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digital data and ‘the utopia of total social legibility’

The argument Daniel Little is making here is an increasingly familiar one, but I’ve rarely encountered such a lucid formulation of it:

Can we similarly “map” the spread of new political ideas and slogans during the Arab Spring? No, because the vast majority of those present in Tahrir Square were not tweeting and texting their experiences. Can we map the spread of anti-Muslim attitudes in Gujarat in 2002 leading to massive killings of Muslims in a short period of time? No, for the same reason: activists and nationalist gangs did not do us the historical courtesy of posting their thought processes in their Twitter feeds either. Can we study the institutional realities of the fiscal system of the Indonesian state through its digital traces? No. Can we study the prevalence and causes of official corruption in China through digital traces? Again, no.
In other words, there is a huge methodological problem with the idea of digital traceability, deriving from the fact that most social activity leaves no digital traces. There are problem areas where the traces are more accessible and more indicative of the underlying social processes; but this is a far cry from the utopia of total social legibility that appears to underlie the viewpoint expressed here.
So I’m not persuaded that the tools of digital tracing provide the full alternative to social simulation that these authors assert. And this implies that social simulation tools remain an important component of the social scientist’s toolbox.
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