What People Leave Behind : Marks, Traces, Footprints and Their Relevance to Knowledge Society

This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science.

This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others.

Francesca Comunello (PhD) is a Full Professor at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome. Her research and publications focus on the intersections between digital technology and society, including digitally mediated social relations, ageing and digital communication, gender and ICT, civic engagement, digital platforms and disaster communication. She has been a member of several national and international research projects and research networks (including European Commission-funded projects); she has also been the PI of several research projects focusing on digital media. She has held a 2-year fellowship at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain), and was awarded a 5-week “Media and Communication Fellowship” by the School of Languages, Social and Political Sciences (LSAP), University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her work has been published in highly ranked journals such as: New Media and Society, Information Communication and Society, Media Culture and Society, The Sociological Review, The Communication Review, Ageing and Society, American Behavioral Scientist, Violence Against Women, and International Journal of Press/Politics. She has authored 3 books: the most recent one (with Simone Mulargia) is Social Media in Earthquake-Related Communication (Emerald, 2018).

Fabrizio Martire (PhD) is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome. Among his main scientific interests: sociological theory, history of sociology and social researches, methodology of social researches (with a specific focus on data collection strategies and techniques), public opinion analysis, evaluation (with a specific focus on quality of social research outputs). On these issues he has organized and supervised several scientific projects, publishing almost 70 essays (monographs, edited volumes, articles in Italian and international journals, chapters). He has attended several international and Italian conferences, giving seminars in a number of foreign universities (Spain, Republic of Korea, Chile, Colombia). He is member of the Advisory Board of the Research Network – Quantitative Methods (RN21) of the European Sociological Association (since 2019); partner of the “Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability”, Berlin, Technische Universität; Member of the Scientific Committee of the Editorial Series “Methodology of Human Sciences”, official series of the Section of Methodology of the Italian Sociological Association (since 2017); and member of the Teaching Board of the doctoral course in communication, social research and marketing, Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome. Since 2021, he is the Director of the BA program in “Communication, technologies and digital cultures” at Sapienza University of Rome.

Lorenzo Sabetta (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome, and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Luiss University. Previously, he was a postdoc fellow in the USA, at the Department of Sociology at the University of Missouri/Columbia (2017-2018), and in Sweden, at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University (2019-2020). He was also invited visiting researcher at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford (January-February 2022) and EkSoc Fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Sociology at University of Lodz (February-June 2022). He works at the intersection of sociological theory, cultural-cognitive sociology, sociology of knowledge, and methodology of social sciences. His recent publications include: The Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton (Anthem Press, 2022, with C. Crothers); Against the Background of Social Reality. Defaults, Commonplaces, and the Sociology of the Unmarked (Routledge, 2022 forthcoming, with C. Lombardo); Appearance of Nothingness. An Analysis of Concealed Strategic Actions (in W. Brekhus, T. DeGloma, and W.R. Force, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interaction, 2021).