Discuss and Assess #1 "What is Digital Sociology?"

When I think about digital sociology, a broad definition that immediately pops up in my head is a sociological perspective used towards the digital space. Now that doesn't explain too much, but obviously, there is more to it than that. So, in other words, I think digital sociology is when the components of the digital world, such as social media applications, new technologies, such as Neuralink (a.k.a. the brain chip Elon Musk wants to implant in our brains), and other digitized media is analyzed in order to understand how they contribute, change, and develop human societies' institutions, social systems, behaviors, interactions, and relationships. When I think of digital sociology, I divide it into two different groups the macro level and micro levels of digital sociology. As stated within the introduction portion of the readings, "digital media technology pervades and cuts across multiple subfields within sociology...” (Gregory, 2017, p. xvii). So it is present in multiple aspects of our lives, whether at the family level, religious level, governmental level, and so many more. The macro side of digital sociology deals with the digital institutions or digital social systems in place. While in contrast, the micro side of digital sociology looks at understanding how, for example, the nuclear family changes in social media's digital space or how they interact with new and developing technologies.

Digital sociology is different from the field of computer science or "big data" crunching/modeling because instead of trying to read this “big data” and understand what it means through a scientific lens, digital sociology takes the digital/data aspects of computer science and adds that human perspective. "Big data" or computer science concepts or ideas can be understood and analyzed through human behavior patterns or different kinds of social relationships within society. On their own, these digital or scientific fields leave out the human perspective and stick to just understanding what the data means in the scientific sense rather than a societal or humanistic sense.

Some important epistemological components of this sub-field mentioned through the reading are that society is being increasingly mediated by digital technologies in every way, whether at the macro or micro levels (Barnard, 2017). The readings for the week summed up this subfield's main features perfectly into "professional digital practice, analyses of digital technology, digital data analysis, and critical digital sociology" (Barnard, 2017, p. 196). These components are essential to understand because as time progresses, the digital space will become ever more heavily involved in our lives, whether it be personally, professionally, educationally, institutionally, or societally. These four features ultimately help us to understand the social stratification, systematic inequalities, institutional norms, human relationships (or bots you never know who you may be talking to in the digital world) within the digital space.