SOCI 391: Big Data, Technology, and Society

SOCI 391-001: Big Data, Technology, Society
(Spring 2025)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R

Horizon Hall 3010

Section Information for Spring 2025

Society and humanity are undergoing a digital transformation. Seemingly durable social institutions – states, markets, civil society, science, and human rights – that we created to protect us from our shared human vulnerabilities as embodied and socially dependent organisms are now hitched to newly emerging, Internet-based digital technologies embedded in the very social relations that shape our understanding of society and humanity. In this course, we examine the rapidly changing relations between these digital technologies, contemporary processes of knowledge production, and society, including our relations as humans to machines and the planet’s changing ecology.

We survey a wide array and combination of digital technologies, and explore new forms of data, algorithmic design and implementation, data practices (production, capturing, mining, prospecting, coding, analysis, control, storage, ownership, commodification, consumption, repair and re-purposing) and knowledge production and application across a wide variety of organizations, institutions and contexts. We analyze and compare new theories of the impact of this digital transformation on capitalism (e.g., surveillance capitalism and platform capitalism), governance (e.g., digital authoriarianization, democratization, “infocratization,”and data colonialism), and alternative social, political, and economic movements that include the creation of platform cooperatives and digital commons and struggles over data sovereignty (or localization). We discuss emerging regulatory initiatives, practices, and visions of states, civil societies, and corporations (including networks of collaborative governance among them) toward the digital practices of “platforms” that own or control vectors of data and information, as well as the changing social relations facilitating or challenging the digital transformation of science and technology and its impact on human rights, and our understanding of humans themselves.

Throughout the course, as we examine the social, ethical, cultural, political, ideological, cognitive, emotional, ontological and epistemological dimensions of this digital transformation, we consider competing ideas for how to situate our own “self” understanding and production of knowledge (as scholars, citizens, and “prosumers”) within these dynamic and often conflicting relations and discourses. We also learn what these changes mean for the future of the social sciences and humanities, and what these disciplines in turn can teach us about these changes that the “analytics” of computational and data sciences cannot – all with the purpose of exploring, understanding, and pursuing mutually valuable collaborative research across all of these disciplines.

Course Information from the University Catalog