Digital Media and the Relational Revolution in Social Science

Abstract

Social science paradigms are invariably grounded in the available methods of data collection. Beginning with administrative records in the late 19th Century, social scientists have collected stores of data on individual attributes, using surveys and records kept by governments and employers. Individual-level data is also aggregated as population statistics for groups of varying size, from households to nation states, and these data are analyzed using multivariate linear models that require the implausible assumption that the observations are independent, as if each respondent was the sole resident of a small island. In comparison, until recently, we have had very limited data about the interactions between people - such as influence, sanctioning, exchange, trust, attraction, avoidance, and imitation. Yet social relations and interactions are the foundation of social life. The entities that we most need to learn about are the things about which we know the least. The reason is simple: It is much easier to observe friends than to observe a friendship. Social interactions are fleeting and mostly private - one needs to be present at precisely the right moment. Moreover, relations are tedious and error-prone to hand-code and record, given the nuances of interaction, the need for repeated observations as relations unfold over time, and the rapid increase in the number of relations as the size of the group increases. As a consequence, studies of social interactions tend to be static, limited to the structures of interaction without regard to content, and based on very small groups. That is why social science has generally been limited mainly to the study of individuals with individual data aggregated for groups and populations. Except in very small groups, social relations have been just too hard to observe.

All this is rapidly changing as human interactions move increasingly online. Interactions that for the history of humankind have been private and ephemeral in nature now leave a silicon record - literally footprints in the sand - in the form of publicly available digital records that allow automatic data collection on an unprecedented scale. However, social scientists have been reluctant to embrace the study of what is often characterized as the “virtual world,” as if human interaction somehow becomes metaphysical the moment it is mediated by information technologies. While great care must be exercised in generalizing to the offline world, the digital traces of computer-mediated interactions are unique in human history, providing an exceptional opportunity for research on the dynamics of social interaction, in which individuals influence selected others in response to the influences they receive. In my presentation, I will survey recent studies using digital records of interpersonal interaction to address questions ranging from social inequality to diurnal and seasonal mood changes to the spread of protest in the Arab Spring, including contributions by Rob Claxton, Nathan Eagle, Scott Golder, Jon Kleinberg, Noona Oh, Patrick Park, Michael Siemens, Silvana Toska, and Shaomei Wu.