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.