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INTRODUCING DIGITAL SOCIOLOGY
Deborah Lupton
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney
10 July 2013
Acknowledgement: This document is an earlier version of material that will be
published as:
Lupton, Deborah (forthcoming) Digital sociology. In Germov, John and Poole, Marilyn
(eds), Public Sociology: An Introduction to Australian Society. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.
This book chapter will have additional teaching material added for its final version.
The version here presented may be cited as:
Lupton, Deborah (2013) Introducing digital sociology. Sydney: University of Sydney.
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Introduction: the digital age
Digital technologies have become central to the lives of most people living in developed
countries and increasing numbers of those in the developing world. Since the
introduction of personal computers in the early 1980s and the internet in the early
1990s, those technologies – variously referred to as ‘information communication
technologies’ (ICTs) or ‘cyber technologies’ and now frequently called ‘digital
technologies’ or ‘the new digital media’ – have reached into many dimensions of
everyday life, affecting family and intimate relationships, leisure activities, paid work,
education, commerce and the ways in which mass media are presented and consumed.
New digital media technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life and
social relations for many people in developed societies, and increasingly in developing
societies. People across the globe have becoming linked together by digital media and
networks in unprecedented ways, allowing for the fast and efficient flow of information
across these networks.
Table 1: Timeline of new digital media technologies since 2000
Year
Technology
name
Function
2001
Wikipedia
Online open-edited encyclopedia
iTunes
Music, podcasts, tv series and film downloading
2003
LinkedIn
Professional networking
Delicious
Social book marking
2004
Facebook
Social networking
2005
Reddit
Social book marking
YouTube
Video sharing
Flickr
Photo sharing and hosting
2006
Twitter
Micro-blogging
2007
Smartphones
Phone calls and connection to the internet,
apps
Tumblr
Micro-blogging
2008
Spotify
Music streaming
2010
tablet
computers
Connection to the internet, apps
Instagram
Photo/video sharing
2011
Google+
Social networking
Pinterest
Image curation
3
Table 1 provides a timeline of important digital media technologies that have emerged
since the turn of the twenty-first century. This indicates the scale of innovation and
rapid adoption of platforms such as Wikipedia, iTunes, Facebook and Twitter and
devices such as smartphones and tablet computers over a relatively short space of time.
The evolution of the Web: from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
It is possible trace an evolution of the web from its first version – Web 1.0 – to the
version it is becoming – Web 3.0 (see Figure 1 below). The Web 1.0 technologies of last
century were based on websites and devices such as desktop or laptop computers.
Users could view information online and use facilities such as online banking and
shopping, but had little role to play in creating online content. The internet was difficult
to access when away from a landline connection and software applications were loaded
onto individual desktops or laptops.
Since the early years of the twenty-first century, the emergence of Web 2.0 sites
that were accessible online rather than loaded individually onto one’s desktop
computer, the development of technologies such as wireless and broadband internet
access and related devices have resulted in a proliferation of technologies, including
smartphones and tablet computers and social networking sites such as Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Ubiquitous wireless computing technologies allow for
users to be connected to the internet in almost any location at any time of the day using
their mobile devices that can easily be carried around with them. Some digital devices
are not only easily carried around in a pocket or bag (for example, smartphones, MP3
players and tablets) but can be worn by the body, such as self-tracking wristbands or
headbands used to collect biometric data (Lupton 2013a). Web 2.0 may now be viewed
as a platform supporting other applications rather than simply as ‘the internet’ or ‘the
World Wide Web’ (Cormode and Krishnamurthy 2008).
The ways in which we communicate with other people, access news, music and
other media, conduct our working lives has changed dramatically. While Web 1.0-style
websites are still available and used for some purposes, they have been complemented
by a multitude of online platforms that allow and indeed encourage users to contribute
content and share it with other users. These acts of both consumption and production
have been dubbed ‘prosumption’ by some internet researchers to convey the dual
nature of such interaction with digital technologies (Beer and Burrows 2010, Ritzer et
al. 2012). They represent a significant shift in how users interact with and make use of
digital technologies, conforming to the democratic ideal of citizen participation and
sharing (John 2013) that are central features of discourses on contemporary digital
media use, particularly social media platforms.
The terms ‘media convergence’ (Meikle and Young 2012) and ‘convergence
culture’ (Hay and Couldry 2011, Jenkins 2013) are now often used to describe the ways
in which digital technologies are able to interact with and communicate with each other
and how people often use several different technologies simultaneously. Unlike the
older media (landline telephones, video, television, print media, analogue photography,
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audio tapes and records) that employed different modes of recording and transmitting
data, digital media use the same type of digital encoding. Smartphones not only make
telephone calls but connect to the web, take digital photographs and videos, record
voice data and play music, television programs and films. Games consoles such as Wiis
can now browse the internet and connect to social media platforms. Various devices
used each day – smartphones, cameras, MP3 players, desktops, laptops, tablets,
wearable computers – can share information between themselves, facilitated by
common interfaces and cloud computing.
Some writers propose that we are now moving towards Web 3.0, or what has
been dubbed ‘The Internet of Things’ or the ‘Semantic Web’ (Halford et al. 2013,
Miorandi et al. 2012). These terms refer to a gradual connection of ‘smart objects’, or
objects that have microprocessors embedded within them that are able to communicate
wirelessly with other digitalised objects. Such features as interconnections between
digital media platforms and objects, the use of information from one site by another
application and technologies communicating directly with each other and establishing
relationships without requiring human intervention represent the move towards Web
3.0. It has been predicted that these links will eventually produce ‘data entities’ with
unique identifiers, including places and objects (Halford et al. 2013: 176). It has even
been contended that with the advent of sensor-based devices that can be embedded into
the human body, people will themselves become ‘data entities’, or one node of ‘The
Internet of Things’ (Brewster 2013).
Figure 1: From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0
Web 1.0
• one-way website use, little user content creation, landline internet
connections, desktop and laptop computers
Web 2.0
• extensive user-created content or commentary, social networking sites,
ubiquitous computing, mobile devices, media convergence
Web 3.0
• interconnected 'smart objects' that can communicate with each other,
producing a single interlinked database
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Defining digital sociology
Digital sociology provides a means by which the impact, development and use of digital
technologies and their incorporation into social worlds and concepts of selfhood may be
investigated, analysed and understood. Sociologists have researched computer
technologies since they became widespread in the mid-1980s. They have addressed
many varied social issues relating to online communities, cyberspace and cyber-
identities. Such research has attracted several different names, dispersed across
multiple interests, whether it is entitled ‘cybersociology’, ‘the sociology of the internet’,
‘the sociology of online communities’, ‘the sociology of social media’, ‘the sociology of
cyberculture’ or something else again.
While the term ‘cyber’ was in vogue in the 1990s and early 2000s, its use seems
to have been largely replaced by the ‘digital’ now that the internet has become more
pervasive and ubiquitous. The term ‘digital sociology’ encapsulates the concerns
previously addressed by ‘cybersociology’ and extends into this new era of mobile digital
computer use. It is a neat descriptive term that also references other disciplines and
their use of the term ‘digital’, such as digital cultural studies, digital humanities and
digital anthropology.
As this suggests, the study of digital technologies takes place across a number of
disciplines, including media and cultural studies, social computing, social psychology,
cultural geography, the humanities and anthropology. Many of these disciplines share
methodological and theoretical approaches with digital sociology: this is inevitable in a
social research environment in which there are often overlaps in research topics,
methods and theoretical approaches between disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences. However there are some distinctive differences that can be identified in
contemporary sociological scholarship on digital media, particularly in relation to
discussion of how digital technologies are affecting academic, and more specifically,
sociological practice itself.
I have identified four distinct aspects of digital sociology:
Professional digital practice: using digital media tools as part of sociological
practice: to build networks, construct an online profile, publicise and share
research and instruct students;
Sociological analyses of digital media use: researching the ways in which
people’s use of digital media technologies configures their sense of selves, their
embodiment and their social relations and the role of digital media in the
creation or reproduction of social institutions and social structures;
Digital data analysis: using digital data for social research, either quantitative
or qualitative; and
Critical digital sociology: undertaking reflexive and critical analysis of digital
media technologies informed by social and cultural theory.
