Digital Sociology

Deborah Lupton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317691808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People's movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital technologies. We are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not.

The sub-discipline of digital sociology provides a means by which the impact, development and use of these technologies and their incorporation into social worlds, social institutions and concepts of selfhood and embodiment may be investigated, analysed and understood. This book introduces a range of interesting social, cultural and political dimensions of digital society and discusses some of the important debates occurring in research and scholarship on these aspects. It covers the new knowledge economy and big data, reconceptualising research in the digital era, the digitisation of higher education, the diversity of digital use, digital politics and citizen digital engagement, the politics of surveillance, privacy issues, the contribution of digital devices to embodiment and concepts of selfhood and many other topics.

Digital Sociology is essential reading not only for students and academics in sociology, anthropology, media and communication, digital cultures, digital humanities, internet studies, science and technology studies, cultural geography and social computing, but for other readers interested in the social impact of digital technologies.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Life is digital

DOI: 10.4324/9781315776880-1

Life is Digital: Back It Up

(Headline of an online advertisement used by a company selling digital data-protection products)

Let me begin with a reflection upon the many and diverse ways in which digital technologies have permeated everyday life in developed countries over the past thirty years. Many of us have come to rely upon being connected to the internet throughout our waking hours. Digital devices that can go online from almost any location have become ubiquitous. Smartphones and tablet computers are small enough to carry with us at all times. Some devices – known as wearable computers (‘wearables’ for short) – can even be worn upon our bodies, day and night, and monitor our bodily functions and activities. We can access our news, music, television and films via digital platforms and devices. Our intimate and work-related relationships and our membership of communities may be at least partly developed and maintained using social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Our photographs and home videos are digitised and now may be displayed to the world if we so desire, using platforms such as Instagram, Flickr and YouTube. Information can easily be sought on the internet using search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. The open-access online collaborative platform Wikipedia has become the most highly-used reference source in the world. Nearly all employment involves some form of digital technology use (even if it is as simple as a website to promote a business or a mobile phone to communicate with workmates or clients). School curricula and theories of learning have increasingly been linked to digital technologies and focused on the training of students in using these technologies. Digital global positioning systems give us directions and help us locate ourselves in space.

In short, we now live in a digital society. While this has occurred progressively, major changes have been wrought by the introduction of devices and platforms over the past decade in particular. Personal computers were introduced to the public in the mid-1980s. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 but became readily accessible to the public only in 1994. From 2001, many significant platforms and devices have been released that have had a major impact on social life. Wikipedia and iTunes began operation in 2001. LinkedIn was established in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Reddit, Flickr and YouTube a year later, and Twitter in 2006. Smartphones came on the market in 2007, the same year that Tumblr was introduced, while Spotify began in 2008. Instagram and tablet computers followed in 2010, Pinterest and Google+ in 2011.

For some theorists, the very idea of ‘culture’ or ‘society’ cannot now be fully understood without the recognition that computer software and hardware devices not only underpin but actively constitute selfhood, embodiment, social life, social relations and social institutions. Anthropologists Daniel Miller and Heather Horst (2012: 4) assert that digital technologies, like other material cultural artefacts, are ‘becoming a constitutive part of what makes us human’. They claim against contentions that engaging with the digital somehow makes us less human and authentic that, ‘not only are we just as human in the digital world, the digital also provides many new opportunities for anthropology to help us understand what makes us human’. As a sociologist, I would add to this observation that just as investigating our interactions with digital technologies contributes to research into the nature of human experience, it also tells us much about the social world.

We have reached a point where digital technologies’ ubiquity and pervasiveness are such that they have become invisible. Some people may claim that their lives have not become digitised to any significant extent: that their ways of working, socialising, moving around in space, engaging in family life or intimate relationships have changed little because they refuse to use computerised devices. However, these individuals are speaking from a position which only serves to highlight the now unobtrusive, taken-for-granted elements of digitisation. Even when people themselves eschew the use of a smartphone, digital camera or social media platform, they invariably will find themselves interacting with those who do. They may even find that digital images or audio files of themselves will be uploaded and circulated using these technologies by others without their knowledge or consent.

Our movements in public space and our routine interactions with government and commercial institutions and organisations are now mediated via digital technologies in ways of which we are not always fully aware. The way in which urban space is generated, configured, monitored and managed, for example, is a product of digital technologies. CCTV (closed–circuit television) cameras that monitor people’s movements in public space, traffic light and public transport systems, planning and development programmes for new buildings and the ordering, production and payment systems for most goods, services and public utilities are all digitised. In an era in which mobile and wearable digital devices are becoming increasingly common, the digital recording of images and audio by people interacting in private and public spaces, in conjunction with security and commercial surveillance technologies that are now part of public spaces and everyday transactions, means that we are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not.

