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| Madras HQ Bibliotheque, CODE/CITY, Manu Luksch © 2017 |
Noortje Marres began by noting that her
final manuscript was submitted shortly after the Brexit vote and Trump election,
which have sparked considerable debate on the role of social media, data
analysis tools to detect fake news and new forms of blocking manipulative
content. What is the relation of these two events to her book? She argued that these
are piecemeal technical solutions that do not go to the heart of the problem. As
much research has shown, communities amongst which fake news circulates are separate
from the platforms and their mitigating technical services. What technical
solutions do not address is that sharing is a logic underpinning digital
platforms and from which their social value is derived. It is this value and
logic that digital sociology attends to, of how knowledge generation is a
social process rather than narrowly behaviorist or configured by individual
platforms. Marres’ understanding of social logics is at the heart of her book
and each panelist took this up in different ways.
Les Back (Goldsmiths) began with a quote
from Marres’ book, that ‘digital sociology is ultimately a form of awareness,
nothing more, nothing less’ (44) and that it is not fringe but key to
understanding social life and that we are already inside the thing we are
trying to understand. To exemplify this point he noted how the monitoring of
social media is part of the very techniques of digital border surveillance and
the traceability of migrants. Beyond
police and border guards, the movement and management of migrants are in
numerous and troubling ways implicated in the digital.
Amanda Windle (University of the Arts London)
offered a feminist critique by referencing a quote inspired by Donna Haraway’s
work that ‘we must stay with the trouble’ (37). Marres offered this in relation
to the troubling question of framings of the digital as either an object or
instrument of inquiry. Windle added to the ‘troubles’ raised in Marres’ book by
posing a number of questions such as ‘whose digital sociology?’; are research
subjects active or passive participants? what are the situated practices that
make up digital life? which bodies are potentially silenced?
Mike Savage (LSE) reflected on the
reference in Marres’ book to the 2007 article he co-wrote with Roger Burrows on
the ‘coming
crisis of empirical sociology’ and how Marres effectively critiques the
presumed binary they set up between ‘new’ and ‘old’ methods. Taking the example
of inequalities research, he argued that rather than debating for or against
new methods the challenge is how to persuasively tell stories through aesthetic
devices and visualisations and what he names the ‘symphonic aesthetic.’
Hannah Knox (UCL) took up another claim in
Marres’s book that while people have always been active in world making,
digital devices blur the boundaries between methods and the tools people use in
their everyday lives. She argued that scientists need to become sociologists to
understand data and interpret visualisations. Through this provocation she made
an appeal for interdisciplinarity and questioned whether we are all becoming
digital sociologists or if there are new forms of expertise emerging in the
interstices of existing disciplines.
In these and other ways, all presentations attested to the importance and wide applicability of Marres' book for sociological studies of digital worlds. An audio transcript of the panel can be found here.
*Marres, Noortje. 2017. Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research. Cambridge: Polity Press.
