This article examines various intuitions of understanding the digital within the framework of microsociological approaches. First, we characterize the thematic areas in which microsociological research of digital technologies was conducted, and the arguments that - at the turn of the 1980s-1990s-made a case for the relevance of microsociological optics for studying the use of technology in the workplace and in corporations: workplace studies, human-computer interaction, and communication studies. We then describe how the convergence of the research positions of technical specialists and social studies occurs, and how this convergence makes it possible to translate technical and digital elements into the language of the social. Subsequent discussions concern the relationship between technology and the social in microsociological approaches. We demonstrate that technologies are secondary to everyday situations in the context of Conversational Analysis, Ethnomethodology and the Goffmanian Interactionist Framework. The prevalence of technology makes its "manufacturability” invisible to its users; failures and breakdowns play the role of an epistemic instrument, as they put digital technologies into question and help researchers discover the interactive mechanisms for maintaining their non-problematic character. In conclusion, we propose a program for studying digital technologies within the framework of microsociological approaches consisting of four options for conceptualizing digital artifacts: as objects, as tools, as a medium and as a subject. We formulate a number of conceptual and methodological principles that, in our view, will allow us to take the next steps towards developing a new language for the microanalysis of digital technologies.

In 2018, the Laboratory for Social Research Methodology (The Institute for Social Analysis and Forecasting, RANEPA) held a series of expert interviews with managers and experts from companies operating in the online research market. The topic of discussion was the online opt-in panel as the most popular and dynamic method of conducting online surveys. There are four negative features that characterize modern Russian online panels. First, there is a prevalence of legal descriptions of facts and social phenomena as opposed to experimental means of observation. Formalism and standardization of procedures work to redefine social and methodological facts into legal ones. According to the latter, quality is determined by compliance with a preestablished procedure and legal norms, but not with common sense or scientific criteria. Second, panel surveys are oversaturated with falsified data and answers formulated in an ironic, playsome manner that does not meet the requirements of the survey industry. The basic psychological state of all survey participants is distrust towards each other’s sincerity. The game of obscuring mistrust is peculiar to the culture of falsification aimed at legitimizing the established order. Third, there is an already formed institution of evading errors, ignoring and silencing regular shifts, editing and cleaning arrays without preserving the original traces of falsification. Finally, the main actors of the research market demonstrate the mechanics of blackout data and significantly reduce the heu-risticity of the information received. The critical description of the online panels presented in the article aims to rethink the development of digital research in the survey industry, identifying challenges and opportunities for the methodological culture of data collection and analysis.

Depending on the disciplinary direction and the scale of technological diffusion that was relevant at the time, the study of human-computer interaction has been characterized by various concepts. This article will focus on the main contexts of the sociotechnical - one of the concepts that is widely used to describe systems and processes, and one that includes different elements or participants - people and technologies. Such trade-offs between social and technical concepts emerged in the engineering research literature in the 1970s, were gradually adopted in the social sciences, and reached the same level of disciplinary interest by the mid-2000s. The problem of the sociotechnical continues to grow in connection with the constantly expanding digital user technologies - together with their barriers, complexities, errors and breakages - which attracts the research attention of social scientists. This work has two goals. First, the dynamics of studying the sociotechnical in different disciplinary directions will be demonstrated. For this purpose, using the Scopus publications database, the main contexts, issues and topics of relevant research will be identified for the period from 1969 to the present. Secondly, the specific features of sociotechnical research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and digital sociology - where reflexivity in relation to the research process, data, methods, and interpretations is of great importance - will be highlighted. In conclusion, the article considers the possibilities and limitations of studying sociotechnical in conditions of technocratic discourse and the development of the digital economy.

