Digital Sociology Noortje Marres

Summary

Digital Sociology is structured as follows. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to recent debates about the rise of a new form of social enquiry in the wake of digital transformations of social life and social research: digital sociology. I ask why the term is gaining traction only now: sociologists have studied digital infrastructures, technologies and practices for many decades already, but only in recent years has the term ‘digital sociology’ come into use. What can explain its rise to prominence?

After a discussion of recent uses of the term in sociology, I show how claims for new, computational ways of knowing society were made across fields, in computing, in the media as well as data science, and have become the subject of significant academic and public controversies. The chapter then evaluates different definitions of digital sociology. It can alternatively be characterized in terms of (a) its object of enquiry (the digital society); (b) its methods; (c) its platforms (new sites and techniques for the public communication of sociology). While each of these aspects of digital sociology are important in their own right, I argue that we fail to grasp something crucial about digital sociology as long as we consider them in isolation. In a discussion of relevant examples, I show how the digital affects the relations between social life and its analysis in various ways, and why digital sociology must address these cross-cutting developments.

The second chapter asks: What is ‘social’ about digital media technologies? I evaluate three prominent answers to this question: (a) the device-centred view that says that social media technologies can be distinguished from non-social technologies by their technical capacities (they allow for social networking, for example); (b) the analytic view that highlights that social technologies make available new sources and forms of social data (for example, social media and mobile, locative data); (c) the critical view that says that media technologies are not social in and of themselves, and only their uptake in social practices make them so. There are then several, mutually inconsistent accounts on offer as to what makes digital technologies social. While some emphasize features like ‘user-generated content’ or social networking functionality, others foreground the importance of ‘contexts of use’: it is in the ‘doing’ of digital practice, that digital media technologies become social. The chapter goes on to discuss a number of problems with these three different views, and then introduces a fourth: the ‘performative’ – or rather, ‘interactive’ – understanding of what is social about digital infrastructures, devices and practices.

This latter approach highlights that digital technologies do not only facilitate social life, or render it researchable, they also make social life amenable to intervention. I argue that the resulting interactions between social life and digital media technologies require further investigation, and invite us to develop a more experimental understanding of digital sociality, of what makes digital technologies social. If we wish to grasp the relevance of digital media technologies for social enquiry and social life, we must then better understand how the digital changes relation between technology and sociality.

The third chapter is concerned with methods. Much recent work in digital sociology has focused on this topic, as questions of method seem to crystallize both the promises and the problems that digital innovation opens up for sociology. This chapter offers an evaluation of these promises and problems, through a discussion of what has become known as the ‘digital methods’ debate. This debate revolves around the question: should we work towards the digitization of existing methods? Or is it more important to develop so-called ‘natively digital’ methods – methods, that is, which take advantage of technical features that are specific to digital networked media technologies? I offer a critical evaluation of these two positions, showing how emerging digital infrastructures provide support for both of them. I then make the case for a third approach, which I call ‘interface methods’.

This third approach builds on the former two, and starts from the recognition that important social research methods are already built into digital infrastructures, devices and practices, even if they currently tend to serve other-than-sociological ends. I argue that it therefore is our task to test and develop the capacities of these methods-devices for social enquiry, so that they may better serve its purposes. While digital architectures constrain social research in many ways, they are also to an extent configurable: the digital application of method requires a continuous mutual adjustment of research question, data, technique, context and digital setting.

Chapter 4 discusses an important methodological problem of digital sociology, which can be summed up by the question: are we studying society or technology? The problem is that sociologists tend to turn to digital social data and platforms in order to study social life, but the resulting research often ends up telling us more about digital technology than about society. I argue that digital sociologists must confront this problem, and I discuss ways of addressing it. First and foremost, it requires that we recognize that there are important problems of bias in digital social research. But we must also move beyond this problem definition, and consider a more fundamental problematic: the object of digital social enquiry is inherently ambiguous, insofar as both technological settings and social practices inflect digital formations, and it is difficult in many cases to disentangle their respective contributions. To conclude, I argue that it would be a mistake to transpose sociological methodologies onto digital settings unchanged. On the one hand, we cannot assume that society and technology can be easily disentangled. But neither can we just assume that digital societies constitute ‘hybrids’ of the technical and the social.

This is because the specification of social problems and media-technological problems is too important and complex a task for sociologists to be able to leave it to others. The solution is to become more flexible in our ontological assumptions: it depends on our research topic, question, research design, chosen methods, and the forms of our data, whether we end up shedding light on digital technology or on digital social life.

Contents

• 1. What is digital sociology?
  • The ‘rise’ of digital sociology
  • From vision to controversy
  • What then does the ‘digital’ in digital sociology refer to?
  • Problems with digital ways of knowing society: bias, instrumentalism, interactivity
  • The coming out of the technology of sociology
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 2. What makes digital technologies social?
  • Platform-centric perspectives: technology makes the social?
  • Data, traces, materials
  • Practice, the situation: the sociological serum, but does it still work?
  • Interlude: how do social 1, 2, and 3 add up?
  • Representing and intervening: rendering social life (and analysis) deployable
  • Changing relations between technology, sociality and knowledge
  • The configuration and contestation of the social
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 3. Do we need new methods?
  • The digital methods debate
  • Digital sources of methodological innovation
  • The digital methods debate reconsidered
  • Interface methods
  • Pilot study: the liveliness of climate change on Twitter
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 4. Are we researching society or technology?
  • Problems of digital bias
  • Two methodological strategies for dealing with digital bias
  • The Janus face of the digital in social research: object and resource
  • How (not) to deal with it? Affirming the problem of ambiguity
  • Three tactics for dealing with ambiguity: critical extraction, performative deployment, radical empiricism
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 5. Who are digital sociology’s publics?
  • ‘From the audience to participation’: for and against digital exceptionalism
  • Three features of digital participation: valuable, technological, metricized
  • Digital participation as a device of social research
  • Re-qualifying digital participation: a machine for knowing society with society
  • Are digital ways of knowing society participatory? A typology
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
• 6. Does digital sociology have problems?
  • What kinds of problems? Not only ethics, and politics, but knowledge
  • Computational social science: no problem, or the mother of all problems?
  • Contesting laissez-faire methodologies
  • Expanding the frame on sociological experiments

Extract

Digital controversies often seem to touch on rather ephemeral or sensationalist topics, and as such it may be tempting to dismiss these controversies as expressing digital culture’s penchant for the extreme, outrageous and only semi-serious. As David Moats and I (2015) asked in our article on digital controversies: ‘Outrage is the dominant mode of engagement with social media, according to the popular online magazine Slate.3 But what about controversy? Just a glance at the lists of ‘trending topics’ on popular platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook reveals a host of scandals, debates, disputes, and polarizing campaigns’. You could say that controversies around ‘creepy’ searches and apps and risqué allusions to ‘girls near me’ exemplify a particular genre of publicity, one that expresses a need for distraction and a preoccupation with more or less hilarious titbits. Furthermore, many of these digital controversies can be called reflexive, or ‘recursive’, in that they involve the use of digital media to make a fuss about digital media (Kelty, 2005).

It may therefore seem plausible to interpret digital controversies as first and foremost expressions of digital culture, as staging activity focused on demonstrating what is significant and distinctive about digital ways of living. This interpretation is appropriate and relevant, but I also think a wider analytic framework is called for. Crucially, controversies about digital ways of knowing society do not just unfold in digital settings, they have also spawned a broad range of public, organizational and policy initiatives, including debates, reports and frameworks, art works, governmental committees, hacks and protests, and the development of new ethical frameworks.