The “digitalization” of sociology: new opportunities and key contradictions

Abstract

The article analyzes the impact of digitalization on sociology and the professional trajectories of a sociologist. The main stages of the “digitalization” of sociology are highlighted, within which not only the amount of data used changes, but also the methods of their processing and analysis. Speaking about the transformation of modern sociology, the author describes several projects of its “digitization”, defining the key features of each. The “digitalization” of sociology is considered as an ambivalent process, which, on the one hand, opens up a whole range of opportunities for the researcher, on the other, actualizes a number of serious problems. The development of computing technologies leads to the expansion of opportunities for rethinking and verification of individual classical theories, the widespread introduction of non-reactive methods of sociological research, to increase their evidence and reproducibility. At the same time, the problems of digitalization are: an increase in the “black box” effect, bias and opacity of artificial intelligence algorithms, a decrease in the interpretability of the results obtained by a sociologist working in the “big data” paradigm. This leads to the need to rethink the model of Russian sociological education, the development of educational technologies that integrate classical sociological thinking and new digital technologies.