Each of these is explained in more detail below.
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Professional digital practice
Using digital media is integral to sociologists’ engagement as public sociologists. An
important dimension of public sociology is conveying sociological research findings and
ideas to the public. Sociologists should not just be talking to each other, but letting
others outside the academy know what they are researching and thinking about. In his
well-known address on public sociology, Burawoy (2005: 4) notes that public sociology
should be about engaging ‘multiple publics in multiple ways’ with sociological insights
and research findings. What can be more public, and reach more audiences globally,
than the use of digital media to convey these insights and findings? Social and other new
digital media provide ideal avenues by which such public engagement can be easily
carried out. Although Burawoy does refer to the traditional media as a platform for
public sociology, he makes no mention of digital media, but he was writing around the
time of emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and thus had not yet realised the potential of
these media for public sociology.
Table 2: Important digital media for academics
Platform or tool
Purpose
Blogs
Write about research
Twitter
Make connections, promote research,
share links
SlideShare
Share PowerPoint or Prezi slides
Facebook
Make topic pages
Wikipedia
Create or edit entries
YouTube
Share video material
Google Scholar
Search other researchers’ work, make a
research profile
Pinterest
Collect visual material for research and
teaching
Storify
Make a narrative using online material
Curating tools for online content (e.g.
Bundlr, Scoop.it, Delicious)
Collect and save online material in
topics
Online referencing tools (e.g.
Mendeley, EndNote Web, Zotero)
Collect and share references
Academia.edu
Make connections, share research
LinkedIn
Make connections, share research
E-repositories
Provide open access to research papers
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As shown in Table 2, there are a plethora of digital medial tools and platforms that can
be used by sociologists as part of engaging as public sociologists. While they have been
lagging well behind such disciplines as science and media studies in using such
technologies as part of scholarly practice, a growing number of sociologists both in
Australia and other countries are taking up these tools as part of their commitment to
public engagement and open access to academic research and in their teaching.
I am one such sociologist, and have written extensively in social media forums
about using social and other digital media for sociological research and teaching. I have
found that using these tools promotes connections between other academics working in
my areas of interest, as well as members of the public and those in professions relevant
to my research (Lupton 2012). Research has shown that such engagement has a
significant impact on an academic’s public and scholarly profile (Eysenbach 2011, Shuai
et al. 2012), but there are many other reasons why it is important.
I find that following other social researchers’ work on digital media is a way to
keep up to date with my field. Research findings are often discussed and published
much earlier in pieces such as blog posts or articles made available on digital networks
such as Twitter, Academia.edu or open-access journals than they are in traditional
academic outlets. Accessing these forums, and contributing one’s own research, is a way
of engaging in and accessing cutting-edge research.
The ‘online scholarly ecology’ (Shuai et al. 2012) that I employ for sociological
purposes includes a number of tools and platforms, all of which are interlinked. I have
my own blog This Sociological Life (where I often discuss social media and academia)
and am a regular user of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for academic purposes. I also
use web curating tools such as Pinterest, Bundlr, Scoop.it, Pinterest and Storify to collect
research materials. I use the Academia.edu website to upload my research documents
and SlideShare for my PowerPoint presentations, where they are accessible to anyone
with a computer and online connection. Many of these tools and platforms are
interconnected: when I publish a blog post, for example, I publicise it on Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn and Academia.edu. My blog posts, in turn, often form part of
academic writing that I later publish in traditional academic forums such as journal
articles, book chapter and books. I have even written an entry for Wikipedia – on the
topic of digital sociology (Digital sociology 2013). (There was a certain degree of
reflexive satisfaction to be had by engaging as a digital sociologist by writing about
digital sociology in a digital platform.)
Sociological analyses of digital media use
There is a long tradition not only in sociology but also in media and cultural studies,
cultural geography and anthropology on researching how users interact with digital
media. While some researchers have used quantitative surveys to do so, many employ
qualitative, indepth methods, such as ethnographic research, focus groups and semi-
structured interviews.