This article problematizes Internet Studies as a sub-discipline in social research. Internet Studies is an interdisciplinary research field encompassing both academic and non-academic research focusing on the internet and societal issues. The key institutions where Internet Studies develop tend to either be university-based or independent. The article focuses on these organizations and aims to reconstruct their history and areas of research as well as the type of knowledge they produce. The first part of the article is more descriptive and historical, explicating howlnternet Studies developed. The author suggests a classification of three key periods of Internet Studies development: the emergence, institutionalization and development of sub-fields, e.g. data science, digital research of different objects such as death, childhood, humanities, arts, and online-research. The key finding of this analysis is that in the internet studies there are no strict boundaries between the theoretical and empirical object. The researchers consider themselves to be co-producers of the internet. The second part of the article problematizes this type of knowledge that is constructed in internet studies, and this part is mostly based on interviews with researchers. The author brings out an idea, that internet studies does not have strict epistemological borders and strong theoretical or methodological limitations; it therefore cannot justifiably be called scientific. As such, the meaning of knowledge becomes problematic. To address this problem, the term "research knowledge” is introduced. This type of knowledge is not scientific, it does not pretend to be disciplinary and is the same inside and outside the organization and in its products. In conclusion, the findings of this research aim to contribute to the development of Internet Studies as a sub-discipline - a sub-discipline which does not aim to study an entity but a transformation of social life due to the internet.

On content, this article combines visual studies and digital ethnography of vision in order to investigate the local ways of seeing practiced by the participants of the Retro Obninsk network community when looking at old photos of the "city of the peaceful atom”. In terms of epistemology, the article captures the digital shifts in the work of a social researcher when using qualitative approaches: the need for joint distributed work, accumulation and analysis of enlarged data, saturation of qualitative research with data, increased sensitivity to the analytical use of zoom and scaling, interest in patterns, etc. The text consists of three parts. The first part describes an experimental design of a qualitative research training aimed at discovering the joint discursive and visual production of retro optics for Obninsk, emphasizing the importance of infrastructure for the organization of distributed digital research and problematizing the qualitative work with patterns. In the second part - centered around the logic of "zooming out” - Retro Obninsk is characterized by its specificity against the background of other retro-cities existing on the VKontakte platform, as an open hyperspectacular community. In the third part - centered around the logic of "zooming in” - the article explicates the optical patterns of Retro Obninsk from the collected data. These patterns include: bringing the lower boundary of the "retro” into chronological correspondence with the end of the Soviet period and searching for its visible markers; a preference for authentic "seeing something as something” over "seeing in comparison”, eliminating the discovery and discussion of affinity in the architecture of Soviet nuclear cities; a detailing view that protects an observer against immersion in the local nuclear history; the technological appropriation of "retro” and its adaptation to actual visual standards; a fascination with panorama-perspectives and a longing for the (nuclear) modernity embodied in the urban form.

This article presents the results of a content analysis of articles in Russian print media devoted to the topic of information technology. Specifically, the authors focus on analyzing the topic of the barriers (risks, threats) mentioned in these articles. The results of the research show that 43% of the sampled articles contain references to barriers that seem surprising in light of the techno-optimistic attitudes, which - as noted by other researchers - are widespread in Russia. The authors of the article show that the mention of barriers in the media is linked to the spheres of security, entertainment and communication, and that these barriers are generally portrayed as legal and political problems. Most frequently, barriers are expressed regarding the relations between the state and the private sector, as well as between Russian and foreign countries and companies. As for the foreign experience, content analysis shows an ambiguity in the development of the image of the IT sector in this context: other countries are portrayed as both a threat to information sovereignty and as role models to be followed. The article concludes with three models (the diffusion model, education model and governmentality model) to explain how and why IT barriers are presented in the Russian media.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of disengagement among Russian IT professionals. Is it a paradox that some IT-professionals criticize digital technologies? Or is it a consequence of their expert knowledge regarding the internet? From February through May 2018, the authors conducted a series of interviews with Russian IT professionals who criticize different aspects of the contemporary internet and consciously limit their use of the internet and gadgets. The interviews revolved around the informants’ user and professional biographies, as well as the reasons for - and practices of - disengagement in their personal lives. In this article, we intend to show that the reasons for disengagement are deeply rooted in the socio-cultural and political context shared by our informants. We point out how their critique of the internet is not limited to technology and its impact on people’s lives. It often becomes a means of raising social and political problems, both on the global and local scale, which some IT professionals propose to alleviate through technological solutions. The study revealed that non-use amounts to a continuum of practices. Some informants never considered using social media and other popular internet services; others almost entirely disconnected from them over time. To some research participants, non-use entails a refusal to engage in particular internet practices common among their social milieu or the outright avoidance of certain platforms.