Digital Sociology Podcast

In this episode I spoke to Rachel Thomson who is Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies at the University of Sussex. Rachel tells me about the “Everyday Childhoods” project (which is part of the long-running “Mass Observation Project”). This is a project which both archives young peoples’ lives and studies their use of digital media and devices. We talk about how this project fits with older forms of archiving and existing approaches to childhood studies and the significance of how children and watched and what happens when this becomes digitized.

The Digital Sociology Podast is having a break for a couple of weeks but I'll be back soon with more interviews with researchers of the digital.

For episode 8 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I had a chat with Warren Pearce who is the Faculty Fellow (iHuman) at the University of Sheffield. He is working on the “Making Climate Social” project which is investigating how climate change debate happens across the web. Warren tells me about some of the innovative digital methods he is using to understand how conversations about climate change take place on Youtube comments and other places online. I hear about some research Warren has done about Koko the Gorilla and his dominance of one area of the climate change discussion online. Koko is a gorilla with a big online presence who lent his popularity to raising awareness of climate change but Warren and his colleagues found that the impact was not quite what it seems on the surface. You can read more about some of Warren’s work on climate change discussion on Twitter and see a full list of his publications here. Also, you can follow Warren on Twitter @WarrenPearce

In episode 7 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Justine Gangneux about her work on how social media users engage in the practice of “checking” and “Facebook stalking”. The empirical research she has conducted shows the importance of humour and of taking “guilty pleasure” in monitoring what others are doing. Justine told me about how people research one another to assess potential future romantic partners, the suitability of flatmates and possible friendships among colleagues. This practice Justine refers to as “scrutiny” rather than surveillance as it brings together issues of transparency, care, humour, monitoring and other elements. Justine’s broader theoretical work can be found in her discussion of surveillance. You can follow Justine on Twitter @JGgnx and see her blog https://justinegangneux.wordpress.com/

For episode 6 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to the world renowned sociologist Deborah Lupton. Deborah has been a leading figure in the sociology of health, public health, the body and risk as well as many other areas. More recently she has been a pioneer of digital sociology. Here we talk a bit about her biography and how she came to be researching “the digital” and how her early work on the virality of HIV paved the way for thinking about digital networks. We also discuss self-tracking of health and exercise and how this relates to metaphors of flows. Deborah tells me about how some of her work on risk has fed into her understanding of big data and health and how she believes there is a new kind of individualisation in public health discourse influenced by the use of self-tracking. For more of Deborah’s insights on the Quantified Self and self-tracking see her book on that topic, she also has a recent book on digital sociology and new one on digital health. For even more s

Holly Powell-Jones is a PhD student at City University London and a former broadcast journalist and educator who is conducting research into the young peoples’ perceptions of risk and criminality online. We talk about her methods of research and how her ethical position informed her approach. For instance, when conducting research she integrates educational aspects which help to inform young people about online criminality and how they can be recognised. Holly tells me about how her participants have made sense of, and made judgements about “sexting” and “revenge porn” amongst other issues and we assess the effectiveness of current legal frameworks in the UK. We touch on issues such as who is considered to be “risky” and what behaviours are considered to be “risky”. Often we assume that younger people are more likely to engage in risky behaviour due to being inexperienced but Holly found that younger people were more risk averse and often “hyper risk managers” who are highly aware of

In episode 4 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Louise Reid from the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews about her research on energy demand, smart technology and wellbeing. Louise told me about some of her findings about how people engage with and understand technologies which allow them to monitor their energy usage. She told me about how she used analysis of Mumsnet discussions to explore how people use smart energy devices. This was really useful because it was a completely different kind of interaction compared to a traditional research interview. This generated much more detailed data on how participants’ interact with their technologies and enabled the researchers to observe the seemingly mundane reality of how people engage in energy practices. We also talk about the differences between how research is done in digital sociology and digital geography and what the two are learning from one another. You can follow Louise on

In this third episode I spoke to Nick Prior who is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh and a Visiting Fellow at Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan. We talk about the influence of digital technology on music consumption and production including midi formats and autotune. The discussion touches on Nick's work on how iPods have changed the way in which we experience public space. Nick also tells me about his latest work on the "crowdsourced" Japanese "virtual popstar" Hatsune Miku. You can find Nick on Twitter @nickprior4

