For Roy Bhaskar, critical moral realism is part of the philosophy of critical realism. It assumes that “moral propositions can be known; and, in particular, social-scientifically vindicated” (Bhaskar 2008, 242). In critical social media research, the user expresses moral values online, and the researcher has a critical attitude towards power structures. The morality and ideologies underlying the online expression can be laid open:
Now the subject-matter of social science is composed not just by social objects but by beliefs about social objects, and if such beliefs are false (a judgment which is within the remit of social science), and one can explain the falsity, then, subject to a ceteris paribus clause, in virtue of the openness of the social world and the multiplicity of determinations therein, one can move without further ado to a negative evaluation of the explanans and a positive evaluation of any action rationally designed to absent it. (Bhaskar 2008, 244)
Critical moral realism in social media research means that the research tries to create knowledge about social media that helps understanding what is absent in the world and needs to be created (absenting absences), in order to foster participatory democracy, freedom, justice, fairness, and equality. This approach neither overdoes nor underdoes research ethics.
7.6 Conclusion
Digital media has become an important topic of study, as the emergence of the field of Internet research shows. It is, however, not just a research topic but has influenced the social sciences in general. Big data analytics and computational social science are the newest developments in this respect. Their emergence is a reflection of the general tendency that critique and theory have in the past decades become less of a focus in academia, which may be one of the consequences of the pressures exerted by neoliberalism, managerialism, and political pragmatism on academia. Effects of instrumental reason in the social sciences include high-level specialisation that is blind for society’s big picture, a disregard for social philosophy, and management and business studies’ influence on the social sciences. The search for a computational social science paradigm is another effect of the diminishing relevance of critique. The danger is that computer science colonises the social sciences and tries to turn them into a subdomain of computer science. There should certainly be co-operations between computer scientists and social scientists in solving societal problems, but co-operation is different from a computational paradigm. Turning social scientists into programmers as part of social science methods education would almost inevitably leave no time for engagement with theory and social philosophy, except if one radically increased the duration of study programmes. Programming is not something you learn overnight, but is a timeconsuming field of education. Computer science’s quantitative logic threatens to undermine critical social science. An alternative paradigm that does not reject, but critically scrutinise the digital, is needed. Critical theory is an alternative interdisciplinary approach that is of importance for both the social sciences and computer science.
Chapter Seven | Digital Positivism and Administrative
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Conclusion