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A focus on the influence of digital media in the creation or reproduction of social
institutions (for example, the economy, the mass media, the family and the education
system) and social structures (age, gender, social class, race/ethnicity) is a
characteristic of the type of critical approach that is often adopted by sociologists of the
digital. Here again Burawoy’s (2005) definition of public sociology is relevant, for he
emphasises the importance of sociologists using their research to ‘turn private troubles
into public issues’, an element of sociological writing that has existed since its earliest
days.
For example, several sociologists interested in digital media have focused
attention on the lack of access to digital technologies experienced by some members of
disadvantaged social groups often experience such as the poor, those living in
developing countries or remote regions and people with disabilities or chronic illness or
poor language skills. However, as Halford and Savage (2010) have pointed out, this term
is rather simplistic, as it fails to recognise the complexities involved and also tends to
position ‘technology’ and ‘social disadvantage’ as two separate and independent
phenomena. They contend that understandings of both social inequity and access to
digital media technologies need to acknowledge their interlinking and their dynamic
nature. Each acts to constitute the other, but this is a fluid, unstable process. Halford and
Savage propose instead the concept of ‘digital social inequality’ to denote the
interconnectedness of social disadvantage and lack of access to digital technologies.
Halford and Savage also note that the ‘digital divide’ literature tends to assume
that providing more or better access to digital technologies will in itself solve problems
of social disadvantage. Yet access is not the only issue involved in the phenomenon of
digital social disadvantage. The practices in which people engage are also important to
identify (Hargittai and Hinnant 2008, Robinson 2009). How do people in different social
groups use digital technologies when they do have access to them? What capacities and
understandings do they need to possess to use them effectively and how does their
social positioning affect these? How do pre-established assumptions about gender, age,
education, social class, ethnicity/race and people’s capacity to use digital media
influence their use? To what extent do certain types of digital media use exacerbate or
alleviate social disadvantage? Research has shown that people of lower education level
may spend more time online in their free time than those of higher education levels, but
do so in different ways: engaging in social interaction and gaming more often, for
example, rather than for education, seeking information or work-related reasons (van
Deursen and van Dijk 2013), or what has been referred to as ‘capital enhancing
activities’ (Hargittai and Hinnant 2008).
So too, it is important to acknowledge that the utopian discourses of democratic
participation, community-building, sharing and prosumption that often circulate in
mainstream accounts of the possibilities offered by new digital media often fail to
recognise the political aspects of these technologies. Not only do people from
disadvantaged social groups often experience limitations in their access to and use of
digital media, all users are constrained by what these technologies offer them. Digital
technologies are not simply neutral artefacts: their affordances (the ways in which they
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can be used) are shaped by the decisions of their developers, which are often founded
on commercial imperatives and corporate worldviews.
Digital media use takes place as part of a digital economy, in formats that are
generated and structured by the developers, not the users (Bird 2011, Hay and Couldry
2011). Indeed users’ desire to create and share content on Web 2.0 platforms and the
data they upload have increasingly become targeted by corporate companies as sources
of wealth creation (Fuchs and Dyer-Witheford 2012, Jenkins 2013, Lupton 2013b).
Prosumers are engaging in unpaid digital labour, while many other paid workers who
bid for freelance work in online platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and
Freelancer.com are provided with very low recompense for their labour, experience job
insecurity and are granted none of the benefits offered by most other workplaces
(Scholz 2013). Differential power relations and exploitation, therefore, are reproduced
on the internet just as they are in other social sites, challenging taken-for-granted
assumptions about the ‘democratic’ nature of the internet (Fuchs and Dyer-Witheford
2012, Mager 2012).
Digital data analysis
Masses of digital data are produced when users interact with the internet, whether as a
by-product of use (the transactional data collected by ‘cookies’ on websites, for
example) or as deliberate contributions by users (blog posts, comments on sites,
consumer ratings, tweets, Facebook updates, home-made videos uploaded to YouTube
and so on). The advent of ‘crowdsourcing’, or the contribution of data from many
prosumers to serve a particular information need, is also part of this aggregation of
data. Algorithms (the codes that direct computers how to operate) are used not only to
generate data but also to predict or shape users’ consumption habits: for example, the
book recommendations that Amazon users receive, based on their previous browsing or
purchasing habits, or the automatic search term completions provided by Google.
