What’s at Stake in Digital Social Research?

Abstract

I am a social researcher who uses both theoretical and empirical enquiry not so much to describe the social as to understand the conflicts involved in constructing an order that appears to us as ‘social’. I seek to address the paradox of doing social research: for the social is not something concrete at which we can point, but a dimension of how whatever in our life is concrete holds together as a world. Media are crucial to what hangs together as a world – and in ways that much social research to this day still ignores. Media are in the contemporary era irrevocably ‘digital’: they take forms that automatically bring possibilities for recombination, retransmission, and reworking by multiple actors. As such, and unavoidably, digital media can be woven tight into the fabric of social life much more than previous media. But what does this mean for the social world, that is, for our possibilities to enhance or undermine how we live together today?