Why should sociologists study digital media?

Why should sociologists be interested in the new digital media technologies? This is a question I have been thinking and writing about recently in developing my next book project on digital sociology (to be published by Routledge next year). Here are some of the reasons that have emerged in the literature:

• Social life is increasingly being configured through and with digital media.
• What counts as ‘the social’ is increasingly framed via digital media.
• Digital media use and practice is structured through gender, social class, geographical location, education, race/ethnicity and age, all social categories with which sociologists have traditionally been interested.
• Digital media are integral parts of contemporary social networks and social institutions such as the family, the workplace, the education system, the healthcare system, the mass media and the economy, again phenomena that have long been foci for sociological research and theorising.
• Digital media configure concepts of selfhood, social relationships, embodiment, human/nonhuman relations, space and time – all relevant to sociological inquiry.
• Digital media have instituted new forms of power relations.
• Digital media have become central to issues of measure and value.
• Digital media offer alternative ways of practising sociology: of researching, teaching and disseminating research.
• Digital media are important both to ‘public sociology’ (engaging with people outside of academia) and ‘private sociology’ (personal identities and practices as sociologists) (see here for my previous post on this).
• Digital media challenge sociologists’ role as pre-eminent social researchers: sociologists need to address this.
• Digital media technologies can contribute to ‘live sociology’ and ‘inventive methods’, or new, creative ways of practising sociology.

As this list implies, digital sociology goes well beyond simply a focus on ‘the digital’. It raises major questions about what should be the focus and methods of contemporary sociological research and theorising. As such, sociologists writing about digital media are important contributors to debates about the future of sociology and how the discipline can remain vibrant, creative and responsive to new developments and social change.

Digital sociology, public sociology, private sociology

Today the British Sociological Association’s Digital Sociology study group is holding its first event in London. Sadly I won’t be able to attend, living as I do on the other side of the world. However I will be following proceedings with interest, via Twitter and any blog posts that may result from the event.

The meeting will discuss the topic of ‘What is digital sociology?’ I have recently contributed to this debate in various forums: on this blog, in a collection of writings based on the blog that I put together and self-archived, in a preprint of a book chapter (available here) and in a Wikipedia entry that I wrote on digital sociology. I am developing these nascent ideas further in an introductory book on digital sociology that will be published by Routledge.

One aspect of digital sociology about which I am currently writing is the challenges for sociologists of the new digital technologies. In the chapter referred to above I have started to discuss these issues, and will do so in expanded form in the new book.

Several interesting articles have been published in recent years by sociologists about the implications for sociology itself of the affordances of digital media. Digital media technologies and data are social artefacts and thus are obvious sources of research for sociologists. Not only that, they allow sociologists to engage in public sociology – communicating their ideas to public audiences outside the academy — more easily than ever before, through the use of open-access forums and social media.

But digital media also contribute to what I am calling for the moment ‘private sociology’, or the professional personae and lived working lives of the academics themselves who use them. As sociologists such as Roger Burrows, Mike Savage and Dave Beer have pointed out, such platforms as digital citation indices has resulted in sociologists’ (and other academics’) professional worth and accomplishments becoming ever more metricised and scrutinised. Those academics who fail to engage in public sociology via digital media may find themselves disadvantaged in their private sociology lives. Yet many academics feel confronted by what they perceive as the technical challenges of learning to use digital media for academic purposes or the time commitments involved to blog or tweet or follow others’ blogs or tweets (an issue that constantly is raised whenever I present workshops on social media for academics).

Those sociologists who do take up the gauntlet and actively use social and other digital media may find themselves confronted with ‘the politics of circulation’ (Beer’s phrase), or the re-use and transformation of their intellectual property via social media in ways to which they are not accustomed. Here again there may be implications for their ‘private sociology’ lives: how sociologists perceive their work and what they think about its use by others in non-academic forums.

Sociologists’ and other academics’ working lives are also being challenged by the introduction of massive online open access courses (MOOCs) and by the open access movement, provoking universities and scholars to rethink teaching, learning and publication traditions.

