Theories, Methods, Practices, and Fields of Digital Social Research

The digital society is an ever-changing and rapidly evolving research object; therefore, there is the need for theoretical and methodological frameworks that may help us to understand how new technologies interact with people in the social daily life. At first, when the majority of social scientists were convinced that studying digital practices no longer meant moving away from reality, the social sciences made an effort to adapt traditional methods to research digital contexts. Subsequently, this effort was aimed at developing new methodological tools designed specifically to study the web.However, neither reworking traditional techniques nor the development of new digital tools could be considered the only valid and reliable way to do digital social research. In the former case, traditional social research methods and techniques may prove to be unsuitable for the study of certain digital practices or contexts (e.g. the study of online communities or social media-related phenomena). However, new methodological tools, with a clear digital nature, may often turn out to be extemporaneous attempts, destined to become obsolete in a very short period of time (Addeo and D'Auria, 2022). Moreover, digital social reserach frameworks should take into account the possibility that new technologies not only change, even radically, during our experience with them, but that over time the ways in which they 'intelligently' interact with us, learn from or with us in the course of our dealings with them, and make decisions will increase and intensify (Pink, 2019).At the current stage of the epistemological development of the social sciences, it is difficult to find conceptual and operational definitions of the key concepts in the digital social research field that are shared by the majority of the social science scientific community. This is not necessarily a bad thing for social science, if we consider that this in fieri state of the art could pave the way for challenging digital positivism while promoting critical digital research practices. Social scientists should 'only' be fully aware that the knowledge drawn from the use of digital and all the web-related technologies is always fuzzy, revisable and highly prone to obsolescence due to the continuous flourishing of online social practices and the creative ways in which individuals' online activities are embedded in data. Digital social research should therefore also be critical, marked by transdisciplinarity and intersectionality; it should aim to understand, and eventually interiorise, how digital technologies are conceptualised and studied in other disciplines and outside academia. Digital social researchers should conceptualise but also and above all practise the processes through which technology is designed, understood and implemented in social life (Fuchs, 2019;Pink, 2019) This research topic explores the challenges and advantages as well as the pitfalls and problems of the digital, conceived here both as an object of research and as a methodological tool, and offers epistemological and methodological insights and examples of what it means to do digital social research.