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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life.
Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations.
This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
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
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Just because it’s called social, doesn’t make it social Emma Uprichard, Summer 2012
Digital Sociology
The Reinvention of Social Research
Noortje Marres
polity
Copyright © Noortje Marres 2017
The right of Noortje Marres to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8482-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Marres, Noortje, 1975- author.Title: Digital sociology : the reinvention of social research / Noortje Marres.Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016038449 (print) | LCCN 2017005356 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745684789 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745684796 (paperback) | ISBN 9780745684819 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745684826 (Epub)Subjects: LCSH: Sociology. | Social sciences--Research. | Technological innovations--Social aspects. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General.Classification: LCC HM585 .M34567 2017 (print) | LCC HM585 (ebook) | DDC 301.01--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038449
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
If books are the result of collaboration, this applies only more so to a book about the digital. A big thank you goes to my collaborators, with whom it has been a pleasure imagining possibilities and developing ideas, many of which found their way into this book: in particular, Carolin Gerlitz, David Moats and Esther Weltevrede. I am grateful to Celia Lury, without whom there quite conceivably would not have been any Digital Sociology, at least not in the places where I work and write. Thank you to Richard Rogers, with whom I first started working on this and from whom I have learned so much.
Thank you, too, to my old colleagues in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and my new colleagues in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, with whom I taught and developed Digital Sociology: Les Back, Jenn Barth, Roger Burrows, Nerea Calvillo, Rebecca Coleman, Andy Freeman, Kat Jungnickel, Dhiraj Murthy, Evelyn Ruppert, Bev Skeggs and Emma Uprichard. I also learnt much from my Digital Sociology students at Goldsmiths, including: Goran Becirevic, Sarietha Engelbrecht, Astrid Bigoni, Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, Sam Martin, Jess Perriam, Nissa Ramsay and Viktoria Williams, and at the University of Warwick, including: Matthias Orliwoski, Swati Metha, Arran Ridley and Thong Zhang.
Chapter 1 was written during a fellowship at the Berlin Social Science Center in the summer of 2014, and I want to thank Michael Hutter and Ignacio Farias for hosting me at the delightfully named Centre for the Study of Newness, and also for helpful discussions with Jeanette Hoffmann and her collaborators. Chapters 3 and 4 draw on published papers: Chapter 3 includes parts of an article written with Carolin Gerlitz, entitled ‘Interface methods: Renegotiating relations between digital social research, STS and sociology’ and which appeared in The Sociological Review in 2016. Chapter 4 builds on ‘Mapping controversies with social media: The case for symmetry,’ a piece I co-authored with David Moats for the second issue of Social Media and Society, and on ‘Why Map Issues?’ which was published in Science, Technology and Human Values,40 (5) in 2015. I am grateful for inspiring comments provided on an earlier version of Chapter 4 by Ulrich Beck and his collaborators in Cosmopolitan Methodology during an excellent workshop in Paris in December 2014. I was able finally to finish this book thanks to a fellowship at the Digital Cultures Lab at Leuphana University, and I want to thank Goetz Bachman, Rene Ridgeway and Armin Beverungen in particular for being there to ask the right questions at the right time. I also benefited from discussions during events organized by and with: Tanja Bogusz, Andreas Bernhard, Dominique Boullier, Paul Feigelfeld, Martina Leeker, Mark Carrigan, Gian Marco Campagnolo, Endre Dányi, Dana Diminescu, Marieke de Goede, Michael Guggenheim, Steven Hinchliffe, Christine Hine, Bruno Latour, Ella McPherson, Rob Procter, Helene Snee, Tristan Thielmann, Stefan Giessmann, Willem Schinkel, Tommaso Venturini, Robin Williams, Alex Wilkie and Steve Woolgar.
Thank you to interlocutors in addition to those already mentioned, for sharing their insights and generously engaging with my thoughts on digital sociology, even as I could not face adopting a platform voice while writing this book: Andreas Birkbak, Erik Borra, Anders Blok, Alessandro Brunetti, Michael Dieter, Vera Franz, Ana Gross, Stephanie Hankey, Anne Helmond, Mathieu Jacomy, Christopher Kelty, Monika Krause, Sybille Lammes, Vincent Lepinay, Manu Luksch, Greg McInerny, Linsey McGoey, Evgeny Morozov, Fabian Muniesa, Anders Munk, Sophie Mutzel, Dan Neyland, Tahani Nadim, Sabine Niederer, David Oswell, Mukul Patel, Nirmal Puwar, Bernhard Rieder, Marsha Rosengarten, Sanjay Sharma, Lucy Suchman, Nathaniel Tkacz, Marek Tuszynski, Lonneke van der Velden, Farida Vis and Britt Ross Whintereik. Emma Longstaff and Jonathan Skerrett at Polity were both patient and demanding, and their criticisms and comments provided valuable guidance along the way.