More broadly there is a much bigger question of how sociology as a discipline might be transformed by digital technologies and data. Burrows and Savage have contended that in the face of the digital data industry that has developed to harvest and analyse these data, sociologists may find themselves sidelined as pre-eminent empirical social researchers. Another issue is to what extent sociologists are able to make use of digital data and analyse the ever-changing platforms and devices of Web 2.0 and the emergent Web 3.0? Susan Halford and Mike Savage have pointed out sociologists may need to become more technically proficient or alternatively collaborate with computer scientists to fully understand new digital media.

There is much here to discuss, and I look forward to the proceedings of the BSA Digital Sociology group meeting. 

My two new books on unborn humans

Last month both my new books on the topic of the unborn (human embryos and foetuses) were published. One is an authored book, part of the Palgrave Pivot series, entitled The Social Worlds of the Unborn. The other, The Unborn Human, is an open access book that I edited as part of the Living Books about Life series published by the Open Humanities Press.

Both books deal with very similar issues and theoretical perspectives, and therefore complement each other nicely. The Social Worlds of the Unborn has five substantive chapters. The first chapter examines what I call ‘contingencies of the unborn’, drawing on sociological, anthropological, bioethical, philosophical and historical perspectives to highlight the dynamic nature of the ways we think about foetuses and embryos and the debates over the extent of their humanness and personhood. I then go on in the next chapter to discuss technologies for visualising the unborn, such as foetal photography and computer imaging and obstetric ultrasound. These have been particularly important technologies in opening up the uterus to the gaze so that we can see the previously mysterious entities that inhabit this space. I argue that visualising technologies have worked to represent unborn entities as already persons in their own right, autonomous from the maternal body, and indeed as already infants. These images also represent the unborn as beautiful, fragile and vulnerable entities requiring our utmost love and protection, and thus are powerful agents in anti-abortion politics.

In the third chapter of this book I focus on pregnant women’s perspectives on the unborn entities growing within their own bodies. I highlight the ambivalence that pregnant women often feel about this Other body inhabiting their own, as well as their difficulty in coming to terms with their ‘two-in-one’ bodies that depart so radically from the contained, unitary bodily norm. The concept of the ‘good mother’ often precludes acknowledgement that pregnant women may sometimes feel as if their unborn is antagonistic and even parasitic. Yet these feelings are not uncommon in pregnant women, in addition to the more culturally accepted notions of the unborn as precious proto-infants.

The next chapter goes on to examine the dead unborn, including discussion of abortion practices, policies and politics, decisions about the disposal of surplus IVF embryos and the mourning and memorialisation of unborn entities lost in miscarriage or stillbirth. It also looks at bioscientific definitions of the unborn and how working practices in the medical clinic or stem cell laboratory operate to deal with using matter from dead unborn entities. Here again issues concerning judgements about the humanness and status of personhood of various unborn entities are to the fore. I demonstrated that the context in which these entities are created and grow (or fail to develop) is vital to concepts of their value and vitality.

The final substantive chapter examines the concept of the endangered unborn, particularly in relation to how pregnant women are represented as posing a threat to their unborn through ignorance or deliberate negligence. I argue that the increasing humanisation and personalising of the unborn and their representation as precious, vulnerable and as already infants with full human privileges work to position them as more important than the women who bear them, who increasingly as positioned as vessels rather than as individuals with their own rights and needs that may differ from those of their unborn.

The edited book, The Unborn Human, takes up many of these issues. I review the contents of the book in my Introduction (‘Conceptualising and configuring the unborn human‘), showing how each item in the collection contributes to various ways of thinking about, treating, representing, creating or destroying unborn entities. Like the other books in the Living Books about Life series, The Unborn Human is a curated collection of material that is available as open access publications. Some of this material can be viewed via links to the website embedded in the book, while others can be directly accessed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means that all of the articles and other materials included in the book, which range from historical documents to scientific, medical, bioethical, policy, sociological, anthropological and cultural studies articles as well as social and other digital media material such as websites, blog posts and YouTube videos, can be accessed for free (including my introduction using the link supplied above).