Sociology and the digital: A response to Alphia Possamai-Inesedy and Alan Nixon

Events have clearly moved on since Roger Burrows and I wrote our article on ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ (Savage and Burrows, 2007). That article provoked a debate partly because there were still significant numbers of sociologists who did not think that the digital environment needed to be fundamental to their research agenda and methodological tool kit. In the decade since this article was published, all sociologists (bar a very few, see Goldthorpe, 2015) have come to realise that we have no choice but to operate within the digital arena – but the key question is how we do this. Alphia Possamai-Inesedy and Alan Nixon’s interesting article is an excellent reflection on these issues, in emphasising that sociology need not be undermined by this situation if we have the confidence and verve to rise to the challenge and not simply seek to defend our heritage. Along with Susan Halford (Halford and Savage, 2017), I have recently become more aware that the ‘big data’ revolution has its limitations in rendering key analytical advances, and it is actually social scientists such as Thomas Piketty (2014), or Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2011) who have shown how skilful visualisations of complex data assemblages can provide major contributions to our thinking. It is precisely because, as this article shows, social scientists are aware of issues of power, theory and critical reflection, that they are better able to mobilise new resources than is evident within empiricist big data currents which tend to rely on a technicist orientation in which ‘the facts speak for themselves’.

The coda of their article offers an extremely valuable checklist of issues which should command attention for future work. I am pleased to see in Coda #2 that social scientists must be trained in understanding critical digital methods. For too long, many sociologists have been suspicious of numbers and quantification, in forms which sometimes appeal to sophisticated theoretical arguments about Verstehen and the like but can also be seen as an unreflexive bias against quantification per se. It is through engaging with the affordances of new digital methods that we can criticise problematic tendencies within this field and act as agents to shape new perspectives. As this article shows, a fuller engagement with the digital arena will allow sociologists to expose the power dynamics at work in this arena and make our work more significant. We need to move away from being spectators towards being active driving forces in shaping future knowledges.

Coda #3 rightly argues too that interdisciplinarity is vital for us to move forward. The social sciences remain remarkably conservative in still tending to default to a disciplinary homeland where we feel comfortable, with a familiar theoretical and methodological corpus. But, as the recent explosion of research on inequalities has emphatically shown, it is those able to cross-fertilise expertise across different domains to understand and question ‘real-world problems’ who will be best placed to make future advances. The fact that it is research on inequalities which has become so high profile in global social science is testimony to how it is politically loaded issues where we can intervene most effectively as part of a broader intellectual movement.

It is clear that there is increasing awareness of the way that digital data generates inequalities itself, and in the coming years there is likely to be increasing popular concern about the operations of digital behemoths such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. We still lack a sophisticated understanding of how citizenship rights should be extended to give people the capacity to control their own data, rather than seeing this as a private resource and commodity. But this situation is changing, with Cathie O’Neill’s (2017) recent book on Weapons of Math Destruction being a wonderful example of how digital insiders are also becoming more aware of the dangers of technicist and purely commercialised digital arenas. In the upcoming politics of information and digitalisation, sociologists need to be key players, and we can only do this by being fully immersed in the operations of the digital arena.