Finally, I want to thank my family and Krause-Guggenheim for time spent in other places than at my desk, and Darius and Audra for accommodating this project while there were so many important things happening.
Introduction
There is much interest today in transformations at the interface between sociology, computing and media technology, and this book discusses what these transformations mean for our understanding of society. The recent excitement and concern about the changing role of computational infrastructures and devices in social life and social research is commonly captured by the shorthand ‘the digital’, a term that has been widely taken up. To be sure, this wide uptake reflects the significant investments in digital technologies, architectures and strategies that have been made across many sectors, including government, the universities, business, media and social and cultural organizations. But it is also informed by the conviction that the digital makes possible new ways of conducting and knowing social life. The capture, analysis and manipulation of data, networks and interaction by computational means has produced new interfaces between social life and social research. This book offers a socio-logical perspective on these latter developments and examines the challenges they pose to our engrained ways of knowing society. It also outlines some practical strategies for conducting social enquiry at this interface. My aim has been to provide an integrated analysis of the practical, methodological, and political problems and opportunities that today’s digital infrastructures, devices and practices open up for the analysis of social life, and to situate these in relation to wider questions about the changing role of knowledge in society and public life. I discuss how the digital at once affects social life itself and our understanding of it, and explore its capacities to transform the very relations between social life and research. I argue that this is where the digital challenges our understanding of society most forcefully, and where digital sociology can make its most important contribution to wider public debates about new ways of knowing society.
Covering the contributions of sociologists and scholars from related fields to our understanding of these developments, the book then provides an advanced introduction to the emerging field of digital sociology. It is based on lectures I delivered as part of postgraduate courses on Digital Sociology over the past years: the introductory course of the Masters in Digital Sociology that I convened across the departments of Sociology and Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and more recently, as part of the postgraduate offer of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick, for students in Digital Media Studies, Sociology as well Big Data and Urban Analytics. The book (like the lectures) serves several overall aims, the first of which is to provide an overview of current debates in sociology, computing and media studies about the new ways of knowing society enabled by digital transformations. As I will discuss in what follows, these debates focused on three main topics: (a) on the general claim that the digital makes possible new forms of knowing the social world; (b) on the concepts, methods and techniques required for the study of today’s digital societies; and (c) on the normative, political and ethical issues raised by the new, digital forms of social research. This book covers each of these three aspects. It also serves a further objective, which is to outline an intellectual agenda for digital sociology. Faced with the myriads of problems that digital ways of knowing society open up for social research as well as for the societies of which it is a part, we need to develop new visions of the role of social enquiry in social and public life. The question is then how sociologists can participate actively in the further development of digital ways of knowing, both inside and outside the universities.
In taking up this question, the book advocates an interdisciplinary approach to digital sociology: I sketch out a way of researching digital societies that both draws on sociological traditions and enters into dialogue with media studies and computer science. In so doing, I join others in pursuing an approach to digital social research that is both critical and creative, and engages with the changing roles of technology and knowledge in contemporary social life. I argue that digital sociology is well positioned to address key problems with digital research as it is currently framed across fields: today, digital social research is increasingly defined as a form of data analysis, focused on the detection of patterns in behavioural data. While there are certainly good grounds for the recent surge of interest in digital analytics across science and society – because it confers on social research a renewed capacity to find coherence and intervene in social life – it is limited in other respects. As I will discuss, to equate digital social research with digital data analysis is to go along with an all too narrow conception of the relation of sociology and computing, one that does not equip us to investigate how sociality itself is undergoing transformation in digital societies. It does not enable us to investigate wider possible changes in the relations between knowledge, technology and society for which the rise of ‘the digital’ serves as occasion. I hope to show that digital sociology can address such issues. To see this, however, we must first critically examine the claims for new, digital ways of knowing society, and outline alternative strategies for researching social life with the digital.
The book 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.