In this episode I spoke to Sian Lincoln about her “Facebook Timelines” project in which they spoke to people about their use of the social network. We discuss the “scroll back method” of interviewing she used to explore the role of Facebook in young peoples’ lives. Sian and I reflect on Facebook etiquette and how people police each other’s behaviour online. We also talk about the central place which nostalgia takes in Facebook but how it structures perceptions of the future. Sian also suggests from her analysis that Facebook’s success (over other, like Myspace, which failed) was enabled by the simultaneous rise of smartphones and that Facebook use is becoming less public. Also, is Facebook cool any more? Was it ever cool? More here: http://thisisnotasociology.blog/2017/07/27/digital-sociology-podcast-episode-2-sian-lincoln-facebook-identity-and-nostalgia

This is the first episode in my new Digital Sociology Podcast. In this series I will be talking to researchers doing work looking at the impact of digital technologies on society and culture. For this episode I spoke to Mike Saker from Southampton Solent University about his work on "locative media" such as Pokémon Go and Foursquare. We discussed the application of the notion of the flâneur to the digital realm. We questioned whether locative media enable a new commercialisation of space and commodification of play? Mike questioned whether locative media create a performance of authenticity? We also discussed Mike’s tendency to study things just as they die!

For this final episode in the series I spoke to Aristea Fotopolou about her work on gender, data and self-tracking. She told me about her work on fertility and pregnancy apps and how they construct and embody discourses of gender, capitalism and neoliberalism. We question the extent to which we are encouraged to be "good citizens". In my view Aristea has some very interesting and useful ways of conceptualising the ways in which we engage with health and exercise tracking such as "biopedagogy" and focusing on the "micropractices" of using technology. Aristea tells me about her experience of conducting an autoethnography of her use of self-tracking and how her identity as a researcher and a research participant blurred. In the discussion Aristea connects the discussion of self-tracking to her other work on feminist activism and digital networks through suggesting that tracking is a form of gendered labour.

For this episode in the series I spoke to Btihaj Ajana who is a Senior Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities and Creative Industries at King’s College London and Associate Professor at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. We talk about her work on biometrics and self-tracking. She suggests that when our bodies are transformed into data they are able to be distributed over networks and our bodily boundaries become more open and fuzzy. She sees this as a shift from body as flesh to body as data and this new ontology requires a new engagement with ethics politics and regulation.

In the sixth episode in the series I spoke to Liz McFall from the Open University. Liz discusses some of her work on the history of insurance and how this relates to the contemporary impact which digital data is having on insurance. New sources of data are changing how data is calculated although sometimes the changes are not as big as we might expect. We discuss whether self-tracking technologies will create personalised insurance pricing based on exercise activities and speculate on the forthcoming changes to the Affordable Care Act in USA.

For this podcast I spoke to Lynne Pettinger about the work she has done with Ewen Speed and Andrew Goffey on the use of data in the NHS and its impact on how services are managed and understood and the role it plays in privatisation. A key issue she addresses is the impact of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and how it signalled a shift in the role of the NHS. In particular there was a move from the role of the state being to "provider of care" to being a"promoter of care".

In episode 4 of the podcast I am talking to Will Davies, the author of The Happiness Industry and The Limits of Neoliberalism. Will tells me about his research into the history of economics and psychology and its influence on public policy. Why do governments and businesses want to make us happy? What's in it for them?

In episode 3 of the podcast I am speaking to Tamar Sharon about her work on self-tracking and the move of digital companies (such as Google, Facebook and Apple) into health research. Amongst other things we discuss the Apple HealthKit and Google's Baseline study and their implications for the political economy of health and how they are potentially skewing the direction of health research. We also think consider whether self-tracking should be seen as a manifestation of neoliberalism or as something with the potential for the development of different kinds of identities.

In the second episode of my Digital Health/Digital Capitalism podcast I spoke to Minna Ruckenstein about her work on various aspects of digital health and in particular how this is influenced by consumption. We discussed issues around "surveillance capitalism", "prosumption" in digital health technologies, direct to consumer genetic testing and the potential for self tracking devices to be used to establish social solidarity.

This is the first podcast in the series and I am speaking to Nick Fox about his work on personal medical devices and his analysis of digital health and digital capitalism more generally. I think this discussion works pretty well as a broad introduction to the themes of the series as Nick really clearly lays out some useful ways of approaching these things. He also offers some suggestions of how things might develop in the future and some propositions for how we can challenge some of the more damaging aspects of the digital health and capitalism. Can we reshape digital technologies to have more positive and collective affects? Can networked health devices enable solidarity and collective action?