Digital Sociology: Making the Digital Central to Sociological Research
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A talk I gave for colleagues at Hunter College on Digital Sociology, December 2, 2015.
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Digital Sociology: Making the Digital Central to Sociological Research
- 1. Digital Sociology Making the Digital Central to Sociological Research Jessie Daniels, PhD December 2, 2015
- 4. what difference does it make?
- 5. what is digital sociology?
- 8. because the world is changing…
- 9. but how sociologists study the world hasn’t* *mostly
- 10. influences every area of sociology
- 13. (1998)*
- 14. (1999)
- 15. (2000)*
- 16. 2001
- 17. (2001)
- 18. (2002)
- 19. the ‘rise of network society’ has
- 20. influenced my own research
- 21. <1997>
- 22. qualitative content analysis, 369 publications from six WS organizations
- 23. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
- 26. Second argument: WS is similar to mainstream rhetoric around race.
- 30. how is the Internet changing WS?
- 31. technology in the classroom
- 32. what study design could measure that?
- 35. how do race & masculinity influence…
- 36. who gets locked up at Rikers?
- 37. the health of young men leaving Rikers?
- 38. paper of the year award
- 39. key findings • “racial/ethnic pride” and positive masculinity can be protective for health • time spent incarcerated reduced for those who went through intervention • returning to stable housing most important predictor of good health and lower rates of reincarceration
- 41. <2004>
- 47. Unique Visitors (each month): ~ 200,000 Total Visitors (since 2007): 2.7 million
- 48. Individual Blog Posts: 1,774 Comments from readers: 10,805 Subscribers: 10,454 Authors: 144
- 50. <2009>
- 51. Several arguments, first: racism is changing because of digital technologies
- 52. WS rhetoric is easier to access, global and more participatory
- 53. Raises questions about how to regulate hate speech in a global, digital era – U.S. is “haven for hate speech”
- 54. U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia v. Black, 2003: “no constitutional protection for a burning cross”
- 55. what is a burning cross in the digital era?
- 57. 306,515
- 62. cloaked websites: intentionally disguising authorship in order to conceal a political agenda
- 63. consistently appears on first page of results
- 67. Graphic Design
- 68. “This site looks like someone, you know, just an individual created it. It doesn’t look very professional.” (study participant, age 17)
- 70. “I mean, I don’t think I would disagree with it. I’m sure there are some slaves that were treated well. So, I can understand their point of view. There’s always two sides to everything.” (study participant, age 17)
- 71. Before & After the Internet
- 72. <2014>
- 77. “altmetrics”
- 80. where is digital sociology now?
- 81. emerging
- 82. relevant for health, self & society
- 83. global & growing: 60 submissions, 11 countries
- 84. coalescing into degree programs
- 85. learning from digital humanities
- 86. asking who controls our data?
- 87. these are sociological questions
- 88. digitalmaterial
- 89. imbricated
- 90. digital sociology is crucial
- 91. digital sociology is just beginning
Notes de l'éditeur
- Image from here: http://miter.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/et_temp/Data-ones-and-zeros-817559_577x280.jpg
- Please feel empowered to live Tweet if you’re so inclined.... I might suggest these hashtags for our conversation today.
- Among many other things that ‘digital’ means, the digital is about code.... coding information into binary code of 1’s and 0’s. Image from here: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/D83AI8LmcuyqyfnvS6qk1Q
- When this happens, information - data - is easier to move around, edit, aggregate and analyze. And, it enables a different set of human interactions that are reconfiguring our selves & society in profound ways. Image from here: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/D83AI8LmcuyqyfnvS6qk1Q
- Back in…
- Some might wonder why the need for a digital sociology – when we already have 20 years of digital humanities, 15 years or so of Internet studies, and an even longer tradition of communication studies.
