At the beginning of the year, reflecting on the sociopolitics of the UFO, I speculated that
Given the plethora of data gathered by Google, Facebook, et al., a sufficiently canny graduate student with a research grant should be able to very precisely delimit various communities according to sets of specific criteria, a kind of “digital sociology” analogous to the digital humanities. Given the possibility (if not actuality—and here my own ignorance of contemporary methods of sociological research is all too painfully apparent) of such a digital sociology (the term is actually used with a different sense in the discipline itself), it’s not too difficult to imagine how such a serious sociological investigation would seek to characterize the social formations of various UFO groups, e.g., research groups, formal and informal; communities, corporeal and virtual, etc. The advantage of such a methodology is its precision. Not only can social groups be characterized by their predilections, but by more materialist considerations, such as class, gender, and race.
Today I read at Nature an article titled “Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data”…
so that they can investigate how social media platforms influence elections and alter democracies….The scientists will have access to reams of Facebook data such as the URLs that users have shared and demographic information including gender and approximate age.
I’m not persuaded I’m possessed of any precognitive abilities, but it is pleasant to sometimes have one’s intuitions confirmed…
Skunkworks 