Chapter 5 is concerned with digital participation and asks how digital sociology as a research practice and intellectual agenda engages with publics. Do digital media technologies offer new ways for sociology to engage with audiences? Can digital infrastructures, devices and practices help us to imagine new public roles for sociology and sociologists? Across disciplines, it has recently been argued that the digital transforms the role of the public in society: in digital societies, ordinary people increasingly figure as active participants in public life, and not just as audiences. In this chapter, I criticize the idea that the credit for rendering today’s media, publics and society more participatory should be conferred on digital technology, and I discuss the contribution that digital sociology can make to the understanding and practice of digital participation. Following Boullier (2016), I argue that classic sociological concepts, like the ‘representation of society to society’, offer purchase on the empirical challenge and normative promise of digital participation today. Concepts like these offer a different way of understanding the supposed shift from ‘audience to participation’ in digital societies, and help to identify an alternative normative direction for this project, one that differs from the drive towards ever more active engagement (more participation).
The final chapter discusses the contribution of digital sociology to public life and interdisciplinary debates about the challenges that digital data and analytics pose for our ways of knowing societies. I summarize the main argument of the book: the relations between social life and its analysis are changing in digital societies, and take one step further: these relations are changing today to the point that the role of social research in society has been rendered problematic. Indeed, the digital is today opening up a new ‘crisis of representation’, as it casts doubt on the capacity of social research to adequately and legitimately represent society. I argue that prevailing conceptions of what computational methods bring to the study of society do not equip us well to understand these transformations and the resulting crisis. However, to address this, digital sociology should not adopt an anti-scientific stance. The main attraction of digital sociology is precisely that it enables the development of experimental forms of enquiry that cut across the divides between the sciences and the humanities. It may develop and inform richer approaches to ‘data interpretation’, more adventurous ways of introducing social theory into the space of digital research, more playful forms of interaction between social research and social practices. Digital sociology opens up ways to reinvent social research.
1What is digital sociology?
In social research, as in other fields, the idea has taken root that the digital makes possible new ways of contributing to society. Actual efforts to realize this promise of the digital have proven the initial optimism to be partly misguided. One sobering example is the Samaritan Radar, a social media application that was launched by the Samaritans, an important UK suicide prevention agency, in October 2014. At its launch, the tool was introduced as a way of identifying users at risk of suicide by way of real-time, textual analysis of Twitter data. Once an ‘at risk’ account has been detected, the Radar would send a message to the followers of the identified account alerting them and ‘offering guidance on the best way of reaching out and providing support’.1 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Samaritans were forced to close the experimental service after a short time, and it was subjected to harsh criticisms in both news and online media. Many argued that notifying people’s social media contacts of their supposed malaise without prior consent amounted to a ‘privacy violation’, while some flagged the risk of stigmatization of individuals already deemed ‘at risk’. Yet others questioned the hubristic presumption that a complex and sensitive phenomenon like suicide risk could be detected and managed using simple methods of data analytics.2 Indeed, social researchers could no doubt propose different, better methods to understand and communicate with people in trouble using social media, and providing the impulse to do so could be one positive outcome of this episode.3 However, the Samaritan Radar debacle also sheds light on a wider, rather diffuse phenomenon, namely the remarkably strong expectations, in our societies, that digital technology will make it possible for social research to help solve social problems.
Digital technology presents an important societal phenomenon today, as popular online platforms like Facebook, smart phones and ‘intelligent’ computational systems have been taken up across the full breadth of society during the last decade or so, from transport to education, from family life to activism, from prison management to wildlife conservation. Whereas the digital used to refer to a fairly special set of practices, those that early adopters, experts, the ‘tech savvy’ and the young engaged in, today it touches on most aspects of social life. This development has important implications for sociology. But the ongoing digitization of society does not only present an important topic of investigation, it also has the potential to transform the very role that social research itself plays in society. Across society, digital infrastructures, devices and practices are widely seen to offer important, new opportunities for making social research relevant to social life (Back, 2012), for turning knowledge about society into action.4 As I will discuss in this chapter, what distinguishes the digital technologies of today – what sets them apart from the ‘Web’ and ‘information and communication technologies’ (ICT) that went before – is their extensive capabilities for monitoring, analysing and informing social life. Today’s digital infrastructures, devices and practices collect an abundance of data that can be used to analyse people’s interactions and movements, from the SMS exchanges captured by phone companies to the location data amassed through smart phone apps. They also make it possible to translate data analysis into targeted feedback in everyday settings and user activities, from the query terms suggested by search engines, to the personalized updates that are offered by transport and weather apps and other digital services. It is these interactive capacities of digital technology, in combination with its ubiquity in society – the fact that digital technology can appear to be everywhere – that today feed the conviction that the digital makes it possible to re-connect social analysis with social intervention, as in the example of the Samaritan Radar app above.
