The Paramount Reality: Revisiting Berger & Luckmann in a Digital Age

• In Event: Teaching and Learning in Sociology Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

In The Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann argued that everyday life constitutes the "paramount reality" — the reality that imposes itself upon consciousness most urgently through face-to-face interaction and full sensory engagement. Other realities, from dreams to aesthetic experience, remain secondary. This paper revisits that claim under conditions of pervasive digital mediation. Drawing on phenomenological sociology, I propose a distinction between attentional dominance — which reality most intensely captures consciousness — and ontological authority — which reality structures taken-for-granted assumptions and obligations. Berger and Luckmann treated these as inseparable: ordinary life commanded attention and organized meaning. I argue that digital environments have driven them apart. Through portable, persistent, and sensorially overwhelming media, digital life increasingly claims attentional dominance, while ordinary life retains a tenuous ontological authority that can no longer be taken for granted. The paper concludes by turning to the classroom as a site where this tension is most visible and most actionable. By leveraging the affordances of ordinary life — the ephemerality of classroom exchange, the recursive structure of co-presence over a semester, and the collaborative interpretation of digital content from a position outside it — instructors can deliberately cultivate the conditions of reality maintenance that Berger and Luckmann once assumed were given.

Author

• Max A. Greenberg, Boston University