Digitised data related to our routine interactions with networked technologies, including search engine enquiries, phone calls, shopping, government agency and banking interactions, are collected automatically and archived, producing massive data sets that are now often referred to as ‘big data’. Big data also include ‘user-generated content’, or information that has been intentionally uploaded to social media platforms by users as part of their participation in these sites: their tweets, status updates, blog posts and comments, photographs and videos and so on. Social media platforms record and monitor an increasing number of features about these communicative acts: not only what is said, but the profiles of the speaker and the audience, how others reacted to the content: how many ‘likes’, comments, views, time spent on a page or ‘retweets’ were generated, the time of day interaction occurred, the geographical location of users, the search terms used to find the content, how content is shared across platforms and so on. There has been increasing attention paid to the value of the big data for both commercial and non-commercial enterprises. The existence of these data raises many questions about how they are being used and the implications for privacy, security and policing, surveillance, global development and the economy.

How we learn about the world is also digitally mediated. Consider the ways in which news about local and world events is now gathered and presented. Many people rely on journalists’ accounts of events for their knowledge about what is going on in the world. They are now able to access news reports in a multitude of ways, from the traditional (print newspapers, television and radio news programmes) to the new digital media forms: Twitter feeds, Storify accounts, online versions of newspapers, live news blogs that are constantly updated. Twitter is now often the most up-to-date in terms of reporting breaking news, and many journalists use tweets as a source of information when they are constructing their stories. Journalists are now also drawing on the expertise of computer scientists as part of using open-source digital data as a source of news and to present data visualisations (sometimes referred to as ‘data journalism’). Further, the ability of people other than trained journalists to report on or record news events has expanded significantly with the advent of digital technologies. ‘Citizen journalists’ can video or photograph images and tweet, blog or write on Facebook about news happenings, all of which are available for others to read and comment on, including professional journalists. Traditional news outlets, particularly those publishing paper versions of newspapers, have had to meet the challenges of new digital media and construct new ways of earning income from journalism.

Digital technologies have also been used increasingly for mass citizen surveillance purposes, often in ways about which citizens are unaware. This element of the digital world became highlighted in mid-2013, when an American contractor working for the US National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, leaked thousands of classified documents he had secretly obtained as part of his work to the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. These documents revealed the extent of the American and other anglophone (British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand) governments’ digital surveillance activities of their own citizens and those in other countries. The documents showed that these activities included accessing telephone records, text messages, emails and tracking mobile phone locations in the US, UK and Europe, as well as surveillance of citizens’ internet interactions and the phone call data of many political and business leaders. It was revealed that the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), were able to access users’ personal metadata from major American internet companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook as well as intercepting data from fibre-optic telephone and internet networks.

This book on digital sociology examines many aspects of digital society. Given the spread of digital technologies into most nooks and crannies of everyday life for people in developed countries (and increasingly in developing countries), it is impossible for one book to cover all the issues and topics that could be incorporated under a sociology of digital technologies. My more modest aim in this book is to introduce a range of interesting social, cultural and political dimensions of digital society and to discuss some of the important debates occurring in research and scholarship on these aspects. I contend that sociologists should not only be thinking about and studying how (other) people use digital technologies but also how they themselves are increasingly becoming ‘digitised academics’ and the implications for the practice and definition of the discipline of sociology.

Some sociologists have speculated that in a context in which many diverse actors and organisations can collect and analyse social data from digital sources, the claim of sociologists that they have superior knowledge of researching social life and access to social data is challenged. The internet empires of Google, Facebook and Amazon as well as many other companies and agencies have become expert at managing data collection, archiving and interpretation in ways about which sociologists and other social scientists working in higher education can only dream. Is there a ‘coming crisis’ of empirical sociology (Savage and Burrows 2007, 2009), and indeed has it now arrived? Must sociologists suffer from ‘data envy’ (Back 2012: 19) or what otherwise has been termed ‘Google envy’ (Rogers 2013: 206) in this age of the corporatisation of big data? How can they manage the vastness of the digital data that are now produced and the complexities of the technologies that generate them? Is there still a role for sociologists as social researchers in this era in which other research professionals can easily access and analyse large data sets? As I will demonstrate in this book, rather than constituting a crisis, the analysis of digital society offers new opportunities for sociologists to demonstrate their expertise in social analysis and take the discipline in new and exciting directions.

If it is accepted that ‘life is digital’ (as the advertisement quoted at the beginning of this chapter put it so succinctly), I would argue that sociology needs to make the study of digital technologies central to its very remit. All of the topics that sociologists now research and teach about are inevitably connected to digital technologies, whether they focus on the sociology of the family, science, health and medicine, knowledge, culture, the economy, employment, education, work, gender, risk, ageing or race and ethnicity.To study digital society is to focus on many aspects that have long been central preoccupations of sociologists: selfhood, identity, embodiment, power relations and social inequalities, social networks, social structures, social institutions and social theory.