There has been much emphasis in recent times on the possibilities of the ‘big
data’ that are produced via digital media engagement and archived digitally, and its
potential for use in commercial enterprises and social research. A digital data industry
has developed, in which ‘web scraping’ or ‘harvesting’ techniques are employed to
identify, manipulate and analyse digital data. The creation of digital data and social
research using these data has now been redistributed among many diverse actors
outside of the traditional academic social sciences (Marres 2012).
Many of the tools used to do this involve the quantification of data, but there are
also approaches that analyse qualitative data from the web, some of which use natural
language processing protocols. These tools can be used for a wide array of social
research purposes, including social network analysis, measuring the influence on social
media of specific individuals and topics (who and what is ‘trending’ and why) and the
‘sentiment’ that is expressed about these people and topics (how others respond
emotionally to them) and how this may differ according to geographical location, age,
gender, social class and race and ethnicity. Reams of digital data are also generated on
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people’s consumption patterns: what commodities and services they buy, what music
they download, how they use electricity and other utilities, where they prefer to take
holidays and how they choose to travel there, what websites they access using search
engines and so on.
Sociologists and other social researchers are beginning to see the potential of
using these digital data in social research projects. After all, social media were given that
title because they involve social relationships, communities and behaviours. As Marres
(2012: 142) notes, what is especially interesting for sociologists about digital media and
devices is that ‘they enable the routine generation of data about social life as part of
social life’. This statement echoes Burawoy’s (2005: 7) observation of the potentialities
of public sociology as bringing sociology into ‘a conversation with publics, understood
as people who are themselves involved in a conversation’.
Social researchers are able to employ a number of digital tools to harvest data
from the web to use in these projects, thus generating new methods for social research.
Data from Facebook and Twitter posts, search engine enquiries, text messages, YouTube
videos, blogs, online images, audio data and even GPS data may be used for analysis.
Researchers may also elicit data for their own concerns, including using web-based
surveys. There has been a recent proliferation of social research on Twitter, for
example, including analysis of how it has been used for health information and
networks (Murthy 2013, Park et al. 2013), in disasters (Murthy 2013), the geography of
Twitter networks (Graham et al. 2013), how language is used to build community on
Twitter (Zappavigna 2011), how this medium is used as part of fandom (Highfield et al.
2013), celebrity (Page 2012), citizen journalism (Murthy 2013) and news reporting
(Arceneaux and Weiss 2010, Hong 2012), how prior online experiences influence
Twitter use (Hargittai and Litt 2012) and several studies on the political use of Twitter
(Ausserhofer and Maireder 2013, Bruns and Highfield 2013, Christensen 2013, Murthy
2013, Thorson et al. 2013).
While some digital data analysis involves expensive software and programing
skills or training in how to use the software, several free (‘open’) web harvesting and
visualisation tools have become available that are easy to use. Google has several tools,
including Blogsearch Scraper, Image Scraper and News Scraper and its Ngram viewer, a
phrase-using graphing tool. Several tools are available to mine social media to make
word cloud visuals. As just one example, Figure 2 below reproduces a word cloud I
made using Tagxedo from the content of posts on my blog, a way of demonstrating
which topics are covered the most (the bigger the word, the most coverage it receives).
Many more complex data analysis tools can be used for digital data analysis,
including the latest version of the social data analysis tool NVivo, which now can import
material from online sites for qualitative and quantitative analysis.
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Figure 2: A word cloud made from the content of entries on my blog
Critical digital sociology
A critical sociological approach to researching digital media draws attention to the
nature of such research and its implications. Where sociologists differ from many other
social researchers in this enterprise is the awareness on the part of many (if not all) of
them of the ‘liveliness’ of these data: the fact that digital data, like any other type of data,
are themselves socially created and have a social life of their own. They are not the
neutral products of automatic calculation, but represent deliberate decisions by those
who formulate the computer algorithms that collect and manipulate these data (boyd
and Crawford 2012, Cheney-Lippold 2011, Ruppert et al. 2013).
