The Internet As an Institution: Reconceptualizing the Digital for Sociology As a Discipline

Within the last twenty years, a new generation of up-and-coming social science scholars has pursued their research agenda using digital spaces and data to investigate our social world. Like other previously burgeoning sub-disciplines within social sciences, digital sociology is still subject to more mainstream disciplinary criticism, especially when publishing and disseminating peer-reviewed work. To integrate digital sociology into the mainstream, we must move forward methodologically and theoretically towards more integrated research, so that non-digital scholars do not treat digital spaces as ad hoc proxies for "real" (i.e., more traditional) data or as mutually exclusive from "real life." But how? For digital sociologists, a necessary first step is reconceptualization of the digital spaces we study. What are the Internet and its digital spaces therein? I argue that social scientists study the Internet as a social institution. Patricia Yancey Martin (2004) once conducted a comprehensive review of the conceptual development of the institution throughout twentieth-century social theory to argue that sociologists should study gender as such. Extending her argument, the first part of this article draws on Martin's twelve criteria for categorizing any phenomenon as a social institution to make a case for the Internet. I use examples of prior digital scholarship to demonstrate how the Internet represents a new social institution worthy of inquiry through "its twelve defining characteristics" of endurance (persistence over time), social practices, conflicts, power struggles, identity formation, and change, among other criteria (Martin 2004; 1256). This approach can enrich the evaluation of peer-reviewed digital research, expand social theory, deepen our understanding of the Internet's social nature, and stimulate more critical investigations into the interconnections of the Internet and other social institutions that could reshape the landscape of digital sociology and open up exciting new avenues for research.