Digital Sociology

Digital sociology is the subfield that studies how digital technologies, data, and platforms shape social life, relationships, institutions, and inequality, and that also considers how digital tools and data change sociological research itself. Deborah Lupton’s Digital Sociology is a key text, distinguishing the sociological analysis of digital media, the use of digital tools in research, and the critique of digital data, while Noortje Marres has advocated a digital sociology that rethinks method. Manuel Castells’ account of the network society and Barry Wellman’s networked individualism provided early foundations, and Sherry Turkle explored the psychological and relational effects of constant connectivity. danah boyd studied youth and networked publics, while Shoshana Zuboff theorized surveillance capitalism and Virginia Eubanks and Safiya Noble showed how algorithmic systems reproduce inequality. Roger Burrows and Mike Savage questioned the coming crisis of empirical sociology as companies amass social data, and Rob Kitchin examined the politics of big data. Nathan Jurgenson criticized digital dualism, the assumption that online and offline worlds are separate. Jan van Dijk and Eszter Hargittai highlighted digital inequality. Digital sociology remains central to research on identity, work, surveillance, culture, methods, and social change.