Digital Sociology

Abstract

Digital sociology refers to the branch of sociology that examines the impact of the Internet and, more particularly, social media outlets in the perception and even formation of the relationships that have long been studied within the field: friendship, love, family, marriage, community, and also the perception and definition of the self. Given the immense impact of social media on virtually every aspect of social relations, digital sociology acknowledges that the constructs of intimacy, relationships, sexuality, community, self, and gender have been affected by the massive influence of the Internet.

Overview

Sociology has long been interested in the relationship between the self and the social construct that the self inhabits. How does an individual's perception of self—a well as that of marriage, family, sexuality, professional success, even death—respond to and involve a broader social network? If a person is born in, say, Philadelphia, would that individual be the same had he or she been born in, say, Papua, New Guinea? Sociology was a discipline grounded in real time, real space. Although other academic curricula were quick to acknowledge and embrace the opportunities offered by the Internet and the impact of digital media to heighten long-established protocols and to radically alter methodologies and the presentation of their academic materials, sociologists sought to scrutinize that impact.

Can the Internet create a community or society? Perhaps because sociology had long been concerned with defining the dynamics of social constructs, viable in a certain time and at a certain place, and the influence such constructs had on the integrity and viability of the self, sociologists perceived in the created spaces of the Internet an eccentric exception: Is the reach of the Internet to be considered a valid kind of community? Are exaggerated re-creations of the self through the agencies of Facebook a valid measure of the real self? What does a stream of Twitter messages from an individual reveal about that individual? Is an individual tweeting to a non-specific broad audience alone or connected? Because sociologists had for more than two centuries explored the dimensions and impact of social constructs on the individual, the Internet posed a significant, even systemic dilemma. Is the space defined virtually commiserating to real-time geographic and temporal space? Can the Internet create a culture?

Accepting the Internet as a professional resource posed additional dilemmas to traditional old-school sociologists. After all, the Internet had become by the early twenty-first century a virtually unlimited resource bank of data that might help define, redefine, and re-characterize the elements of any given social construct. The emerging concept of big data—that is, the unimaginably large data sets generated virtually daily by Internet activity, there to be analyzed for patterns, for trends, for some sustaining and defining logic about human behavior and human interaction—posed a most tempting challenge for sociologists (see Duggan et al., 2014). For the first time in human history, the accumulation of data about humans within their social organizational patterns exceeded the ability of processing it. Beginning in the middle 1990s, at the threshold of what would become the digital age, the data measured and filed by an ever increasing global platform of information doubled every two years. That was an unprecedented volume of data. What might sociologists do with such reservoirs of information? Are they valid materials akin to the decades-long painstaking gathering of data performed under the scrutiny of professionals in the field? Can such an apparently careless grab-bag of unexamined responses be considered as viable data for sociological inquiry? Traditional, conventional sociologists had long prided themselves on developing specific protocols to ensure that whatever data might be gathered had significant and probative value. What now to do with this tsunami of unfocused, unfiltered, and unsponsored data? Bluntly, "the relations between social life and its analysis are changing in the context of digitization and digital sociology offers a way of engaging with this" (Marres, 2013).

Embrace it, according to the argument of a new wave of sociologists, the digital sociologists. These pioneers argued passionately that the Internet had significantly redefined traditional notions of the self, the community, gender, even space itself. And that, as sociology had done with other major social upheavals triggered by the introduction of new technology (such as the printing press, locomotives, the telephone, the airplane, and television), the time had come for the discipline to recognize a field devoted to studying the patterns and habits of human behavior within specific technological and social constructs. The principal difference between the digital environments and those of other technological innovations was speed: Compared to the pace of other major cultural and sociological ages, such as the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, the computer age developed with remarkable rapidity, barely thirty years, new technologies redefining the reach of the digital world exponentially. Obsolescence of computer software and applications, as well as the gadgets that sustain and maintain them, could now be measured in a span of months. As social media, the Internet, and the global links of instantaneous communication accelerated their influence on everyday lives, a new generation of sociologists posited the dramatic notion that their field needed to redefine some of its foundations to accommodate the new era of information, networking, and access (Davies, 2014).

Applications

With the embrace of digital technologies in the field of sociology came concerns that resisting the obvious influence of such technologies on everyday life would lead to a revisiting of a striking and apparently irresolvable dichotomy within the academic community between the humanities and the sciences, a binary approach to education that was sustained with some acrimony a generation before. In the advent of the digital era, the hard sciences appeared once again to split off from the humanities. Could machines with their elaborate algorithms define human communities? Could a community be sustained among people who never actually met, never actually bonded in real time and within real space? Sociology, although obviously reliant on hard data, was centrally a humanities discipline, investigating as it did real peoples involved in real communities and acting and reacting with one another in ways that defined real patterns. With the introduction of cyber-communities, the disciplines were poised again inevitability to collapse into an all new civil war.

Beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century, digital sociology offered a strategy to negotiate such inevitability. The term itself was not used within academic discourse until 2009—sociologists raised entirely within the argument of digital realities were far more attuned to the implications of the digital environment. By 2009, the larger public had gone a long way toward embracing social media as a way to engage others and to forge a community that was at once real and not real. By 2009, the message pipelines provided by and facilitated by the Internet—Twitter, blogging, emails, iPhones, LinkedIn, tablets, personal and professional websites, Facebook, Pinterest, as well as the constant stream of information via Internet sources, to name only a handful of the available social media platforms operating by 2009—had become standard communication vehicles for people with Internet access, a rapidly increasing demographic.

At the beginning of a new century, the industrialized world was converting into a mediated environment; that is, a global, culturally diverse community linked by digital communication technologies, rather than the traditional face-to-face sharing, into community that had long defined societies in real time and in real place. For the new age sociologists, who had termed their emerging field digital sociology, the key was far from ignoring the impress of social media and the data reservoir of the Internet rather to embrace such resources and such realities. Space, community, identity, family, gender, intimacy, relationships—all had undergone radical redefinition. The vocabulary of traditional sociology needed to be reconfigured. Indeed, observers know that digital natives use the resources and the reach of the Internet to pursue not narrow and individual initiatives (such as Facebook or blogs or Instagram) but perceive that the Internet can be used to forge an international community of the likeminded to direct and even encourage activism, promote social agendas and political causes, to use the Internet and social media to actually create a community.

No academic has so engaged the challenge and possibilities of digital sociology as Deborah Lupton, of Australia's University of Queensland. In her pioneering work which has gone a long way in codifying the new discipline, she wrote in 2012, "Digital sociology can offer a means by which the impact, development and use of these [digital] technologies and their impact upon and incorporation into social worlds and concepts of selfhood may be investigated, analysed and understood." ("What Is Digital Sociology?").

These were potentially template-changing issues for the science of sociology, in a field where the digital capabilities were redefining themselves with unprecedented rapidity. New software applications, new gadgets, new access portals appeared with such frequency that any stable approach would undergo complete reinvigoration. Using websites and professional conferences, sociologists began to investigate how to use social media within their discipline. Quickly, proponents cited four areas in which traditional sociology and the digital era might overlap. First, sociologists needed to study how users of social media define and in some cases entirely create their sense of self (dubbed cyber-self) and their sense of identity as part of a larger, albeit digital, community. Second, professional observers needed to define precisely the import and reliability of the massive amounts of data retrievable from Internet resources. Third, sociologists as professionals needed to exploit the pipeline of the Internet to create an international body of like-minded researchers with shared areas of inquiry, a network of cooperative sociologists taking advantage of the communication opportunities of the Internet. And fourth, sociologists, whatever their personal predisposition or biases toward the emerging technology, needed to recognize that an entirely new era of their science had opened and that, as a collective, sociologists needed to codify precisely how to approach the impact of social media on traditional notions of community and self, not only to gather the data but to respond critically to the instruments of social media.

Within a scant decade, social media had entirely recreated the traditional conceptions of relationships, although that revolution certainly had not included everyone. If the traditional assumption behind sociology was that participation in communities as the shaping influence on a range of constructs from self to family, the new age of digital technologies posed a particularly stubborn barrier. Some people had the technology; some did not. If formerly sociologists could assume wide inclusive participation in a social construct given space and time (if a person lived in, say, Melbourne, Australia, in the early twentieth century, then participation in that social construct could be assumed), digital sociologists could not. Having computers and digital technology did not presume computer literacy. Among the earliest terms introduced into the field of digital sociology was the concept of the digital divide.

The digital divide is a concept that describes the unequal access to technology that exists as a result of the stratification of society into different economic classes. Many people are unable to afford their own computers, tablets, smartphones, and similar gadgetry, and even when some of these devices are available (most libraries have computers for public use, for example), not everyone has the time or the educational background to be able to make use of them. This means that a large segment of society is without the equipment, skills, and confidence to access the variety of digital media. Furthermore, according to Jan A. G. M. van Dijk, an early advocate of the field of digital sociology, access to digital resources is not the same as connectivity, and connectivity is not the same as competence, and competence is not the same as skill.

A line divides users from non-users. That line, as it turned out, cut across a number of traditional sociological barriers—those without digital access included the economically disadvantaged who could not afford the gadgets crucial to full Internet access; those who lacked the education, the training, and the competency to fully realize the opportunities of the Internet; Luddites who simply refused to embrace the implications and opportunities of the Internet; and most broadly those not digital natives, those born before 1980s, those who came at technology with a deeply ingrained bias and/or anxiety. Sociologists needed to create new dynamics to measure both those within and without the digital environments.

