Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age

"Yes, but I would actually put this book first if I had to order the books in terms of importance. The reason is that this book is really ushering in a golden age of social science. When you think about it, 20 years ago, if I wanted to do a study—like I did in my book—I would need to go out and talk to lots of people about their political views. Maybe I could talk to a couple of 100 people, but that would be it. In the last 10 years what’s happened is the data revolution. We have unprecedented amounts of data and we can now study millions of people in seconds. For a social scientist, it’s like we finally found our telescope, to quote Duncan Watts, one of the great computational social scientists. “The opportunities for offline contact between Republicans and Democrats in the US is really shrinking” So Matt Salganik, in this really forward-thinking book, began to ask the question: how can this new data help us study new places? The examples he raises are everything from studying poverty in places where it’s difficult to do surveys, to studying authoritarianism. It’s all sorts of things that have been beyond the pale of social science. And yet, I also love how Matt is very careful to understand the limits of the field—the ethical dilemmas that can arise, the distortions that can happen when we only focus on the online digital traces and ignore what happens offline. That’s why it was such a great inspiration for my own book. I am an optimist. A good friend describes me as ‘a dystopian idealist,’ which I think is probably the most apt description of my outlook. We need to become aware of the tendency of social media to distort our identities and that goes for both our understanding of other people and of ourselves. This thing I call ‘the social media prism’ amplifies status-seeking extremists and mutes moderates, leaving us all feeling more polarized than we really are. And it often leads many people to engage in behavior that may make them feel good about themselves, or give them a sense of status, but it’s ultimately very deleterious for democracy. And so what we need to do is become more introspective when we use social media. We need a new kind of civics training. And that involves, in the first step, simply, becoming more aware of how social media distorts our understanding of ourselves and each other."