Digital sociology

Digital sociology is a sub-discipline of sociology that focuses on understanding the use of digital media
as part of everyday life, and how these various technologies contribute to patterns of human behavior,
social relationships and concepts of the self.

The first scholarly article to have the term 'digital sociology' in the title appeared in 2009.[1] The author
reflected on the ways in which digital technologies may influence both sociological research and
teaching. In 2010, 'digital sociology' was described, by Richard Neal (https://about.me/rrneal), in terms of
bridging the growing academic focus with the increasing interest from global business.[2] It was not until
2013 that the first purely academic book tackling the subject of 'digital sociology' was published.[3] The
first sole-authored book entitled Digital Sociology was published in 2015[4] and the first academic
conference on "Digital Sociology" was held in New York, NY in the same year.[5]

Although the term ‘digital sociology’ has not yet fully entered the cultural lexicon, sociologists have
engaged in research related to the internet since its inception. These sociologists have addressed many
social issues relating to online communities, cyberspace and cyber-identities. This and similar research
has attracted many different names such as 'cybersociology', 'the sociology of the internet', 'the sociology
of online communities', 'the sociology of social media', 'the sociology of cyberculture' or something else
again.

Digital sociology differs from these terms in that it is wider in its scope, addressing not only the internet
or cyberculture but also the impact of the other digital media and devices that have emerged since the
first decade of the twenty-first century. Since the internet has become more pervasive and linked with
everyday life, references to the 'cyber' in the social sciences seems now to have been replaced by the
'digital'. 'Digital sociology' is related to other sub-disciplines such as digital humanities and digital
anthropology. It is beginning to supersede and incorporate the other titles above, as well as including the
newest Web 2.0 digital technologies into its purview, such as wearable technology, augmented reality,
smart objects, the Internet of Things and big data.

Contents
Subfields of digital sociology
Professional digital practice
Sociological analyses of digital media use
Digital data analysis
Critical digital sociology
Public digital sociology
Digital transformation of sociological theory
See also
References
External links

Subfields of digital sociology

Four aspects of digital sociology have been identified by Lupton (2012):[6]

1. Professional digital practice: using digital media tools for professional purposes: to build
networks, construct an e-profile, publicise and share research and instruct students.
2. Sociological analyses of digital use: researching the ways in which people's use of digital
media configures their sense of selves, their embodiment and their social relations.
3. Digital data analysis: using digital data for social research, either quantitative or
qualitative.
4. Critical digital sociology: undertaking reflexive and critical analysis of digital media
informed by social and cultural theory.

Professional digital practice

Although they have been reluctant to use social and other digital media for professional academics
purposes, sociologists are slowly beginning to adopt them for teaching and research.[7] An increasing
number of sociological blogs are beginning to appear and more sociologists are joining Twitter, for
example. Some are writing about the best ways for sociologists to employ social media as part of
academic practice (see the LSE Impact of the Social Sciences website (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci
alsciences/)) and the importance of self-archiving and making sociological research open access,[8] as
well as writing for Wikipedia.[9]

Sociological analyses of digital media use

Digital sociologists have begun to write about the use of wearable technologies as part of quantifying the
body[10] and the social dimensions of big data and the algorithms that are used to interpret these data.[11]
Others have directed attention at the role of digital technologies as part of the surveillance of people's
activities, via such technologies as CCTV cameras and customer loyalty schemes[12] as well as the mass
surveillance of the internet that is being conducted by secret services such as the NSA.

The 'digital divide', or the differences in access to digital technologies experienced by certain social
groups such as the socioeconomically disadvantaged, those of lower education levels, women and the
elderly, has preoccupied many researchers in the social scientific study of digital media. However several
sociologists have pointed out that while it is important to acknowledge and identify the structural
inequalities inherent in differentials in digital technology use, this concept is rather simplistic and fails to
incorporate the complexities of access to and knowledge about digital technologies.[13]

There is a growing interest in the ways in which social media contribute to the development of intimate
relationships and concepts of the self. One of the best-known sociologists who has written about social
relationships, selfhood and digital technologies is Sherry Turkle.[14][15] In her most recent book Turkle
addresses the topic of social media.[16] She argues that relationships conducted via these platforms are
not as authentic as those encounters that take place "in real life".

Visual media allows the viewer to be a more passive consumer of information.[17] Viewers are more
likely to develop online personas that differ from their personas in the real world. This contrast between
the digital world (or 'cyberspace') and the 'real world', however, has been critiqued as 'digital dualism', a
concept similar to the 'aura of the digital'.[18] Other sociologists have argued that relationships conducted
through digital media are inextricably part of the 'real world'.[19] Augmented reality is an interactive
experience where reality is being altered in some way by the use of digital media but not replaced.
The use of social media for social activism have also provided a focus for digital sociology. For example,
numerous sociological articles,[20][21] and at least one book[22] have appeared on the use of such social
media platforms as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as a means of conveying messages about activist
causes and organizing political movements.

