Digital Sociology

The Reinvention of Social Research

Noortje Marres

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780745684826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

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.

1
What 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 environ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is digital sociology?
• 2 What makes digital technologies social?
• 3 Do we need new methods?
• 4 Are we researching society or technology?
• 5 Who are digital sociology’s publics?
• 6 Does digital sociology have problems?
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement