Theories, Methods, Practices, and Fields of Digital Social Research

Book excerpt: The digital, in the form of technologies, scenarios, objects, processes, and relational and interactional structures, is increasingly becoming central to understanding culture, society, human experience, and the social world. It permeates our society’s practices, symbols, and shared meanings, and it makes old distinctions, such as the one between online and offline, real and virtual, and material and immaterial, obsolete. It also introduces digitally native objects of research, such as cyber-bullying and digital identities, which have a direct impact on mainstream sociological problems.