The London Riots and the Simulation of Sociality in Social Media Data Research

Abstract

The concept of collectivity in the social sciences hinges on a tension between technology’s propensity for speeding-up and slowing-down, as well as for calculation and change. Furthermore, it implies that the social sciences inhabit this tension by assuming the technological possibility of objectivity, while also performing the idea that true objectivity must rid itself of all limiting techniques. These accelerating tensions then generate ‘more true’ and more questionable renditions of the social. In order to illustrate the tensions embedded in the concept of collectivity, this article explores the progressive rationale that informed the data mining and modelling conducted by the British newspaper The Guardian around the London riots, which can be understood as the harnessing of change and risk through ‘social media’ for neoliberal capital. Social science data mining shows itself here to be implicated in an increasingly displaced and oppressive ideal of social change and scientific progress via its utopia of ideal community.