What makes the digital such a relevant phenomenon for sociology then goes beyond its importance as a research topic. Its contemporary significance must also be understood in terms of the transformations of social research, and of its role in society that it makes possible. These transformations have been described in various ways, but they can be summed up in the belief that social research, through its implementation in computational infrastructures, may gain the capacity to intervene in social life and thereby to address or even solve social problems. The Samaritan Radar project was presented as a way of taking advantage of the widespread uptake of a social media platform like Twitter across society for a progressive purpose, and it did this by outlining a new way of using methods of textual analysis to act on the issue of suicide risk. As such, this project offers a clear demonstration of the belief in the power of the digital to confer onto the analysis of social life the capacity to help solve social problems. However, once the project was underway, multiple challenges to this ambition came into view, such as the risks of privacy violation and stigmatization. Furthermore, as a blogger speculated a few months later, the fact that a suicide prevention agency is monitoring social media might even lead users to practise self-censorship, thereby affecting the very fabric of interaction in these settings.5 As such, the Samaritan Radar episode can also be interpreted as a kind of ‘critical’ test of progressive hopes invested in the digital. This is partly what makes it such a relevant case from a sociological perspective.
I would like to argue that the digital today does offer fresh opportunities for connecting social analysis and social intervention, but not in the way in which this promise is usually understood. This is because digital societies are marked by far more complex interactions between social life and knowledge – between social research and social action – than tends to be recognized when data analysis is put forward as a way of acting on social problems. The Samaritan Radar episode highlighted some of these more complex dynamics. This tool did not only facilitate interaction – feedback – in the technical sense of sending a notification to an identified user’s social media contacts. It also brought into relief more comprehensive forms of interaction between social research and social life. When the monitoring and analysis of everyday activities is used as a basis for intervention into these activities, a complex set of exchanges between knowledge and behaviour is set in motion, as the public debate that followed on the launch of Samaritan Radar also highlighted. When users are identified as a ‘suicide risk’, this designation may initiate a dynamic in which social concepts – like ‘suicide risk’ – and social life interreact: once individuals (as well as others) are ‘aware of how they are classified’, this produces a situation in which these actors are likely to ‘modify their behavior accordingly’, to quote the description that social theorist and philosopher Ian Hacking (2000, p.32) has provided of what he calls the ‘interactivity’ between social research and social life. This type of transformative effect, by which the description of a social situation transforms that situation, has long been of special concern to sociologists and philosophers (Thomas and Thomas, 1928; Becker, 1963). As I will discuss in what follows, one of the key questions that arises in digital societies is how computational forms of interaction at work here combine with sociological dynamics of interactivity between knowledge and social life.
In this book, I would then like to propose that the digital opens up new occasions for interaction and interactivity between social life, technology and knowledge, and that these form a central challenge for sociology in a digital age. The proliferation of computational infrastructures, devices and practices across society has given rise to new forms of exchange and mutual adjustment between social research and social life, a development in which social, technical and epistemic processes fuse in ways we need to understand much better than we do now. On a general level, it means that if we are to grasp the significance of the digital for sociology, we must recognize that interaction is not just a notable technical feature of digital technology today. Interactivity – in the broad sense of exchange and traffic between the analysis of activities and those activities themselves – presents a crucial sociological dynamic. Indeed, in the classic view of the early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber (1905/1968), this is the defining challenge of social science. As Weber famously noted, what distinguishes social enquiry from other forms of research is that it must contend with the fact that the ideas people have about the social world interact with what happens in it. As sociologists have since argued, social research presents a special form of knowledge insofar as it is inherently interactive: social research must expect, and indeed anticipate, that knowledge about social life and social life itself mutually influence one another (Cicourel, 1964). This is also to say that social dynamics of interactivity are not at all new in themselves. However, in today’s digital societies, technology must increasingly be factored into these complex processes. Remarkably, however, while there has been much interest in the new ways of knowing society that digital technology makes possible, both inside and outside the university, the complex interactions between digital technology, social research and social life have received much less attention. As I will discuss, the debate about digital social science has largely proceeded within a representational framework – one focused on the capacity of digital data analysis to represent adequately given social phenomena and patterns – and not an interactional one.
