Digitaalinen sosiologia 2024/Lainaukset 12.02.2024

"Key here are practices of “openness” and “sharing,” which Weller (2011: 7) sees as technical features of new digital technologies as well as a “state of mind” for the people who are using them." (Selwyn 2019, 109-110)

"Digital sociology is not a field that fits easily into traditional notions of what “sociology” is." (Selwyn 2019, 110)

”There is certainly an openness regarding who is engaged in digital sociology. As evident throughout this book, digital sociology involves scholars from a broad range of backgrounds.” (Selwyn 2019, 110)

"Digital sociology could therefore be seen as an inclusive field of study that operates around (and in between) traditional academic structures and boundaries. This stems directly from the acceptance of digital practices as a primary means of “doing” digital sociology." (Selwyn 2019, 111)

"In one sense, it is tempting to imagine that any instance of working online is a form of public accessibility and engagement. Healy (2017: 771) describes social media facilitating “a distinctive field of public conversation, exchange, and engagement” between academics and academic publics. Social media certainly make it easier for sociologists “to be seen” and, it follows, make it easier to “see” sociology in action. However, doubts remain over how engaging these public actions actually are." (Selwyn 2019, 120)

"Finally, alongside these consensus-related forms of public engagement are more radical, politically driven approaches toward public sociology based around online forms of activism, advocacy and agitating for rights. For example, research around critical data studies is directed toward enhancing public understandings of data privacy and dataveillance, as well as alternative actions that advantage citizens rather than corporations ... Kennedy and Moss(2015) describe such activities as working toward the cultivation of “knowing publics” – i.e. publics who are knowledgeable about their engagements with digital technology, therefore increasing the potential for digital societies to know better themselves." (Selwyn 2019, 121-122)

"Innovative practices such as “open access” resources, “crowdfunding” research projects, and so on, can be seen as low-cost alternatives to the proper funding and resourcing of sociology." (Selwyn 2019, 123)

"There is a danger that digital sociology becomes the preserve of independently resourced part-time practitioners – a field reliant on people engaging in sociological work in their own (free) time and at their own expense." (Selwyn 2019, 124)

"As Duffy (2017: 1) argues, the influence of “social media logic” is far removed from what academics might consider 'the university's knowledge-making ideals.'" (Selwyn 2019, 125)

"By working with online publics, sociologists are inviting multiple publics to contest their work. These include interest groups with particular ideological perspectives to promote, as well as trolls and other online abusers. As Lareau and Muñoz (2017: 19) put it diplomatically, sociologists who work online are exposing themselves to “audiences who do not have a neutral, dispassionate approach." (Selwyn 2019, 127)

"Digital sociology helps us understand the growing dominance of reconstituted and intensified forms of technology-based capital accumulation. And it challenges the idea that these changes can be governed only along profit-hungry lines of transnational tech-industry interests." (Selwyn 2019, 129)

”In short, digital sociology is part of an ongoing evolution of the discipline – revitalizing classic sociological concerns while introducing novel (or at least substantially altered) points of contention and curiosity.” (Selwyn 2019, 130)

"Given the trend for established professorial “names” to attract the largest social media following, there is a danger that trends such as crowdfunding increase the privilege of high-status academics rather than representing an alternative way of working around the system." (Selwyn 2019, 128)

"Melissa Gregg (2006) praises academic blogging as a valuable form of “conversational scholarship,” with many academics welcoming the opportunity for “slow thinking” and the iterative generation of ideas and knowledge sharing (Mewburn and Thomson 2017)." (Selwyn 2019, 114)

As Roger Burrows (2012) puts it, all academics are now “living with the H-index” – i.e. subject to various forms of “quantified control,” accountability and auditing that stem in no small part from many of the digitized writing, publishing and dissemination practices described earlier. (Selwyn 2019)