This book develops ideas and discusses ideas in which I have been interested for about two decades now. In the mid-1990s I began thinking and writing about how people conceptualised and used the types of computers that were available in those days: personal computers, the large, heavy objects that sat on people’s desks, or the bulky laptops that they lugged around in the early version of ‘mobile’ computers. I first became intrigued by the sociocultural dimensions of computer technologies when I began to notice the ways in which computer viruses were discussed in popular culture in the early 1990s. Personal computers had been in use for some time by then, and people were beginning to recognise how much they had begun to depend on computer technologies and also what could go wrong when hackers developed ‘malware’ (or malicious software) in attempts to disrupt computer systems. My research interests at that time were in health, medicine, risk and embodiment (including writing about the metaphors of and social responses to HIV/AIDS). I was fascinated by what the metaphor of the computer virus revealed about our understandings of both computer technologies and human bodies (which have increasingly come to be portrayed as computerised systems in relation to the immune system and brain function) and the relationships between the two.

These interests first culminated in an article on what I described as ‘panic computing’ where I examined the viral metaphor in relation to computers and what this revealed about our feelings towards computers, including the common conceptualisations of computers as being like humans (Lupton 1994). I followed up with another piece reflecting on what I described as ‘the embodied computer/user’ (Lupton 1995). As this term suggests, the article centred on such features as the ways we thought of our personal computers as extensions of or prosthetics of our bodies/selves, blurring the conceptual boundaries between human body and self and the computers people use. An empirical project with Greg Noble then built on this initial work to investigate how personal computers were conceptualised and used in the academic workplace, including identifying the ways in which people anthropomorphised them, gave them personalities and invested them with emotions (Lupton and Noble 1997, 2002; Noble and Lupton 1998). Two other interview-based projects with Wendy Seymour addressed the topic of how people with disabilities used computer technologies, again focusing on such features as people’s emotional and embodied relationships with these technologies (Lupton and Seymour 2000, 2003; Seymour and Lupton 2004).

Some of these earlier interests are taken up and re-examined in this book in a context in which computers have moved off the desktop, significantly shrunk in size and connect to the internet in almost any location. Now, more than ever, we are intimately interembodied with our computing technologies. We are not only embodied computer/users; we are digitised humans. In the wake of the different ways in which people are now using digital technologies, I have become interested in investigating what the implications are for contemporary concepts of self, embodiment and social relations.

My more recent research has also involved the active use of many forms of digital tools as part of academic professional practice. Since 2012 I have been engaging in what might be called a participant observation study of the use of digital media in academia, trying various tools and platforms to see which are the most useful. I established my own blog, ‘This Sociological Life’, and began blogging not only about my research but also my observations about using social and other digital media for academic purposes. I joined Twitter and used platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Slideshare, Storify, Prismatic, Delicious, Scoop.it and Bundlr for professional academic purposes. The contacts and interactions I have made on Twitter and in following other academics’ blogs, in particular, have been vital in keeping up to date with others’ research and exchanging ideas about digital society. All of this research and the practical use of social and other digital media, from my earlier forays to my contemporary work, inform the content of this book.

Key Terms

When referring to digital technologies I mean both the software (the computer coding programs that provide instructions for how computers should operate) and the hardware (physical computer devices) that work together using digital coding (otherwise known as binary coding), as well as the infrastructures that support them. Contemporary digital technologies use computing platforms, the underlying environment in which software operates, including operating systems, browsers, applications (or apps) and the processing hardware that supports the software and manages data movement in the computer.

The digital is contrasted with analogue forms of recording and transmitting information that involve continuous streams of information, or with non-electronic formats of conveying information such as printed paper or artworks on canvas. Non-digital media technologies include landline telephones, radio, older forms of television, vinyl records, audio and visual tape cassettes, print newspapers, books and magazines, paintings, cameras using film and so on. While all of these ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ media and devices still exist, and some of them are still used regularly by large numbers of people, they can also be rendered into digital formats. Artefacts and artworks in museums and art galleries, for example, are now often photographed using digital cameras and these images are uploaded to the museum’s or gallery’s website for viewing by those who cannot view them in person

This leads to the concept of digital data. When referring to digital data I mean the encoded objects that are recorded and transmitted using digital media technologies. Digital information is conveyed by non-continuous sequences of symbols (often 0s and 1s). Digital data include not only numerical material (how many likes a Facebook page receives, how many followers one has on Twitter) but also audio and visual data such as films and photos and detailed text such as blog posts, status updates on social media, online news articles and comments on websites. As I emphasise in this book, digital data are not just automatically created objects of digital techno...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Digital Sociology
• 1 Introduction: life is digital
• 2 Theorising digital society
• 3 Reconceptualising research in the digital era
• 4 The digitised academic
• 5 A critical sociology of big data
• 6 The diversity of digital technology use
• 7 Digital politics and citizen digital public engagement
• 8 The digitised body/self
• 9 Conclusion
• Discussion questions
• Appendix: details of the ‘Academics’ Use of Social Media’ survey
• Web Resources
• Bibliography
• Index