Digital Social Futures Research

Abstract

Social research is almost inevitably digital: in its subject matter because the digital, social and material dimensions of our worlds and lives are now inseparably entangled; and in its methods as our research techniques and encounters are, even if indirectly, implicated with digital technologies, platforms and practices. Social scientific renderings of digital technologies and media and everyday life propose a range of discipline-specific ways of understanding this relationship between the online/offline and digital/material, and a large and growing literature about digital methods and practice for research and its dissemination. The new challenge is to advance from this strong base of critical research and scholarship within the social sciences and humanities, in two ways. First towards interdisciplinary interventions that will bring theory, methods and concepts into dialogue with technology and design disciplines, and policy and industry agendas; and second to engage with emerging digital technologies and communication, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Automated Decision Making (ADM), and the new socialities, everyday life practices and business models associated with these technological possibilities.