While there has much written about the democratic possibilities of ‘open data’,
or the digital data that may be available for anyone to use, questions remain about the
willingness of corporations or institutions to make the data they collect truly available
to the public (Halford et al. 2013). The data generated by prosumers is often difficult for
them to access once it has been uploaded to a digital platform, and as noted above, may
become the basis of commercial enterprises from which they do not benefit financially.
A further topic of digital sociology research is that which directs critical attention
at the ways in which sociologists and other academics themselves use digital media.
This is a reflexive approach that draws on contemporary social and cultural theory to
analyse and interrogate the kinds of subject positions that are configured via digital
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technology use as part of professional practice. While such a critical approach does not
preclude professional digital use or the analysis of digital data for social research, it
opens up a space for reflection upon the implications and unintended consequences of
such practices (see Table 3 below for a summary of this).
Table 3: Challenges for sociologists posed by the new digital media
Sociologists have warned that both digital data and the tools used to collect and analyse
them are specific ways of shaping research, among many others, and caution must be
exercised against uncritically accepting them (Beer 2012, Ruppert et al. 2013, Savage
2013, Uprichard 2012). Some sociologists have also interrogated the ways in which
sociologists’ use of new media affect their employment conditions and their
presentation of their professional selves (Burrows 2012, Savage 2013, Savage and
Burrows 2007, 2009). What impact do technologies such as Google Scholar metrics,
open access publishing, the constant generation of digital data on social activities and
the introduction of massive open online courses (MOOCs) have upon sociologists
working in universities? Will academics who are able to actively engage with digital
media and establish a strong online presence achieve precedence over other academics?
Some sociologists have contended that the masses of data produced by digital
media technologies and the potential for these data to be analysed by commercial
companies may prove a major challenge to sociological practice. If other social
researchers and commercial companies can access and analyse these data, what role
can sociologists play (Savage and Burrows 2007)? It has also been contended that the
increasingly complexity of the internet as it moves towards Web 3.0 offers challenges to
sociologists in terms of researching the social and political aspects of this new
• sociologists’ position as empirical social
research experts
the digital data economy
• sociologists’ computational and data analysis
expertise
digital data and Web 3.0
• sociologists’ control over the products of their
research
the politics of circulation
• sociologists’ employment conditions
MOOCS, open access
publishing, citation indices
• sociologists’ professional and public profiles
social and other digital
media expertise
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technology, and that they may need to acquire more sophisticated computational
expertise to do so or else collaborate with computer scientists (Halford et al. 2013).
Others have warned that sociologists need to be aware of the ‘politics of
circulation’ (Beer 2013) of digital media cultures, or the multitude of ways in which the
content created by one author or group of authors may be re-used and transmitted via
different modes of publishing (reblogged or excerpted on other people’s blogs, tweeted
in tiny ‘grabs’, commented upon and so on). As part of using new media technologies,
therefore, the product of sociologists’ and other academics’ labour may be re-
appropriated and transformed in ways that are unprecedented and may pose a
challenge to traditional concepts of academic research and publication.
Conclusion
The new digital media have had a profound impact upon many aspects of social life,
social institutions and social structures, including sociology itself. Many sociologists can
see the potential offered by all four aspects of digital sociology outlined above. There is
no need to adopt either an uncritical utopian approach or an overly pessimistic
perspective on the potential of digital technologies and digital data for sociology
(Marres 2012). As Halford and colleagues (Halford et al. 2013: 186) have contended,
these are ‘exciting times’ as sociologists investigate new avenues for exploration.
As an academic discipline, sociology has traditionally played an important role in
identifying and commenting upon the role played by media and technologies in
everyday life, social relations, social inequality, social institutions, selfhood and the
body. In this spirit, and also as digital technologies increasingly become part of the
academic world as it has in many other spheres, continuing critical and reflexive
examination of these technologies and their implications for academic practice and
selfhood should be an integral dimension of sociological research, and more specifically,
of public sociology.
14
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