Re-conceptualizing social research in the “digital era”. Issues of scholarships, methods, and epistemologies

Chiara Carrozza

doi:10.31447/as00032573.2018228.05

Abstract

The article discusses an emerging area of sociology that has come to be called “Digital Sociology” starting from the experience of a research project that provided a group of social scientists with the opportunity to experiment with a wide range of digital technologies, devices, and platforms for academic work. A literature review of recent contributions is put into a dialog with the empirical materials collected during the project, leading to the identification of a tentative research agenda to contribute to the development of this area of inquiry.

Highlights

Almost all that social scientists have been traditionally interested in – identity and embodiment, power and inequalities, social structures and institutions, collective action – are today inevitabily and inextricably connected to the “digital”, a term commonly used to address the “expanding array of material that has been rendered into digital formats and the technologies, devices and media that use these formats” (Lupton, 2014, p. 12)
In this article we presented two clusters of arguments widely discussed in the emerging area of “digital sociology”
The first cluster of arguments claims that a democratizing potential is inherent to “technologies born of peer-topeer networking and wiki ways of working” (Weller, 2011, p. 50) and suggests that it could benefit both the academy and society

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Noortje Marres has argued that what defines digital sociology is not primarily its methods and techniques and the opportunities for researching society opened up by digital data, but the changing relationships between social life – as an object of research – and social analysis She defines digital sociology as “a digitally aware form of social inquiry, one which does not seek to bracket the influence of digital technology in the doing of social life and social research” (Carrigan, 2014a). Orton-Johnson, Prior, and Gregory (2015) suggest that we should think of digital sociology as “an opportunity to step outside ‘normal science’ for a moment, to address the big concerns of the discipline” and as “a reflexive moment in sociological thinking — a moment that asks us to interrogate taken-for-granted presumptions of who or what constitutes the ‘social’” This reflexive exercise about social research in the digital era calls into question issues of scholarship, methodology, and epistemology. The concluding section summarizes the main points emerging from the central sections, highlighting possible future lines of research

AND METHODOLOGY

CONCLUSION