The Future Of Sociology In The Digital Era

The goal of this thesis is to advocate for a shift in the focus of sociological research away from groups to the individual. Since its founding, Sociology has traditionally dealt mainly with the concept of groups. While previous research has provided us a general framework with which to interpret human history, I will argue that group-based theories cannot provide the microscopic detail necessary for study of daily life, which makes up the vast majority of human interaction. In the past, humans were less mobile, and this created great overlap between geographical identities, kinship identities and historical identities. However, as human society allows greater mobility, this connection is dissolving, and the inaccuracies produced by group-based theories are becoming more pronounced. Although social groups are undeniably true on a subjective level, they cannot be meaningfully used to analyze the behavior of individuals because social groups cannot be properly defined and because all individuals are members of multiple social groups, making the interpretation of individual behavior in terms of groups extremely difficult if not impossible. I propose viewing social groups primarily as linguistic concepts, as words which are learned from others but imperfectly ’copied’ to the individuals’brain At the same time, decreasing costs of printing and distribution are enabling a new type of research, a data-centered research focused on daily life.This thesis provides a preliminary model of how to conceive of culture in individual terms. In Part Ⅱ will demonstrate the shortcomings of group-based theories, then argue theoretically why an individual based theory is superior. In Part Ⅱ I will explain in detail how culture can be understood in terms of the individual, and why people from the same group will have similar characteristics even though these characteristics are not causally related to group membership. Based on this model, in Part Ⅲ I will discuss one possible way of interpreting history through this point of view, then I will show how this point of view can help us avoid some of the controversies around which so much academic debate is centered. In Part Ⅳ I will provide a general framework for how research could be conducted using an individual-based model of culture. While this individual perspective relies on the general framework of the historical development of human society provided by previous authors, it will allow us to fill in the details that were outside the scope of previous works.