Digital Social Research: Potential and Overview

We live in societies where, over the last two decades, digital technologies have become woven into almost every sphere of human experience. In daily life, people acquire and live with digital devices and systems that in turn mediate a growing range of digitized services, media forms, cultural objects, social interaction and experiences. Such activities take place across the domains of work, home, transport, education, and leisure, combining and sometimes redefining these domains. Digital technologies have also become the infrastructure of broader dimensions of social, economic, political and cultural life: the ways that people connect, converse and relate to each other, understand and experience culture, negotiate and organize the content and boundaries of work and leisure, public and private life. Many forms of digital mediation are altering established conventions of how time and space are organized and experienced, from notions of being ‘always on’ in a perpetually connected 24/7 society, to how instant communications appear to constitute new times and places for sociality, to the ways in which people’s identities seem less anchored to location and more by technologically mediated communication. Public and private institutions of every kind have had to adopt and adapt to digital infrastructures, processes and practices, producing a range of intended and unintended consequences and concerns around ethics, privacy, rights, surveillance, knowledge and power.