- The fact is – the social world is changing….. Image source: http://www.businessinsider.com/vatican-square-2005-and-2013-2013-3
- …but how sociologists study the world hasn’t, mostly. Image source: http://www.businessinsider.com/vatican-square-2005-and-2013-2013-3
- Today, there is exciting work happening in each of these areas that grapples with how digital technologies are transforming --- religion, politics, culture, the economy, education, law, crime, sports & the environment to name just a few – but most of it is not happening in sociology. It is happening in other disciplines, and across disciplines, . The fact is that many of the social implications of the Internet were articulated decades ago by leading sociologists without calling themselves “digital sociologists”. Scholars such as Castells, 1996; Back, 2002; DiMaggio, et al., 2001; Hampton 2002; Ignacio, 2000; Sassen, 2002; Wacjman, 1991; Wellman, 2001, have all made important contributions to our understanding of how the digital and the material are imbricated, to paraphrase Sassen. Yet, overall sociology as a discipline has been relatively unconcerned with explicitly defining a disciplinary relationship to the digital. Instead, sociology has often ceded this terrain to other disciplines. And, from a disciplinary standpoint, SOCIOLOGY IS AT RISK in a least two ways: 1) it risks becoming irrelevant if it doesn’t take seriously the digital, and 2) it will lose the early career scholars who will look elsewhere for job placements and conference attendance. So, I see the formation of digital sociology as a transformation of the discipline of sociology in ways that will enliven it and ensure its continued relevance for students and the next generation of professors. Image sourcehttp://www.buzzle.com/img/articleImages/605636-9816-48.jpg
- There are theoretical antecedents to the emergence of digital sociology…
- Castells makes a persuasive argument that we are living through a transformation as significant as the industrial revolution – entering an “informalion age” and the “rise of network society” – a transformation he says began in the 1970s – and is which affects the economic, social, cultural and identity. RISE OF NETWORK SOCIETY: Castells argues that in this &apos;new economy&apos;, in which on &apos;a new mode of development, informationalism, of which networking is a critical attribute — evidence of changes in work structure and labour patterns, and concludes that while the networked &apos;symbolic analyst&apos; (or knowledge worker) POWER OF IDENTITY: Feminism, white supremacists + environmentalists…. END OF MILLENNIUM: Makes a not-very-well developed argument about the rise of inequality globally. Been CRITIQUED FOR TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM.
- Counters the narrative about technology isolating us…. popularized relentlessly by Sherry Turkle. Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb
- Chart 5 domains where Internet is relevant for sociology: 1) inequality / digital divide 2) community + social capital 3) political participation, 4) organizations + economic institutions, 5) cultural participation and cultural diversity.
- WACJMAN: argues against technological determinism. This article examines the development of the social studies of science and technology (STS) and its critique of this dominant position. It provides an account of the principal concepts that inform the area, which emphasize that technology is a socio-technical product, patterned by the conditions of its creation and use. Technology and society, rather than being separate spheres, are mutually constituted. SASSEN: examines the embeddedness of the new technologies, the complex interactions between the digital and the material world, and the mediating cultures that organize the relation between these technologies and users.
- The 1990s were really early days of the Internet.
- Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Montgomery, Alabama. Photo from 1989. Image source: http://www.exploring-america.com/pics/civil-rights-memorial-center_montgomery.jpg
- Consistent theme in my research.
- Source: The History Channel http://www.history.com/images/media/pdf/Men%20Who%20Built%20America.pdf
- Image source: http://s1105.photobucket.com/user/p0rtalthinker/media/TheInternetHappened_image_1024x1024_zps86050a78.jpg.html
- First story begins in 2009….
- My experience in the classroom prompted research questions I didn’t know how to answer at the time…. http://www.flickr.com/photos/macloo/3348765187/
- This was in 1997-98.
- Image source: http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-streaming-internet-tv-nhl-hbo-now-espn
- Image source: http://images1.villagevoice.com/imager/u/580x328/6689296/rikers_contraband_sign_flickr_matt_green.jpg
- Consistent theme /question in my work
- This, too, is consistent with earlier work because there is no greater engine of WS than the carceral system. 98% of those incarcerated at the Rikers youth facility were Black/Latino. And, the notions of threat / criminality are consistent. The challenge was: could we interrupt this cycle and improve health?
