{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","uuid":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"digitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","isbns":["2021022153","9781032119182","9781032119205","9781003222149","2405518376"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":343,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":184,"pdf_page":198,"physical_index":198,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1a929c7148e59519a5efc5ef9e1afeabf73d325f0dd7eb829dba17c927821529"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"The rise of big data and social media has resulted in particular transformations of academia. Deborah Lupton (2015) has, in this context, coined the notion of digital sociology. She argues that digital sociology consists of (a) professional digital practice so that sociologists employ “digital tools as part of sociological practice – to build networks, construct an online profile, publicize and share research and instruct students” (p. 15); (b) the investigation of the use of digital technology; (c) digital data analysis, which has also been characterised as the rise of digital methods (Rogers 2013); and (d) critical digital sociology, the fourth aspect of digital sociology. Lupton (2015) defines critical digital sociology as the “reflexive analysis of digital technologies informed by social and cultural theory” (p. 16).\n\nAll forms of social analysis reflect society in complex ways. Critical digital sociology is a particular reflexion of and on digital technologies’ role in society. It is a theoretical approach grounded in critical and Marxist theory that tries to understand capitalism and domination as well as their possible alternatives. But one should note that there is a contradiction between critical sociology as digital sociology’s fourth dimension and big data analytics that is part of Lupton’s third dimension of digital sociology.\n\n7.4 Epistemology and Methodology: Critical Digital Methods\n\nSociology wants to better understand society by a dialectic of social theory and applied social research methods. Positivism reduces the analysis of society to empiricism and lacks critical theory’s capacity of contextualising social phenomena in the dynamics, dialectics, and history of power structures. Big data analytics’ positivism results in often very superficial analyses that highlight major topics, users or social relations in large amounts of data gathered from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. It fails to understand users’ motivations, experiences, interpretations, norms, and values. We need critical digital methods as alternative to digital positivism.\n\nIt has, for example, been common to study contemporary revolutions and protests (such as the 2011 Arab Spring) by collecting large amounts of tweets and analysing them. Such analyses can, however, tell us nothing about the degree to which activists use social and other media in protest communication, what their motivations are to use or not to use social media, what their experiences have been, what problems they encounter in such uses, and so on. If we only analyse big data, then the one-sided conclusion that contemporary rebellions are Facebook and Twitter revolutions is often the logical consequence (see Aouragh 2016; Gerbaudo 2012). Digital methods do not outdate but require traditional methods in order to avoid the pitfall of digital positivism. Traditional sociological methods, such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, surveys, content and critical discourse analysis, focus groups, experiments, creative methods, participatory action research, statistical analysis of secondary data, and so on, have not lost importance. We do not just have to understand what people do on the Internet but also why they do it, what the broader implications are, and how power structures frame and shape online activities.\n\n184\n\nThemes","previous_page":183,"next_page":185}