Conceptualizing Digital Sociology as Critical, Interdisciplinary Practice

Dr. Karen GregoryDigital Day of Ideas | May 18th 2016

University of Edinburgh @claudiakincaid

#DigScholEd

Source: http://akraya.com/managed-projects/big-data/

• Why Digital Sociology?

• Examples of current work: • Enchanted Entrepreneurs: Karen Gregory• The Quantified Self: Deborah Lupton• Facebook as Value: Beverley Skeggs & Simon Yuill

• Connecting our work: How do we participate in building this emerging digital, social world?

“…privacy, the private self, human and civil rights,

governance and citizenship, finance, health and

medicine… and even, of course, education…”

Tracing Digital Sociology

“…long history of research done in Internet

studies, information and communication studies,

media and cultural studies, the sociology of

science and technology, and surveillance

studies…”

“The very algorithms that makes Facebook what it is, for example, do not simply arrive in our lives.

They themselves are the result of human labor, decision-making processes, flows of capital, and even the extraction of rare minerals necessary for their very computing power.”

“Like Mills, we remain interested in understanding

the rather complicated nature of human agency in

an increasingly technocratic society.”

how digitization affects or alters “the relations

between researchers and researched, and those

between the objects, methods, [and] techniques of

social research, broadly conceived.” – Noortje

Marres

“What is Digital Sociology?” 2013

http://www.csisponline.net/2013/01/21/what-is-digital-sociology/

… such methods do not just describe society but

“help to create it anew.” – Evelyn Ruppert

Digital SociologyPodcast, 2013: https

://markcarrigan.net/2013/09/10/evelyn-ruppert-on-digital-sociology/

• Gregory, Karen. (2014) Enchanted Entrepreneurs: The Labor of Esoteric Practitioners in New York City. Dissertation. City University of New York.

• Lupton, Deborah. (2016) The Quantified Self. Polity Press: Boston, MA.

• Skeggs, Beverley & Yuill, Simon (2015) “The methodology of a multi-model project examining how Facebook infrastructures social relations.” Information, Communication, and Society. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1091026

Values and Value

https://values.doc.gold.ac.uk/

“… Increasingly, we are now seeing digital

technologies and data-aggregating apparatuses

developing in the service of a positivism that

desires not only to represent social life, but to

predict its very outcomes…”