- Health risk is really at the point of re-entry to community….
- SOCIETY FOR PUBLIC HEALTH EDUCATION (SOPHE) Sarah Mazelis Paper of the Year Award (2011) Screen capture from: http://hpp.sagepub.com/content/12/1/44
- Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2963792/
- Image source: http://www.wowelectrons.com/image/cache/data/Ipaq_rx1950/ipaq_top-500x500.jpg
- Back in…
- Blogs were on the rise, as the latest big thing….and they were heralded as a technology that made possible the “citizen journalist” + there was a lot of talk about the ‘little people rising up’ through blogs.
- 2004 was also the year that “blog” was picked as word of the year. Remember that, because I’m going to come back to it at the very end…. Joe R. Feagin and I began discussing establishing a scholarly blog in about 2004-2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4059291.stm
- Joe R. Feagin and I began discussing establishing a scholarly blog in about 2004-2005. We finally did it in spring, 2007. Early screenshot fromRacism Review, 2007. http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2007/04/08/imus-gendered-racism/
- Joe and I both conceptualize what we’re doing with the RR blog as a form of intellectual activism, the work of digitally-engaged scholar-activists. For more on intellectual activism, see PHCollins’ latest book.
- The backend... which, if we were going to approach advertisers, is what we would show people.
- The big numbers.
- The smaller numbers, which in many ways, I’m more pleased about, because these suggest both a continuously engaged community (more so than the larger numbers which may be one-time visitors) – and the smallest number, 144 of ‘authors’ reflects the menorting work that Joe + I do with other scholars many, but not exclusively, younger or early career who want to write for the blog.
- First story begins in 2009….
- Wanted to know if the six organizations / newsletters I’d followed in first book had made the transition to the digital era – and if so, what form they were taking. Overall, some did, most didn’t – but Internet created new opportunities for WS. Findings from earlier research held true – gendered WS & overlap with mainstream. But, something the BIG FINDING: racism is changing b/c of digital technologies.
- Much, much EASIER TO ACCESS the same rhetoric than when I had to drive to Montgomery AL to visit the Klanwatch archive. Much more GLOBAL – enabling what I refer to as TRANSLOCAL WHITENESS, so that people in countries around the world who identify as ‘white’ can now find each other online. More PARTICIPATORY – which has meant more voices, including more women, shaping WS rhetoric, which has led to some interesting modifications of WS, so that gender equality (for white women) and lesbian/gay rights (for white people) are openly discussed and often embraced.
- Thinking about WS in a global context – shifts things considerably from the earlier work – and it sets the U.S. often misguided notion of ‘first amendment protection’ for hate speech in sharp relief with the rest of the world. The U.S. stands alone among western, industrialized nations in its unwillingness to take action against hate speech – often refusing to even attend UN gatherings about hate speech --- so that WS in countries outside the U.S. are attracted here. Making the U.S., what one scholar calls “a haven for hate speech” online. In fact, not all speech is protected, even here in the U.S.
- some 14 states in the US have “no crossing burning” ordinances on the books – and a conservative supreme court ruled on this – finding that there is no constitutional protection for a burning cross. Yet, it is often local law enforcement who is left to make judgment calls about what is, and is not, “protected speech,” and hate speech – particularly online – is almost always ignored. Image source: http://www.iwchildren.org
- An important question remains: what constitutes a burning cross in the digital era?
- The longest-running and most popular white supremacist site online. At time book went to press, 129,000+ members….
- As of December, 2015: 300,000+
- My experience in the classroom prompted research questions I didn’t know how to answer at the time…. http://www.flickr.com/photos/macloo/3348765187/
- First, one student typed in “kkk.com” to search engine.
- A second student typed in “martin luther king” into a search engine and came to this site….
- ….it is hosted by Stormfront…
- Cloaked websites…. a disorienting new form of WS that has some insidious implications.
