In recent years Digital Sociology has emerged as an increasingly prominent trend within the discipline at an international level. But it remains unclear precisely what this tendency represents, provoking enthusiasm and skepticism in equal measure. In this special section for The Sociological Review’s website, we invite short blog posts (1500 words or less) addressing digital sociology and the questions it raises for the future of the discipline. This could include but is by no means limited to:
- What does the ‘digital’ in digital sociology really mean? Is there a risk that digital sociology fetishises the ‘digital’?
- Should digital technology lead us to reconceptualise the social?
- What, if anything, distinguishes digital sociology from fields of inquiry such as cyber cultures, web studies and the sociology of the internet?
- How does digital sociology relate to parallel trends in cognate disciplines e.g. digital anthropology, digital geography and the digital humanities?
- How should we conceptualize the ‘offline’, the ‘online’ and the relationship between them? Should we reject this dichotomy entirely?
- What role can digital sociology play in an intellectual landscape increasingly dominated by data science and computational social science?
- Does digital sociology change the relationship between sociology and other disciplines?
Please contact Mark Carrigan with submissions or any questions relating to the special section: mark@markcarrigan.net. The deadline for contributions is December 1st 2015.
Mark Carrigan 