Research has also been done on how racial minorities and the use of technology by racial minorities and
other groups. These "digital practice" studies explore the ways in which the practices that groups adopt
when using new technologies mitigate or reproduce social inequalities.[23][24]

Digital data analysis

Digital sociologists use varied approaches to investigating people's use of digital media, both qualitative
and quantitative. These include ethnographic research, interviews and surveys with users of technologies,
and also the analysis of the data produced from people's interactions with technologies: for example, their
posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr and Twitter or their consuming
habits on online shopping platforms. Such techniques as data scraping, social network analysis, time
series analysis and textual analysis are employed to analyse both the data produced as a byproduct of
users' interactions with digital media and those that they create themselves. For Contents Analysis, in
2008, Yukihiko Yoshida did a study called[25] "Leni Riefenstahl and German expressionism: research in
Visual Cultural Studies using the trans-disciplinary semantic spaces of specialized dictionaries." The
study took databases of images tagged with connotative and denotative keywords (a search engine) and
found Riefenstahl’s imagery had the same qualities as imagery tagged "degenerate" in the title of the
exhibition, "Degenerate Art" in Germany at 1937.

The emergence of social media has provided sociologists with a new way of studying social
phenomenon. Social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, are increasingly being mined for
research. For example, Twitter data is easily available to researchers through the Twitter API. Twitter
provides researchers with demographic data, time and location data, and connections between users.
From these data, researchers gain insight into user moods and how they communicate with one another.
Furthermore, social networks can be graphed and visualized.[26]

Using large data sets, like those obtained from Twitter, can be challenging. First of all, researchers have
to figure out how to store this data effectively in a database. Several tools commonly used in Big Data
analytics are at their disposal.[26] Since large data sets can be unwieldy and contain numerous types of
data (i.e. photos, videos, GIF images), researchers have the option of storing their data in non-relational
databases, such as MongoDB and Hadoop.[26] Processing and querying this data is an additional
challenge. However, there are several options available to researchers. One common option is to use a
querying language, such as Hive, in conjunction with Hadoop to analyze large data sets.[26]

The internet and social media have allowed sociologists to study how controversial topics are discussed
over time—otherwise known as Issue Mapping.[27] Sociologists can search social networking sites (i.e.
Facebook or Twitter) for posts related to a hotly-debated topic, then parse through and analyze the
text.[27] Sociologists can then use a number of easily accessible tools to visualize this data, such as
MentionMapp or Twitter Streamgraph. MentionMapp shows how popular a hashtag is and Twitter
Streamgraph depicts how often certain words are paired together and how their relationship changes over
time.[27]

Critical digital sociology

This aspect of digital sociology is perhaps what makes it distinctive from other approaches to studying
the digital world. In adopting a critical reflexive approach, sociologists are able to address the
implications of the digital for sociological practice itself. It has been argued that digital sociology offers a
way of addressing the changing relations between social relations and the analysis of these relations,
putting into question what social research is, and indeed, what sociology is now as social relations and
society have become in many respects mediated via digital technologies.[28]

How should sociology respond to the emergent forms of both 'small data' and 'big data' that are collected
in vast amounts as part of people's interactions with digital technologies and the development of data
industries using these data to conduct their own social research? Does this suggest that a "coming crisis
in empirical sociology" might be on the horizon?[29] How are the identities and work practices of
sociologists themselves becoming implicated within and disciplined by digital technologies such as
citation metrics?[30]

These questions are central to critical digital sociology, which reflects upon the role of sociology itself in
the analysis of digital technologies as well as the impact of digital technologies upon sociology.[31]

To these four aspects add the following subfields of digital sociology:

Public digital sociology

Public sociology using digital media is a form of public sociology that involves publishing sociological
materials in online accessible spaces and subsequent interaction with publics in these spaces. This has
been referred to as "e-public sociology".[32]

Social media has changed the ways the public sociology was perceived and given rise to digital evolution
in this field. The vast open platform of communication has provided opportunities for sociologists to
come out from the notion of small group sociology or publics to a vast audience.

Blogging was the initial social media platform being utilized by sociologists. Sociologists like Eszter
Hargittai, Chris Bertram, and Kieran Healy were few amongst those who started using blogging for
sociology. New discussion groups about sociology and related philosophy were the consequences of
social media impact. The vast number of comments and discussions thus became a part of understanding
sociology. One of such famous groups was Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/). Getting feedback
on such social sites is faster and impactful. Disintermediation, visibility, and measurement are the major
effects of e-public sociology. Other social media tools like Twitter and Facebook also became the tools
for a sociologist. "Public Sociology in the Age of Social Media" (https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/soc-
social-media.pdf).[33]

Digital transformation of sociological theory

Information and communication technology as well as the proliferation of digital data are revolutionising
sociological research. Whereas there is already much methodological innovation in digital humanities
and computational social sciences, theory development in the social sciences and humanities still consists
mainly of print theories of computer cultures or societies. These analogue theories of the digital
transformation, however, fail to account for how profoundly the digital transformation of the social
sciences and humanities is changing the epistemic core of these fields. Digital methods constitute more
than providers of ever-bigger digital datasets for testing of analogue theories, but also require new forms
of digital theorising.[34] The ambition of research programmes on the digital transformation of social
theory is therefore to translate analogue into digital social theories so as to complement traditional
analogue social theories of the digital transformation by digital theories of digital societies.[35]

See also
Digital anthropology
Digital humanities
Digital Revolution
Social web
Sociology of the Internet
Software studies
Tribe (internet)
Computational social science

References
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External links
Digital Sociology (http://www.digitalsociology.com)
Culture Digitally blog (http://culturedigitally.org)
Cyborgology blog (http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology)
Digital Sociology storify (https://web.archive.org/web/20140309223405/http://storify.com/DA
Lupton/digital-sociology-2)

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