Over the last decade, however, sociologists and scholars in related fields such as digital media studies, geography and computing have been hard at work to develop the concepts, methods, and methodologies that we need in order to understand the complex interactions between digital technology, sociality and knowledge, and the aim of this book is to offer an introductory account of these important if challenging efforts. In this opening chapter, I will provide an overview of this emerging work on digital sociology, with a special focus on the claim that the digitization of society makes possible a new way of knowing and intervening in society. The chapter situates this claim in relation to longstanding engagements in sociology with computational technologies, as both an object and instrument of social enquiry. By considering recent interest in digital sociology against this historical backdrop, we are able to move beyond two equally dissatisfying claims: the claim that the digital ways of knowing society emerging today present a radically innovative form of knowledge, as some advocates of the ‘new’ computational social science have suggested; but also beyond the claim that there is nothing new about digital sociology, that it is basically ‘old sociology’ with a few new ‘sexy’ but superficial and unconvincing technological features built in.
Rather, the research practices that today go by the name of ‘digital sociology’ contain both old and new elements – old and new techniques, methods, concepts, sources of data, and forms of intervention (Latour et al., 2012; Watts, 2004; Law and Ruppert, 2013; MacKenzie et al., 2015). This insight will allow us to confront a different set of questions from those pushed into the foreground by the opposition between the old and the new. The question for digital sociology is not only whether today’s digital societies give rise to new social forms or give us more of the same, or whether digital sociology presents a new or an old way of knowing society. We must equally consider whether and how ‘the digital’ entails changes in the relations between technologies and social life; between knowledge, society and technology. Indeed, I want to argue that it may be ultimately more productive to adopt the latter, relational perspective. We will need to come to terms with these changing relations if we are serious about deploying digital technologies for progressive purposes. Today’s digital transformations invoke important debates from sociology’s past and about the role of ideas and technology in social life. I would like to show how digital transformations render these sociological traditions newly relevant to contemporary problems. And that they do so in ways that challenge us to develop a more ‘technology-aware’ way of understanding social life.
The ‘rise’ of digital sociology
One of the puzzles of ‘digital sociology’ is that the label has come into usage only relatively recently: it only started appearing in print towards the end of the 2000s.6 This is strange because sociologists have studied the role of computational technology in social life and society at large for many decades (Athique, 2013). It was in 1976 that the sociologist Daniel Bell (1976) announced the coming of the post-industrial society, a societal transformation in which the computer and its uptake in industry, government and organizations played a central role. In the new society that was announced by Bell, it was no longer the production of material goods, but information- and data processing that would function as ‘the engine’ of social transformation. Not just grand theories of society, but also empirical studies of social life, have for many decades already insisted that computational technologies play a formative role in social life. It was almost thirty years ago that Lucy Suchman published Plans and Situated Actions (1987), a classic fieldwork study of the interactions between people and computational systems, most notably a ‘smart’ photocopier, in everyday work places. Suchman’s book made the case for a more-than-technological, ‘socio-technical’ understanding of computational practices and arrangements. Her field studies showed how capacities that are often ascribed to digital technology – such as the ability to represent reality, or to coordinate action – in actuality are the outcomes of social and technical interactions between people and machines, as well as with everyday environments and objects.
To be sure, the rise to prominence of personal computing and the widespread uptake of Internet technologies from the 1990s onwards meant that the analysis of the computational society, and of computational social practice, had to be updated. But this job was largely done in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the appearance of Manuel Castells’ Network Society (1996) and Miller and Slater’s The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (2001). These classic studies broadly followed in the footsteps respectively of Bell and Suchman but showed that after PCs, the Web and e-mail, computerization no longer primarily affected the professional spheres of industry, organizational life and state bureaucracy, as earlier accounts of the computerization of society had argued: computing now came to transform social relations, practices and structures, in everyday, cultural, political, and public life. In this same period, sociologists were also turning to the Internet and the Web as sites of research, taking up established methods like ethnography and network analysis to conduct social research online, studying online communities and researching so-called socio-technical networks – hybrid formations involving human and non-human elements (Hine, 2000; Slater, 2002; Rogers and Marres, 2000). Importantly, however, in this period, it was the concept of the ‘network’ – closely connected to the figure of the Web – and the distinction between online and offline, rather than the digital as such, that dominated sociological thinking and research on the computerization of social life (Woolgar, 2002).
