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.

- 1. Toward a Sociology of Traces. - Part I Traces Between Space, Interaction, and Symbols. - 2. Leaving a Trace: Donor Plaques as Material Evidences of Generosity?. - 3. Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice. - 4. Traces of Social Binding: Interpretive Tracing as a Bridging Concept. - 5. Clues of Displacement: The Gentrification of Silver Hill. - 6. What Do Museum Visitors Leave Behind? The New Experience and the New Visitor in the Twenty-First Century. - Part II Algorithms, Social Media, and Online Footprints. - 7. Investigating Exhaust Data in Virtual Communities. - 8. Retracing Algorithms: How Digital Social Research Methods Can Track Algorithmic Functioning. - 9. Visible and Invisible Traces: Managing the Self on Social Media Platforms. - 10. Performative Intermediaries Versus Digital Regulation. A Multidisciplinary Analysis of the Power of Algorithms. - Part III Traces and Political Sphere: Capitalism, Surveillance, Personal Rights, and Moral Concerns. - 11.  Surveilling the Surveillants: From Relational Surveillance to WikiLeaks. - 12. When the Footprint Is a Carbon One: A Sustainable Paradigm for the Analysis of the Contemporary Society. - 13. Material Traces of a Cumbersome Past: The Case of Italian Colonial History. - 14. Video Surveillance and Public Space: Surveillance Society Vs. Security State. - 15. The Right to be Forgotten in the Digital Age. - 16. Countering "Surveillance Capitalism." The Intertwining of Objective and Subjective Factors. - Part IV Traces as Strategic Research Materials. - 17. Traces and Their (In)significance. - 18. Traces and Algorithms as Socio-digital Objects. - 19. "Personal Influence" and Influencer Logic: A Theoretical and Methodological Comparison. - 20. What People Leave Behind Online: Digital Traces and Web-Mediated Documents for Social Research. - 21. Trace and Traceability in/of the Face: A Semiotic Reading through Art. - 22. Shameful Traces and Image-Based Sexual Abuse: The Case of Tiziana Cantone.