Digital Social Worlds

Contact person : Johann Chaulet (johann.chaulet@univ-tlse2.fr)

Caroline Datchary, Julien Figeac, Nikos Smyrnaios

We can only observe the rise of networked digital technologies that populate our daily lives: ordinary sociability, work, entertainment, education; almost all of our social life is gradually colonized by digital devices. Devices, networks, online services are becoming useful but also invasive adjuvants of our personal, professional and civic life. Taking them into consideration appears to be a necessity.

However, we cannot isolate and even less essentialize purely digital activities, since the digital must be thought and conceived as an equipment of the activity and not as its determinant. Consequently, the study of the digitization of social worlds calls for a simultaneous grasp of what is happening both online and offline, and for resituating this transformation in a diachronic perspective that takes into account the historical, social, political and economic processes at work. Technicist and marketing approaches, imbued with technical determinism, neglect a multitude of issues at stake in the growing digitalization of the social world.

It is precisely these issues that the operation Digitalized Social Worlds, through a systematic questioning of the foundations of the social link and a theoretical and empirical distance, intends to grasp. It must therefore allow for the production of scientific knowledge that can be used to equip a citizen's critique in the face of hegemonic tools and discourses around the digital world. This intention will be applied in the framework of research on the fragmentation and digitization of public space and public policies, the political economy of digital actors, and the equipment of sociability and professional activity.