Digital Society: Emotions, Power, Activism, Data, Software, and Methods

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key concepts, theories, and scholars across digital sociology, including online affect, political economy, networked activism, datafication, algorithms, software studies, and digital social research methods.

Affective Turn

A paradigm shift in cultural and social research reflecting a growing awareness of the vital role of feelings and emotions in society, moving beyond previously neutral concerns like representation and signification.

Affect (Papacharissi)

An experience of intensity that is often unconscious—a particular drive, mood, or energy that precedes an individual, distinct from personal feelings or socially communicated emotions.

Affective Intensity

A driving force of digital sociality that attaches people to specific online networks, topics, and communities through sensory jolts, shared thrills, or even boredom.

Stickiness (Sara Ahmed)

The capacity of socially circulated and shared objects to become saturated with affect, functioning as sites of personal and social tension that link signs, figures, and bodies together.

The Grab (Theresa Senft)

A dynamic of spectatorship and participation distinctive to digital society, defined as clutching, commanding attention, and touching across stages of production, consumption, and circulation.

Resonance (Susanna Paasonen)

The reciprocal connection between affective media content and affective audiences, describing the ways they stick together and resonate or dissonate with each other.

Sentiment Analysis

A computational research technique that extracts subjective opinions, attitudes, and emotional polarities (positive, negative, neutral) from digital text by mapping keywords, internet slang, and emoji.

Dataveillance (Deborah Lupton)

A form of surveillance carried out by commercial and governmental entities via the automated monitoring and tracking of users' behavioral data traces and emotional states.

Flaming

Public, vitriolic online exchanges marked by hostility, insults, and verbal aggression, often enabled by anonymity and reduced social cues in computer-mediated communication.

Trolling

The deliberate online practice of posting inflammatory, disruptive, or deceptive content to intentionally provoke others, stir up arguments, and elicit strong emotional reactions.

Lulz

An unsympathetic, ambiguous form of laughter celebrated by internet trolls that expresses amusement at other people's distress and treats targets as objectified pawns.

Cute Cat Theory (Ethan Zuckerman)

The theory that digital platforms built for circulating everyday, non-political content (like cute cat photos) possess a latent capacity to be mobilized for political activism, making censorship difficult for governments.

Affective Publics (Zizi Papacharissi)

Networked publics called into being and mobilized through affectively charged, shared gestures and online storytelling rather than formal political agendas.

Digital Citizenship

The combination of access to digital tools, technical skills, and educational literacy required to participate effectively in society and political life online.

Second-Level Digital Divide (Eszter Hargittai)

Inequalities in internet competence and navigation skills that exist among individuals who already have physical access to the internet, creating disparities in social and political leverage.

Power Law

A mathematical distribution characterized by a continuously decreasing curve where many small, poorly connected events coexist with a tiny number of extraordinarily massive hubs.

Scale-Free Network (Albert-László Barabási)

A network structure organized around a small number of highly linked central hubs whose link distribution follows a power law rather than a random bell curve.

Preferential Attachment

The rich-get-richer process governing evolving networks, whereby nodes that already possess many connections have a significantly higher probability of attracting new connections.

Online Tribal Bureaucracy (Mathieu O'Neil)

An organizational structure in online groups that combines rule-based meritocracy and written record-keeping with the emergence of personal, charismatic authority.

The Precariat (Guy Standing)

A precarious working class in global capitalism lacking job security and predictability, including low-paid knowledge workers, gig laborers, and informal workers.

Digital Labour

The user activities—such as uploading content, writing posts, and clicking links—that produce marketable data commodities and economic value exploited by capitalist platform owners.

Playbour

The hybrid phenomenon of play and labour in which voluntary, enjoyable social media activities simultaneously operate as unpaid value-generating work for digital corporations.

Identity Tourism (Lisa Nakamura)

The online practice of temporarily assuming racial or gender identities different from one's own as playful prostheses without bearing the physical or social consequences of those identities.

Cybertypes (Lisa Nakamura)

Distinctive, collectively produced digital representations of identity that reproduce and reinforce offline racial, gendered, and cultural stereotypes within online environments.

Disruptive Spaces

Emergent online socio-cultural spaces that serve as springboards for social movements, enabling users to obstruct, circumvent, or offer alternatives to dominant power structures.

Public Sphere (Jürgen Habermas)

A social realm of rational-critical debate and deliberation outside state and commercial control where private individuals gather freely to form public opinion.

Public Sphericules

A fragmented array of diverse, small-scale mini-public spheres organized around specific issues and niche groups, diverging from a singular mass public.

Cybersalons (Jodi Dean)

Digitally mediated discussion spaces where individuals connect around shared interests and networked capabilities rather than physical proximity or traditional shared identities.

Private Sphere (Zizi Papacharissi)

A hybrid digital realm where autonomous, personalized, and seemingly private expressions carried out in personal online spaces produce collective civic and political consequences.

Monitorial Citizen (Michael Schudson)

A citizen who continuously scans the informational environment in a watchful, surveillance-like manner, remaining poised for action when circumstances demand it.

Citizen Journalism

The practice in which ordinary people document, interpret, and circulate eyewitness accounts and news footage using digital devices, bypassing mainstream editorial gatekeepers.

Networked Social Movements (Manuel Castells)

Decentralized, autonomous protest movements originating on horizontal digital networks that bypass formal organizational hierarchies and occupy physical urban space.

Communication Power (Manuel Castells)

The capacity of social actors to construct meaning in people's minds through the symbolic manipulation and autonomous dissemination of messages across multimedia networks.

Personal Action Frames (Bennett & Segerberg)

Easily personalized, inclusive memes and slogans that allow diverse individuals to mobilize around shared grievances without adopting a rigid collective identity.

Connective Action (Bennett & Segerberg)

A mode of political mobilization organized directly through digital peer-to-peer sharing and personalized communication networks rather than centralized movement organizations.

Protocol (Alex Galloway)

A standardized set of rules and code specifications (such as TCP/IP or DNS) that governs communication and establishes the underlying architecture of control in distributed networks.

Tactical Media (Alex Galloway)

Media practices and activist interventions that exploit flaws in proprietary and protocological systems to disrupt control and repurpose technologies toward emancipatory goals.

Digital Repertoire of Contention

The evolving set of digital methods, tactics, and protest forms (e.g., hashtag activism, connective action) available to ordinary people that lower the costs and physical barriers of activism.

Datafication

The social process of rendering ever-greater aspects of human life, interactions, and environments into quantified, machine-readable data.

Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff)

An economic order that claims private human experience as free raw material to be translated into behavioral data, predictive products, and commercial profit.

Data Exhaust

The unstructured byproducts, traces, and behavioral ephemera left behind inadvertently by users during their routine digital interactions and device usage.

Data Selves (Deborah Lupton)

Digital identities configured and understood as assemblages of personal data traces, metrics, and behavioral informatics generated through continuous online tracking.

Quantified Self

The cultural practice of tracking and registering one's biological, behavioral, and daily routines using wearable sensors, self-tracking apps, and personal analytics.

Algorithms

Step-by-step mathematical procedures and coded logics executed on input data to solve problems and produce specific computational outputs.

Algorithmic Literacy (Kelley Cotter)

The critical knowledge of what algorithms do, how they operate, and their societal consequences, enabling citizens to resist algorithmic power and demand democratic accountability.

Programmed Sociality (Taina Bucher)

The conditioning and structuring of human social interaction and online visibility through the algorithmic rules embedded in digital platforms.

Filter Bubble (Eli Pariser)

A personalized digital information environment created by recommendation algorithms that isolates users from opposing views by continually reinforcing preexisting beliefs.

Calculated Publics (Tarleton Gillespie)

Algorithmic groupings and audiences computed and invoked by platform recommendation systems rather than formed organicially through social interaction.

Data Justice

A critical framework that treats datafication as an issue of social justice, scrutinizing historical inequalities, discrimination, and the systemic impacts of automated processing.

Software Studies

An interdisciplinary field exploring software not merely as technical instructions, but as a vital cultural, political, and material force shaping everyday life.

PageRank

Google's foundational search algorithm that measures the relevance of a webpage based on the number and authority of hyperlinks directed toward it.

Link Economy

A web ecosystem where hyperlinks operate as pseudo-monetary currency and primary measures of value, reputation, and search engine visibility.

Like Economy

An online economy structured around embedded social buttons and reaction features that transform user sentiments into comparable, marketable, and traceable behavioral data.

Internet of Things

A network of physical objects and devices integrated with sensors, software, and network connectivity that communicate and share data autonomously.

Hyperconnectivity

The condition of persistent, ubiquitous online accessibility and contact fostered by mobile digital devices across time and space.

Approximeetings (Sadie Plant)

The practice of negotiating social gatherings where exact meeting times and locations are left flexible and progressively refined via mobile communication as the event nears.

Micro-Coordination (Ling & Yttri)

The practical, instrumental use of mobile phones for real-time logistics, such as announcing delays and progressively adjusting schedules.

Hyper-Coordination (Ling & Yttri)

The expressive, relational use of mobile devices to maintain emotional bonds, exchange gossip, and reinforce social ties through ongoing communication.

Perpetual Contact (Katz & Aakhus)

The prevailing socio-technical imperative in digital society that emphasizes continuous social accessibility and immediate communication via mobile technology.

Methodological Bricolage

A pragmatic research approach where methods are flexibly assembled, adapted, and combined from diverse qualitative and quantitative traditions to address specific research questions.

Digital Ethnography

The qualitative, interpretive study of everyday practices, cultures, and meanings in environments where digital mediation and material offline life intersect.

Thick Description (Clifford Geertz)

An ethnographic account that moves beyond superficial factual records to reveal and interpret the complex conceptual structures and webs of meaning underlying human action.

E3 Internet (Christine Hine)

A framework defining the contemporary internet as embedded in material contexts, embodied through sensory practices, and woven into everyday routines.

Social Network Analysis (SNA)

A formal methodology that models, visualizes, and quantifies the relational structures, ties, and flow of resources among actors represented as nodes and edges in a graph.

Dyad

The fundamental structural unit of social network analysis, consisting of a pair of social actors and the specific tie connecting them.

Strength of Weak Ties (Mark Granovetter)

The sociological theory demonstrating that distant, casual acquaintances (weak ties) are more effective than close relations (strong ties) at bridging structural holes and sharing novel information.

Distant Reading (Franco Moretti)

A computational text analysis approach that foregoes the close reading of single documents to discern broad linguistic, thematic, and structural patterns across large textual corpora.

Digitally Analogue Outcomes

Uses of digital media that merely imitate or emulate pre-digital media practices without producing any substantial transformation in underlying social logic.

Digitally Enhanced Outcomes

Social practices where pre-existing offline activities persist but undergo scale changes in speed, reach, and efficiency by leveraging digital affordances.

Digitally Transformative Outcomes

Social actions and organizational models that depend entirely on natively digital affordances and could not exist without them, representing a fundamental model change in sociality.