Since the early 2000s, PCs and the Internet have been joined by popular social media platforms, smart phones, and large-scale investment in ‘intelligent’ computational systems in such sectors as transport and energy. These infrastructures, devices and associated practices build on and extend the capacities of previous incarnations of computing in (and as) social life – they are networked, interactive, designed for non-expert users, and so on – but there are some important qualitative differences. Previous studies of the computerization of social life tended to focus on specific social domains – such as commerce or activism – or specific sectors and communities, like the implementation of computational systems in ‘air traffic control’ (Suchman, 1997) in the 1980s, or hacker culture (Riemens, 2002) in the 1990s. Even as sociologists studied computational practices and forms of organization that extended across time and space (such as diasporic networks (Diminescu, 2012)), and their uptake among different social groupings (elderly engineers; adventurous teenagers; activists), these digital forms of life were nevertheless described as special – the domain of the young, the savvy, migrated, the radical. Today, however, ‘the digital’ touches on most aspects of social life. It is no longer special, and must be addressed as part of most if not all substantive areas of sociology, from citizenship to intimacy, the relations between the state and the economy, the changing role of contractual labour in society, to the experience of self and nature, from gender relations to the city (Orton-Johnson and Prior, 2013; Lupton, 2014). As such, the digital can be understood as a new kind of total social fact (Fish et al., 2011; Lury and Marres, 2015). This term coined by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Adam Fish and others have argued, is perfectly applicable to the Internet: just as in Mauss’ description of the total social fact, the Internet today touches on ‘every aspect of organized human life’, and qualifies as a ‘phenomen[on] which extend[s] to the whole of social life’ (Mauss, 2005: 70, cited in Fish et al., 2011). What Fish et al. say about the Internet, we can extend towards the broader category of the digital: it must be understood as irreducible, as affecting most if not all areas of social life, and as itself generative of new social practices, ties and relations, a point to which I will return.
Why do we speak of the digital today? As computerization takes on the aspect of a total social fact, prior pre-occupations with its special effects – what happens when social life becomes networked? when culture moves online and becomes virtual? – are replaced with concerns with more sobering societal effects, such as: what kind of influence are digital industries gaining over societal arrangements? As I will discuss, projects to re-configure society’s infrastructures, forms of organization and practices by way of the digital have multi-faceted implications, but there is one outstanding feature I want to highlight at the outset, and this is the critical importance to these projects of social research, broadly conceived (Marres, 2012a). As digital technologies are embedded ever more widely into societal infrastructures and social practices they generate an abundance of information about social life, enable the application of analytic techniques and make possible new forms of feedback (Savage, 2009). The ubiquitous use of smart phones and digital platforms and the grafting of ‘intelligent’ computational systems onto existing transport, communications and energy architectures – in the form of travel cards or smart energy meters – have resulted in what is often called a ‘digital deluge’: a wealth of digital traces that can be used for research and other practical purposes (Given, 2006; Savage and Burrows, 2007; Edwards et al., 2013). As the digital increasingly inflects both large-scale infrastructures and our most intimate practices, these social arrangements become connected by an ever-expanding pool of devices for data capture, analysis and feedback, whether it is in the form of new methods for consumer credit rating that take into account social media data, or the reputational scores of Twitter users that are monitored by these users themselves, as well as, potentially, their employers (Kitchin, 2014; Gerlitz and Lury, 2014; Deville and van der Velden, 2015). The range of fields and potential applications is vast, but, as the journalist and novelist John Lanchester put it succinctly, what matters is that it is digital.7
Today’s widespread use of the short-hard term ‘digital’ may then be taken to refer to the loose and diffuse set of capabilities that derive, not just from the ‘computerization’ of society in general, but, more specifically, from the equipment of social arrangements and practices with devices for data capture, analysis and feedback (Amoore and Piotukh, 2015). Arguably, indeed, wider projects to re-make societies by way of the digital critically depend on the embedding of new empirical instruments for research and intervention into social practices, environments and infrastructures. This circumstance can help to clarify an important distinctive feature of the forms of social enquiry that over the last years we have started to refer to as ‘digital sociology’. While computational arrangements, processes and practices have for many decades served as topics of sociological research, the ‘digital’ presents sociology with something that is qualitatively different, as the digital transformation of society today involves the configuration of a vast, evolving, potential ‘empirical apparatus’ for social research across social life. Digital devices have been taken up so widely that they can today be configured as instruments for analysis of and intervention in, not just this or that special practice, but society.
