As many commentators have pointed out, the outputs from social-networking sites, Twitter, and blogs are a goldmine for social and behavioral scientists. They can be used in so many ways. No wonder that the Library of Congress is intending to open a research archive of public tweets.
For the first time it will be possible to achieve what famous 19th century writers like Gabriel Tarde and Francis Ysidro Edgeworth so wanted to do, to be able to produce a “mathematical psychics” but one with real bite.
There are four sites of interest.
One is the conduct of research. We should finally be able to get a grip on all kinds of issues that have eluded social scientists, partly because they simply did not have the data. For example, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are already being mined by happiness researchers. Again, this material finally makes it possible to detect those large-scale gravitational waves of emotion that make their way through populations which are often remarked upon but have been so very difficult to see and mark. More, all kinds of behavioral relationships can be tested and confirmed which arise out of networks and bursts. Finally, these outputs have been prompted and driven by the development of new network techniques which are themselves both instruments of research and a part of how this new world has been formed. That reflexive relationship is itself of interest in that it shows how we embed our thoughts within other thoughts in different ways as new technologies arise.
Then, we can see a new era of representation coming into existence. The ability to represent large streams of information has been expanded, bringing into being all kinds of dramatic changes in how we are able to see and take in the world.
Again, the practice of teaching is now starting to change. Previously I have been a skeptic about a lot of digital initiatives. But just as the new generation of teleconferencing suites has convinced me to use them as a normal supplement to interaction so, I now realize that, with the new software that is coming on line which can be combined with phones, laptops, iPads and various tablets, it is becoming possible to follow the drift of what classes are thinking in lectures and intervene. Teaching can become a kind of mutual research activity.
Finally, it is possible to see people reacting to the information that they can access and quantifying their own lives: take a look at the numerous blogs which try to summarize biographies and interests in quantitative form. The quantitative self arrives on the scene.
In turn, we will see all kinds of old distinctions breaking down. Quantitative and qualitative no longer make much sense and all of those sterile debates in social science about which is best will become outmoded: researchers of the future will use both as a matter of course. The humanities will likely take a turn towards a much broader recursive range which will draw on all manner of devices in order to write the world in combination as well as concentrating on individual “authors.”
But there will be problems along the way (nicely summarized and satirized in Charles Stross’s new science-fiction police procedural, Rule 34). In particular, I was struck by a recent Chronicle article on the problems that Harvard researchers have faced in accessing a Harvard Facebook class around safeguarding privacy to the satisfaction of participants and the corresponding difficulties now facing research ethics committees. The relationship between researcher and researched is changing too.
