The Fields of Digital Research: topics and developments

In recent decades, the Internet - and technologies that fall into the category of what are called ICI - have taken on a central role in people's lives. Every aspect of life seems to be permeated by the incursion of digital resources and technologies, to the point that sociology has begun to question how these redesign some phenomena that sociology, as a science of "social facts", has always questioned and focused on. What is being called into question, in a logic that goes from micro to macro, are the classic sociological conceptions of identity, of the nature and formation of social bonds, of the structures and dimensions of the collective imagination. According to recent data from ... smartphone users are % and own a computer %. Although a digital divide persists in certain areas of the world and for certain social categories, the centrality that these tools assume for people is evident, influencing their decision-making processes, attitudes, values ​​and imaginations. It therefore seems increasingly necessary to add as a third element of the object of sociology - which as is known studies the relationship between the individual and society - that of the media, which here assume a dual role: on the one hand they are a place of social conditioning, in a structural sense, to the extent that digital spaces are also contexts in which new forms of power and control are highlighted, on the other hand they are places of identity expression and participation, to the extent that these environments are themselves the result of the interaction and communication that users give life to in digital spaces.