Digital Sociologies

Digital Sociologies
Author: Daniels, Jessie
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2017
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1447329015

This handbook offers a much-needed overview of the rapidly growing field of digital sociology. Rooted in a critical understanding of inequality as foundational to digital sociology, it connects digital media technologies to traditional areas of study in sociology, such as labor, culture, education, race, class, and gender. It covers a wide variety of topics, including web analytics, wearable technologies, social media analysis, and digital labor. The result is a benchmark volume that places the digital squarely at the forefront of contemporary investigations of the social.

Digitized Institutions

Digitized Institutions
Author: Jessie Daniels
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2016-11-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1447329090

A key sociological insight is that institutions, whether education, the economy, politics or the media, shape the contours of individual life and drive inequality. In this Byte, the contributions take up the way that digitally meditated social processes are transforming institutions. The writing here examines the interconnectedness of institutions and considers digitization across schooling, work, and media, with an eye toward how inequality works. Together, these selections yield important insights into critical features of the institutions that mediate our digitized society, arguing that digital sociology’s greatest challenge is measuring inequalities that are produced by society’s datalogical turn.

Digital Sociology

Digital Sociology
Author: Deborah Lupton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2014-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317691806

We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People’s movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital technologies. We are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not. The sub-discipline of digital sociology provides a means by which the impact, development and use of these technologies and their incorporation into social worlds, social institutions and concepts of selfhood and embodiment may be investigated, analysed and understood. This book introduces a range of interesting social, cultural and political dimensions of digital society and discusses some of the important debates occurring in research and scholarship on these aspects. It covers the new knowledge economy and big data, reconceptualising research in the digital era, the digitisation of higher education, the diversity of digital use, digital politics and citizen digital engagement, the politics of surveillance, privacy issues, the contribution of digital devices to embodiment and concepts of selfhood and many other topics. Digital Sociology is essential reading not only for students and academics in sociology, anthropology, media and communication, digital cultures, digital humanities, internet studies, science and technology studies, cultural geography and social computing, but for other readers interested in the social impact of digital technologies.

Imagining Society

Imagining Society
Author: Nehring, Daniel
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529204917

Re-examining C.Wright Mills’s legacy as a jumping off point, this original introduction to sociology illuminates global concepts, themes and practices that are fundamental to the discipline. It makes a case for the importance of developing a sociological imagination and provides the steps for how readers can do that. The unique text: • Offers succinct and wide-ranging coverage of many of the most important themes and concepts taught in first year sociology courses; • Has a global framework and case material which engages with decoloniality and critiques an overly white, western and developed world view of sociology; • Is woven through with contemporary examples, from social media to social inequality, big data to the self-help industry; • Rethinks and re-imagines what a critically committed, politically engaged and publicly relevant sociology should look like in the 21st century. This is a lively, engaging and accessible overview of sociology for all its students, teachers and people who want to learn more about sociology today. It is a welcome clarion call for sociology’s importance in public life.

Information

Information
Author: Michele Kennerly
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2021-01-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231552807

For decades, we have been told we live in the “information age”—a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and concepts of information are usually considered the provenance of the natural and social sciences, which present them as politically and philosophically neutral. Yet the humanities should and do play an important role in interpreting and critiquing the historical, cultural, and conceptual nature of information. This book is one of two companion volumes that explore theories and histories of information from a humanistic perspective. They consider information as a long-standing feature of social, cultural, and conceptual management, a matter of social practice, and a fundamental challenge for the humanities today. Bringing together essays by prominent critics, Information: Keywords highlights the humanistic nature of information practices and concepts by thinking through key terms. It describes and anticipates directions for how the humanities can contribute to our understanding of information from a range of theoretical, historical, and global perspectives. Together with Information: A Reader, it sets forth a major humanistic vision of the concept of information.

Digital Sociology in Everyday Life

Digital Sociology in Everyday Life
Author: Jessie Daniels
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2016-11-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1447329058

Digital technologies, digital media, and mobile technologies now shape the experience of everyday life in the Western world, yet the way our quotidian lives are enmeshed with these technologies is far from clearly understood. Through studies of the digital everyday, sociologists are beginning to reinvigorate the sociological imagination in light of digitization. Chapters in this Byte cover topics such as designing a research framework and how to work ethically as a digital researcher, continually interrogating one’s position as a researcher and reflecting on the process of knowledge creation. Cumulatively, they highlight the value of sociological theory for understanding our digital world.

Sociological Theory for Digital Society

Sociological Theory for Digital Society
Author: Ori Schwarz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2021-08-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509542981

The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life – it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities. What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects? How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply ‘social networks’? How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remould power structures? What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power? And what happens when labour departs from work? By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society.

Designing the Social

Designing the Social
Author: Harry T. Dyer
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020-06-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811557160

This book uses data collected from in-depth interviews with young people over the course of a year to explore the complex role of social media in their lives, and the part it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity to a broad public on a wide array of platforms. Using this data, the book proposes and develops a new theoretical framework for understanding identity performances. Comic Theory, detailed in this book, centres on a consideration of the role of social media design in shaping identity, and explores the ways in which socio-culturally grounded users engage in acts of compromise, novelty, and negotiation with social media designs and digital technologies to produce unique identity performances. Positioned within the field of educational research, this book overtly challenges assumptions and myths about the internet as a neutral source of knowledge, instead exploring the way in which designs and technologies shape who we interact with and how we understand what it is to be social. Moving beyond the over-used ‘digital natives’ paradigm, this book makes a clear case that educators and education researchers need to move beyond a focus on coding and digital skills alone, highlighting the pressing need to take explicit account of the overlaps between digital technology, culture, and education.

Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond

Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond
Author: Tombul, I??l
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 990
Release: 2021-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1799871827

Orientalism is about much more than just information gathered about the East within its general postcolonial period. In this period, orientalism is a Western discourse that dominated and shaped the view of the East. There is “otherization” in the way the West has historically looked at the East and within the information presented about it. These original stories of travelers in the past and previous telling about the East are facing a reconstruction through modern types of media. Cinema, television, news, newspaper, magazine, internet, social media, photography, literature, and more are transforming the way the East is presented and viewed. Under the headings of post-orientalism, neo-orientalism, or self-orientalism, these new orientalist forms of work in combination with both new and traditional media are redefining orientalism in the media and beyond. The Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond shows how both new media and traditional media deal with orientalism today through the presentation of gender, race, religion, and culture that make up orientalist theory. The chapters focus on how orientalism is presented in the media, cinema, TV, photography, and more. This book is ideal for communications theorists, media analysts, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students working in fields that include mass media, communications, film studies, ethnic studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies.