Afterword

Author(s):  
Elizabeth B. Silva

As digital technologies – used socially for information, communication or entertainment – allow for new ways of living social life and of knowing about it, it is increasingly significant that we inquire about the crucial matter of what the digital does to the ways we know about each other, how we live, and what social scientists can learn from and with the digital....

Communication technologies, including the Internet, social media, and countless online applications, create the infrastructure and interface through which many of our interactions take place today. This form of networked communication creates new questions about how we establish relationships, engage in public, build a sense of identity, and delimit the private domain. Digital technologies have also enabled new ways of observing the world; many of our daily interactions leave a digital trail that, if followed, can help us unravel the rhythms of social life and the complexity of the world we inhabit, including dynamics of change. The analysis of digital data requires partnerships across disciplinary boundaries that–although on the rise–are still uncommon. Social scientists, computer scientists, network scientists, and others have never been closer to their goal of trying to understand communication dynamics, but there are not many venues in which they can engage in an open exchange of methods and theoretical insights. This book opens that space and creates a platform to integrate the knowledge produced in different academic silos so that we can address the big puzzles that beat at the heart of social life in this networked age.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Rafalow

Social scientists know that technologies, new or old, do not inherently constitute community. A town hall is, after all, just a building; its walls take on meaning when people breathe social life through its doors, establish a shared purpose, and form relationships with one another. But so far scholars have not well evaluated existing theories of how digital technologies do, or do not, aid in the development of community. What’s missing is a reconciliation of contemporary manifestations of social interaction with classic sociological theories of community. Taylor Dotson tackles this challenge head-on, bolstered by a staunch critique of Barry Wellman’s theory of networked individualism, or the idea that digital technologies have transformed community life to sets of relationships are less local, more global, and centered on interests rather than local necessity. “Try getting a Facebook status update to help move a couch or stay for dinner,” Dotson huffs, in an early hook. Technically Together assembles a wealth of “technology” cases – not just digital devices or internet environs, but woodstoves, bars, cooperative business, and zoning structures – and applies a framework for evaluating whether each abets, or depresses, core tenets of community. Dotson denaturalizes assumptions of not only what counts as technologies (any structure, really) but also injects a perspective as to which are technologies of community.


1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Nicholas John Russo

Renewed awareness in ethnic groups as well identified, persisting and active participants in the political and social life of American society imposes a new task on the social scientists to define better and more cogently measure the implications of pluralism and integration. This article by Russo—presenting the findings of his doctoral dissertation: The Religious Acculturation of the Italians in New York City—evidences the fast disappearance of the cultural identity of an immigrant group in relation to their rural religious tradition and behavior. At the same time, it notes the survival of social identity. In the light of this evidence, we can ask ourselves if ethnic religious institutions might have led the immigrants to religious forms more in keeping with their new environment and how the acculturation described should be evaluated. Above all, we are forced to search for those variables which maintain the ethnic groups’ identity even in the third generation. In this way, the process of the inclusion into American society of different ethnic and religious groups may reveal some clues for the more complex test of inclusion of different racial groups.


Author(s):  
Eva Panulinova ◽  
Slavka Harabinova ◽  
Renata Baskova

Revolutionary changes in society are linked to digital technologies and affect all areas of social life, not excluding construction industry. This requires not only knowledge reform, but above all skills reform. The current demand of practice is to increase the knowledge and competences of graduates of civil engineering faculties in the field of introduction and use of digital technologies in the process of planning, implementation, and maintenance of buildings, as well as to support the skills development of civil engineers in teamwork while using BIM technologies. The presented, currently implemented project contributes to meeting the above-described Practice Needs. The expected direct impact of the project is to increase the competitiveness, employability, and quality of life of graduates entering practice.


Author(s):  
A. Yu. Kosenkov

Based on the analysis of transformations of the technical reality of the last century related to the development of computers and digital technologies, the article discusses the processes of digitalization and digital transformations. It has been established that digitalization can be understood as the process of creating, through digital technologies, a specific real or virtual digital product with information, communication, production, economic and other purposes. It is noted that the digitalization process leads to digital transformations – processes of a qualitative change in the structural elements of reality associated with the development and use of digital technologies and digital products. The study also establishes that digitalization processes, due to the advent of computer devices and digital technologies, are transforming technical reality.


