Digital sociology as a response to the challenges of societal digital transformation

Abstract

New technologies have a comprehensive impact on social processes and relationships, transforming social institutions, interactions, norms, patterns, and values of society. The transformation of sociology tools in the digital era is considered. The authors analyze the emergence and formation of digital sociology as a response to the ongoing transformational processes, which focus on the impact of high-tech on social reality. The impact of four key technologies that transform the study of society (communication networks, big data, algorithms, and platforms) is investigated. All this creates challenges not only of a technical, but also of a methodological nature, and raises questions about the relevance of research tools to current social processes. Digital sociology today focuses on the revision and actualization of empirical tools of cognition. Special attention is paid to the Big Data phenomenon, which creates both opportunities for sociologists and a huge number of takeaways related to representativeness issues and results interpretation. The result of understanding these complex methodological processes lies in developing an approach characterized by the combination of Big Data and Thick Data, which makes it possible to achieve a synergy of two opposite directions, a symbiosis of quantitative and qualitative solutions in sociological science. An overview of some specific methods of studying society related to the expansion of the virtual world is given, and emphasis is placed on the impossibility of science moving towards one of the two types of methods due to the complementary and mutually enriching nature of these approaches. The future of sociology, according to the authors, lies in developing interdisciplinary approaches, as well as in the synergy of quantitative and qualitative methodological tools.