- Cloaked site consistently appears third (3rd) or fourth (4th) in the results (e.g., ‘hits’): and this is an important factor for assessing value, trustworthiness of the information according to the young people in this study, like this young woman:
- Task II: Participants were asked to evaluate pairs of websites: Cloaked site (www.martinlutherking.org) Legitimate site (www.thekingcenter.org )
- Task II: Participants were asked to evaluate pairs of websites: Cloaked site (www.americancivilrightsreview.com) Legitimate site (www.voicesofcivilrights.org)
- At one time, you could type in the words “American Civil Rights Review” into Google, it comes up first along with sources from Harvard, the library of congress’ Voices of Civil Rights and the American Civil Rights Institute, Ward Connelly’s conservative California-based organization.
- Visual cues are an important part of how adolescents evaluate information online. Of the cloaked civil rights site, many responded like this young person….quoted here.
- Good news for growing literacy about digital media – bad news is that WS are just one good graphic designer away from a much more pernicious presence.
- For young people who possess critical race consciousness, recognizing cloaked websites is within their reach, as this young woman illustrates.
- In this case, the young woman assesses that this site, as just another “point of view,” another “side” on a two-sided argument. She is also unable to ascertain who it is that’s publishing the site, which is hosted by anti-Semite and racist Frank Weltner who is advocating on this page for a re-writing of the history such that plantations were “sanitary, humane and relaxed,” workplaces rather than institutions predicated on human misery. As in the previous example, this illustrates how a lack of critical thinking about racial politics offline can lead to misreading information online.
- So, sort of by serendipitous accident, I happened to have a kind of “natural experiment” of WS rhetoric before and after the Internet in these two books. One of the big takeaways for me is really the point about digital sociology that I brought up near the beginning. Digital technologies are changing the social world & sociology needs to rise to the challenge of investigating this changing social world.
- More recently, my work has turned to how digital technologies are changing the way we do our work as scholars.
- This interest resulted in the project: JustPublics@365…..we’re called “Just Publics” because our focus is on reaching wider publics…with academic research that connects to social justice in some way. ….which I presented on here awhile back.
- Funded as a 1-year “experiment,” $550,000. Basically, like running a startup within a traditional academic institution. Challenging, but good.
- Another resource about this.... http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access
- Open access also means new approaches to knowledge production… as I discuss in this piece about how I took a tweet from a conference, transformed it into a blog post, then a series of posts, and then into a peer-reviewed article. At the LSE Impact Blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/09/25/how-to-be-a-scholar-daniels/
- There are lots of tools coming together to help make it easier to measure these alternative metrics, or “altmetrics.”
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22173204 From the abstract/conclusion: “Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.”
- Back in…
- 2013 vs. 2014
- “The Quantified Self” -- through digital technologies that we wear – or perhaps soon, that we embed – is collecting data at a very personal, individual level and aggregating into large datasets – mostly by marketers and that we mostly have no control over. Image source: http://quantifiedself.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/TechReview_July11-Cover-2_x220.jpg
- So ahead that there’s a national grants-making-org devoted to it.
- “who controls our data?” – is a fairly commonly asked question in Internet circles, but I would argue it’s one that needs to be investigated by sociologists.
- When the NYTimes ran a piece in the Upshot (July 9, 2015) this summer – about “when algorithms discriminate” ….Google’s online advertising algorithm, for instance, shows as for high-income jobs to men much more often than it showed the ad to women, a new study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers found. …ads for arrest records were significantly more likely to show up on searches for distinctively black names or a historically black fraternity. ….advertisers are able to target people who live in low-income neighborhoods with high-interest loans. – I just kept thinking: these are sociological issues.
- As Sassen + others theorists note – the material and the digital are imbricated…. They overlap
- As Sassen + others theorists note – the material and the digital are imbricated…. They overlap
- As Sassen + others theorists note – the material and the digital are imbricated…. They overlap
- Back in…
- Please feel empowered to live Tweet if you’re so inclined.... I might suggest these hashtags for our conversation today.