However, there is one important, stubborn detail that goes unmentioned in this story about the rise of ‘the digital’ as a machine for knowing and transforming society. Many sociologists remain unconvinced that the sources of data and methods made available by today’s digital infrastructures present something new, or that they are even usable for social enquiry. Some of this scepticism is mild and takes the form of playful reminders that if we really want to know what the ‘digital’ refers to today, we should consider its promotional, sensationalist and hype-like quality, as suggested, for example, by a Twitter message sent by the British sociologist Mike Savage in July 2013: ‘wow! The rise of digital sociology!’8 The tweet included a link to a Google Trends visualization of the key-word ‘digital sociology’ and the related terms ‘digital anthropology’ and ‘digital cultures’ (Figure 1.1). Under the heading ‘interest over time’, the figure compares the number of times people have searched for these phrases since 2009, suggesting that the term ‘digital sociology’ came into use around January 2011, a good few years later than digital anthropology, and at least ten years later than digital culture. As Savage is surely aware, it is easy to question the accuracy of such figures: for example, when we remove the ‘s’ from digital cultures, the picture changes, showing how the academic disciplines, among them sociology, are dwarfed by ‘culture’ when it comes to their ability to make the connection with ‘digital’ (Figure 1.2).9
Figure 1.1 Savage’s Google Trends query, July 2013
Figure 1.2 Savage’s Google Trends query, with an ‘s’ removed, July 2013
Around the time Savage wrote this message, hype-ish and inflated claims about digital social science were still doing the rounds of the more serious media. In an especially exuberant article that appeared in 2011, the New York Times described recent efforts of social scientists ‘to mine the vast resources of the Internet – Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cell phones’ – as realizing nothing less than the aims of universal social science, citing ‘social scientists who believe that digital data will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behaviour – enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena’.10 In sociology, this grand narrative about a ‘new science’ that will uncover the eternally valid laws of society has a name – it is called sociological positivism and is most commonly associated with the nineteenth century sociological theory of August Comte, and, it has to be said, tends to be regarded among serious sociologists as too naive and/ or hubristic an idea to seriously entertain. Sociological scepticism also extends to the practical challenges of digital social enquiry. One major issue here – to begin at the top of the iceberg – is that most digital systems today are privately owned: significant parts of the emerging apparatus for social analysis are located beyond the public Internet, and remain inaccessible for most social researchers (Savage and Burrows, 2007; Wagner-Pacifici et al., 2015).
Should it then really surprise us that, as the computational social scientist David Lazer and his co-authors (2009, p.721) observed, ‘leading journals in economics, sociology, and political science show little evidence of this field?’ They went on: ‘but computational social science is occurring – in Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo, and in government agencies such as the US National Security Agency (sic)’, and all this still appears to be largely true today, even as the ‘foresight’ of the NSA to use digital data for social research purposes today, after the recent controversies about Internet surveillance, qualifies rather less as a shining example than Lazer and colleagues suggested back in 2009. Indeed, a broad range of problems have been identified with the use of digital infrastructures, devices and data for social research purposes, as I will discuss in what follows. But before doing so, I first want to examine in more detail the general claim that the digital makes possible a ‘new way of knowing society.’
From vision to controversy
Notwithstanding the continued scepticism of many, over the last decade scholars across the disciplines of sociology, computing, media studies, geography, anthropology, and related fields have formulated intellectual visions of a new digital form of social enquiry. As already suggested, many of these visions focus on data: sociologists have argued that digital infrastructures inaugurate a new age of the ‘traceability’ of social life (Latour, 1998; Thrift and French, 2002). The outstanding feature of digital technologies, from this vantage point, is that they render everyday activities recordable and monitorable to a new degree, and with unprecedented intimacy: your phone traces your movements, your thermostat knows when you are asleep, search engines know what you think. Some sociologists have characterized the data collected by digital means as ‘transactional’ or ‘naturally occurring’ social data (Edwards et al., 2013). In contrast to the purposefully collected data that sociologists used to rely on, such as surveys or interviews or focus groups, the argument then goes, today’s digital data are not produced in artificial situations. They are generated as a by-product of already occurring interactions and processes across social life. However, as we shall see in Chapter 2, many other sociologists have criticized the idea that digital environments, such as for example Facebook, qualify as ‘natural’ (Derksen and Beaulieu, 2011; Lewis, 2015).
