This article has been edited and excerpted from Academic Monthly, Issue 5, 2026.
Edited by WANG YOURAN