Social theory and the digital: The institutionalisation of digital sociology

Abstract

This article is a critique of digital sociology and a proposal for a very different social theory of the digital. As the article aims at fundamental aspects of the discipline, it may be perceived as a polemic, even if it is meant to be a serious intervention in a field crying for debate. Drawing on the analyses of well-known digital sociology textbooks, the article argues that digital sociology is aligned to its object by virtue of a common subjective stance towards the digital and shared new materialist ontological presuppositions. The extent of this subjective alignment is revealed by two complementary aspects: what it desires, namely, to be in the ‘digital party’, and what it acquiesces to, namely, to contemporary capitalism's disqualification and existential banning of the idea of intrinsic value, and its imposition of extrinsic criteria and measurements on any realm of life which claims intrinsic value. By thus doing digital sociology renounces the very ground on which an autonomous position as a social science can be built. The alternative social theory proposed seeks to undo that alignment by realigning sociology to a stance grounded on intrinsic values and a materialism attentive to antagonism rather than to naïve notions of matter.