A second vision of a new, digital way of knowing society focuses on the new analytic techniques that digital infrastructures enable. Most spectacularly, some sociologists have claimed that the digital makes possible a ‘scaleless’ form of social enquiry, as it allows us to zoom from a particular ‘data point’ out to the whole (data-set), and back again. This claim is of key importance for sociology, because it suggests that the digital may help to bridge a long-standing divide in sociology, that between the detailed description of social life on the micro-level and the analysis of whole populations on the macro-level of society (Latour et al., 2012; Conte et al., 2012). As Latour et al. (2012) put it, digital infrastructures allow us to ‘navigat[e] data sets without making the distinction between the level of the individual component and that of the aggregated structure’ (p. 590) Indeed, Latour has gone a step further, as he generalizes this claim about digital methods to make a wider argument, arguing that the digital allows us to sidestep one of the foundational problems of sociology, that of the ‘great divide’ between society and individual, between structure and agency. Less extreme, but gesturing in a similar direction, is the argument by Savage and Burrows (2007) that the digital data deluge makes possible a shift from theory-driven causal ‘explanation’ to a more empirical style of ‘description’ as the dominant mode of sociological analysis, as digital data analysis enables the fine-grained description of social life on the granular level as well as extrapolations towards wider ‘patterns of living’ (Savage and Burrows, 2007; Adkins and Lury, 2011; Mackenzie et al., 2015).
A third vision, finally, proposes that the ‘game-changing’ feature of emerging, digital infrastructures does not consist of either digital data, or digital forms of analysis, in and of themselves, but instead derives from the ways in which data capture, analysis and feedback are combined in the digital arrangements that are configured across society today. Social media, mobile and other ‘smart’ infrastructures have a double-faced nature, in that they present at once an instrument for the analysis of social life and a device for intervention in it (Edwards et al., 2013; Healy, 2015; Law and Ruppert, 2013; Marres and Weltevrede, 2013). As such, digital infrastructures have the capacity to reconfigure the relations between social research and social life, as it has long been assumed by many sociologists and philosophers of science that society cannot be studied with interventionist, experimental methods, such as those associated with laboratory science: most prominent sociological methods like sample-survey analysis, interviews and fieldwork are not experimental but observational. This third perspective, then, highlights what I referred to in the introduction as the new forms of ‘interactivity’ that mark the relations between social research and social life in digital societies. It pays special attention to the ways in which the proliferation of digital devices across social life has been accompanied by the uptake of social concepts and methods, such as the ‘social network’ and ‘network analysis’, across society (Mayer, 2012; Healy, 2015). The digital then directs our attention anew to the ‘social life’ of methods (Law and Ruppert, 2013) and makes it necessary to reflect not only on how the digital enables sociologists to understand the world differently, but also on how the social world itself is transformed by digital ways of knowing society (see also Knorr-Cetina, 2014; Marres, 2012a).
I will examine these three visions of new digital ways of knowing society in more detail in what follows, but striking about each of them is that, to a greater or lesser extent, they ascribe to the digital the capacity to solve sociology’s problems. Indeed, sociologists like Bruno Latour (Latour et al., 2012) explicitly argue that digital infrastructures provide a way out of one of the long-standing problems in sociology, that of the rift between the study of society as a whole, on the macro-level, and the investigation of social practices in their particularity, on the micro-level. As he puts it: because digital traces allow sociologists to follow ‘the action’ from micro to macro, they suspend the need to posit different levels on which sociality unfolds (see also Manovich, 2011). Although arguably in a less extreme fashion, this capacity of the digital to (dis)solve sociology’s problems is also invoked in sociological discussions about the ‘data deluge’. As noted, some sociologists have characterized the data that digital infrastructures make available as ‘naturally occurring’, and this too suggests that the digital may help us to solve a recognized, methodological problem, namely that of the ‘artificial quality’ of generalizable social data. The data that are classically used to analyse societal dynamics on the macro-level, such as survey data, are not like laboratory data, but neither are they exactly ‘natural’: they depend on a machinery of ‘survey-sample analysis’, including the design of questionnaires, the selection of discrete moments in which to conduct the survey and so on (Cicourel, 1964; Savage, 2010). Thirdly, and finally, the claims that ‘new’ forms of interactivity between social research and social life are arising in digital societies also contain a promise to solve one of sociology’s problems, namely the problem of a sociology that is perceived and/or perceives itself as ‘out of touch’, as not sufficiently engaged with society (more about this in Chapter 6).
It is then not just social organizations like the Samaritans, or ‘susceptible’ journalists at the New York Times, who believe that the digital can solve problems of social research. (It is not just out-there in society, that ‘the digital’ is capable of conferring problem-solving capacities onto social research.) However, as noted above, problems with the ‘new’, digital approaches to knowing society have been formulated with equal conviction if not zeal. Lee et al. (2008) have argued that the more sensational claims for new computational ways of understanding social life tend to overstate the differences that separate the ‘new’ from ‘old’ forms of social research, and they suggest that such claims to innovation tend to depend on the forgetting of previous advances in sociology (p. 5; see also Watts, 2004; Chapter 3