Africa ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart A. Marks

Opening ParagraphMost descriptions of social life in rural communities in Central Africa contain some references to hunters or hunting practices. Despite the decimation of some wildlife species by rinderpest at the turn of the last century, wildlife continued plentiful in many regions and hunting and trapping were part of the subsistence routines of males in rural areas during the first three decades of this century. During this period in Zambia, European administrators (Gouldsbury and Sheane 1911; Melland 1923; Hughes 1933), missionaries (Smith and Dale 1920), and itinerants (Lyell 1910; Letcher 1911) often interspersed their exploitative accounts of ‘sport hunting’ with descriptions of chants, rituals, magic and other hunting lore of their African associates. These accounts of local traditions, often colored with the latent assumptions of the time, apparently intrigued and fascinated their European readership then mentally riding the crest of colonial expansion and technological superiority. In subsequent decades, large wild mammals declined in numbers and in importance as a subsistence base in most rural areas. Yet information on hunting customs, gleaned incidentally in the pursuit of the researchers' major interests, has been a continuous feature of ethnographies written subsequently by social scientists (Richards 1939; White 1956; Turner 1957; Scudder 1962; Stefaniszyn 1964; Reynolds 1968) suggesting a widespread enthusiasm for hunting even where wildlife is no longer of consequence. These fortuitous bits of information on the subsistence hunter's world still leave many unresolved questions as to the function and frequency of these customs, the numbers and types of hunters in each community, and the nature of subsequent changes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 462-465
Author(s):  
Simon Woods

This paper is a commentary on Herzog et al.’s vignette drawn from their experience of conducting ethically challenging qualitative research. They describe an encounter with a family in which an older child has acted as a sibling donor to a sick younger sibling. It is evident that the process has taken its toll on the well-being of the older child and has created tensions within the family. What then are the ethical boundaries and responsibilities of researchers who enter the private domain of the family? This commentary responds with a model of “ethical reflexivity” which shows how a reflexive researcher can incorporate moral reflection at the different stages of the research process. Reflexivity works differently at different points, upstream it allows for anticipation and planning, incorporating ethical strategies into the methodology. Midstream reflexivity allows for evaluation, reflection and strategic response as the research unfolds and downstream it allows for a critical evaluation of how the research played out. Although it is a vital resource for any society to allow a wide degree of freedom for social scientists to research the social life, this freedom also brings responsibilities. Participation in research both creates and reveals the vulnerabilities of participants and since the researcher is entangled in these complexities they must also be prepared to respond and act. At times it may be necessary to step out of the role of researcher in order to offer support or take more decisive action especially when the well-being of vulnerable participants is at stake.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-415
Author(s):  
Dunya D. Cakir

AbstractExamining the writings of prominent Islamist women intellectuals in Turkey, including Fatma Barbarosoğlu, Cihan Aktaş, Yıldız Ramazanoğlu, and Nazife Şişman, this article explores the repercussions of their intellectual activism for how scholars understand and study piety politics. These Islamist women intellectuals, whose discourse and subjectivities have been translated into analytical categories by scholars of piety politics, contest the terms of their encounters with academics and, more broadly, the conversion of Muslim women into objects of research. Their writings shed light on the complex interpretative interplay between academic and lay discourse when the objects of scholarly study speak back to social scientists. I argue that these kinds of critical engagements between Islamist women intellectuals and social scientific discourses attest to the mobility and circularity of social scientific categories, which have infused and reconstituted Islamist debates in Turkey. Rather than uncritically endorse or dispute these intellectuals’ interpretations of social scientific accounts, I leverage their claims to underscore the social life of academic discourse and to promote an enriched vision of piety politics and reflexive methodology.


Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel

The revival of world history towards the end of the twentieth century was intimately connected with the rise of a new master concept in the social sciences: globalization. Historians and social scientists responded to the same generational experience that the interconnectedness of social life on the planet had arrived at a new level of intensity. The conclusions drawn from this insight in the various academic disciplines diverged considerably. The early theorists of globalization in sociology, political science, and economics disdained a historical perspective. The new concept seemed ideally suited to grasp the characteristic features of contemporary society. It helped to pinpoint the very essence of present-day modernity. Globalization opened up a way towards the social science mainstream, provided elements of a fresh terminology to a field that had suffered for a long time from an excess of descriptive simplicity.


Author(s):  
David S. Wall

Networked digital technologies have transformed crime to a point that ‘cybercrime’ is here to stay. In the future, society will be forced to respond to a broad variety of networked crimes that will increase both the complexity of crime investigation and prevention, whilst also deepening the regulative challenges. As cybercrime has become an inescapable feature of the Internet landscape, constructive management and system development to mitigate cybercrime threats and harms are imperatives. This chapter explores the changing cybersecurity threat landscape and its implications for regulation and policing. It considers how networked and digital technologies have affected society and crime; it identifies how the cybersecurity threat and crime landscape have changed and considers how digital technologies affect our ability to regulate them. It also suggests how we might understand cybercrime before outlining both the technological developments that will drive future cybercrime and also the consequences of failing to respond to those changes.


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