Professionally, sociologists needed to confront the vast reservoirs of information cataloged daily, even hourly, by the Internet. If sociologists had long prided themselves on the meticulous and careful gathering of data from which to extrapolate guiding theories about behavior, this new resource posed considerable challenges. How much of the data were even reliable? Do people within the comfortable anonymity of social media deal with accurate information, honest responses, and reliable observations? How much of a person's Internet identity is a construct? Rather than dismissing the sum total of Internet data as unreliable as they were gathered without professional supervision, digital sociologists determined that the field was at the threshold of a new discipline protocol that would deal with rather than ignore these questions.

Viewpoints

Of course, a big part of the challenge to those in the field of digital sociology is the field's newness. For advocates, introducing social media and digital cultures into sociology represents a way to "enliven" standard sociological research (Daniels, 2014). It is at the stage—as exhilarating as it is frustrating—in which its advocates can formulate critical and intriguing questions but must wait for the hard data to be gathered to make the necessary conclusions. As Jonathan R. Wynn, professor of Digital Sociology at Smith College, has outlined (2009), the challenges in the field are continually expanding with the growth of digital communications itself. Inevitably, digital sociology will evolve as an interdisciplinary field, drawing together fields as far ranging as computer software engineering and communication. The field is as ambitious as it is complex, and digital sociologists have only begun to contend with the tonnage of data available from social media sources, have only begun to formulate a code of ethics regarding the use of social media data and the sticky issue of privacy, have only begun to pattern out the contradictions and complexities of behavior that first responds to the opportunity of social media and then without deliberate plan or supervision come together to form an entirely new social construct, a digital nation, one that crosses not only geographical boundaries but political, social, religious, cultural, and economic boundaries as well.

Terms & Concepts

Big data: A very large, complex set of contradictory data points gathered by a variety of digital platforms and available for analysis as a way to reveal patterns or to suggest trends.

Cybercommunity: A quasi-nation culture that defies traditional national, political, military, or geographical boundaries, a culture shaped and sustained entirely by the links available through the Internet.

Cyberself: The reconstruction, even recreation of the self and the repurposing of identity through the use of social media outlets.

Digital divide: A concept that describes the unequal access to technology that exists as a result of the stratification of society into different economic classes. Many people are unable to afford their own computers, tablets, smartphones, and similar gadgetry, and even when some of these devices are available (most libraries have computers for public use, for example), not everyone has the time or the educational background to be able to make use of them.

Mediated environment: The reconstruction of cultures and societies through the infiltration of visual media, digital technologies, and the Internet.

Bibliography

Davies, H. C. (2014, February 25). Introducing digital sociology. Retrieved April 1, 2015 from http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2014/02/25/introducing-digital-sociology/

Duggan, M., et al. (2015, January 9). Social media update. Retrieved April 1, 2015 from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/

Knoblach, H. (2014, November 20). Pioneering digital sociology: Contexts. Retrieved April 1, 2015 from http://contexts.org/articles/pioneering-digital-sociology/

Lupton, D. (2012, July 8). What is digital sociology? Retrieved April 1, 2015 from https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/digital-sociology-part-1-what-is-it/

Marres, N. (2013, January 21). What is digital sociology? Retrieved April 1, 2015 from http://www.csisponline.net/2013/01/21/what-is-digital-sociology/

Marres, N., & Gerlitz, C. (2016). Interface methods: renegotiating relations between digital social research, STS and sociology. Sociological Review, 64(1), 21–46. Retrieved December 8, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=113308361&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Wynn, J. (2009). Digital sociology: Emergent technologies in the field and the classroom. Sociological Forum, 24(9), 448–456. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database SoclNDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebsco-host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=37605432&site=ehost-live

Van Dijk, J. A. G. M. (2013). Inequalities in the network society. In K. Orton-Johnson & N. Prior (Eds.). Digital sociology: Critical perspectives: 105–124. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Suggested Reading

Fuchs, C. (2013). Social media: A critical introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kirkpatrick, G. (2008). Technology and social power. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Lupton, D. (2015). Digital sociology. New York, NY: Routledge.

Orton-Johnson, K, & Prior, N. (Eds.). (2013). Digital sociology: Critical perspectives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Parmeggiani, P. (2009). Going digital: Using new technologies in visual sociology. Visual Studies, 24(1), 71–81. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database SoclNDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=37184987&site=ehost-live

Pioneering digital sociology. (2014). Contexts: Understanding People in Their Social Worlds, 13(4), 6–8. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database SoclNDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=99587919&site=ehost-live

Sanjek, R., & Tratner, S. W. (2016). eFieldnotes: The makings of anthropology in the digital world. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

van Heur, B. (2010). From analogue to digital and back again: Institutional dynamics of heritage innovation. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(6), 405–416. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=54379971&site=ehost-live