What use is the concept of the digital? Embracing the retro

Abstract

Responding to this journal's inaugural editorial statement, this forum piece reflects on the ongoing usefulness of the concept of the digital itself. The digital as a term could be regarded to encapsulate too much of social life to be effective as an analytical point of reference. Beginning with the unstated evocations of the term, the article turns back to earlier work on digital sociology in an attempt to put this concept into context and to think about its value. It argues for embracing the digital's retro properties by reflecting on how it might be used to understand the relations between past, present and future. The article concludes by thinking about how potential issues with the term digital can be turned to the advantage of the researcher and also how a renewed agenda for research on digital society might yet be devised, especially in the pages of this new journal.