Soziologie des Digitalen - Digitale Soziologie?

About ten years ago, we were still able to justify the reservations of sociology with regard to digitisation as a healthy caution against the hype of the ‘virtual world’ and ‘cyberspace’; today, the situation looks different: beyond the usual rhetoric of media revolutions, new forms of practice, organisation and order have emerged around digital technologies in more or less all fields, posing tangible challenges to sociological theory-building, methods development and empirical social research. Are our theories based on action, communication or practice suitable for describing the contribution of algorithms? Are our methods for dealing with language, images and printed text suitable for analysing the automatic modification of texts, images and videos by filter technologies? How do we deal with increasing competition in data analysis and evaluation? These are the questions that this special volume of the journal ‘Soziale Welt’ (ISSN 0038-6073) explores. With contributions by Dirk Baecker, Sascha Dickel, Tobias Wolbring, Barbara Sutter, Sabine Maasen, Elke Wagner, Niklas Barth, Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda, Roger Häußling, Udo Thiedeke, Josef Wehner, Nicole Zillien, Bernadette Kneidinger-Müller, Heike Greschke, Jagoda Motowidlo, René König, Patrik Sumpf, Christian Stegbauer, Alexander Mehler, Oliver Nachtwey, Philipp Staab, Andreas Boes, Tobias Kämpf, Alexander Zielger, Sabine Pfeiffer, Anne Suphan, Uli Meyer, Uwe Matzat, Erik van Ingen, Christian Papsdorf, Tanja Carstensen, Jeffrey Wimmer, John Postill, Victor Lasa, Ge Zhang, Evelyn Ruppert