Facebook’s advertising campaign
These are in Manchester Piccadilly at the moment. Anyone know how widespread this campaign is?
Updates from June, 2016 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Wherefore Art Thou, Elvis?
And I got half a mind to let it all burn up in this fire
I’ve had burning through my veins since I first learned to cry
I’d watch this whole night come down and never miss her again
I never felt right and never fit in walkin’ in my own skinWalkin’ in my own skin
Now I got scars like the number of stars
My mind’s full of vipers
I got the dust of the desert in my bones
Comin’ through the amplifiersAnd in the minor chord fall and the fourth and the fifth
It’s a broken Hallelujah and a pain in my fist
I wash my hands like the man with the blood on his teeth
Over and over without reliefAnd I got nothin’ for you darlin’ but a story to tell
About the rain on the pavement and the sound as it fell
I’d watch this whole night come down and never miss her again
I never felt right and never fit in -
Mark
Institutionalised depoliticisation at the IMF
From No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, loc 2771:
The tendency for political objectives to drive economic decisions –which are then propagated as purely technical policies geared at improving economic growth –is a well-known operating principle within the IMF. The late economist Jacques Polak, a former IMF director of research and one of the longest serving staffers –the IMF honoured him after his death by naming its annual research conference after him –once put it bluntly. ‘The proprieties of the Fund’, he said, ‘contain an unwritten rule that, if at all possible, political arguments be dressed up in economic garb’.
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Murmuration
Watching this is enough to make me temporarily rethink my long standing hostility to ‘global brain’ speculation. It’s remarkable what beautiful order can arise in a purely aggregative way and it’s something I’ve tended not to recognise in my theorising of collectivity.
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Trans/Gender-Nonconforming College Students Project
Trans/Gender-Nonconforming College Students Project
Abbie Goldberg, a Professor of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester MA, is conducting a survey oftrans/gender-nonconforming college students (including recent graduates) regarding their perspectives and experiences on a range of topics, including trans advocacy and needed supports/services on college campuses.Students with non-binary gender identities are particularly encouraged to participate, as their experiences are rarely represented in research. Students may participate if they identify as trans, gender-nonconforming, gender questioning, genderqueer, agender, or anywhere on the gender-nonconforming spectrum. The survey, which was informed by focus groups and consultation with trans/gender nonconforming college students, takes about 25-30 minutes to complete. All responses are anonymous. Individuals can elect to be entered in a lottery for one of 10 $50.00 Amazon gift cards; individuals’ names and email addresses will not be connected to or traceable to the data that they provide.
Please contact the principal investigator of the study, Abbie Goldberg, with any questions or feedback, or to request to be informed of study findings: agoldberg@clarku.edu. Feel free to learn more about her research on sexuality, gender, and families. Or visit the project Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/transgnc.
This study has been approved by the Clark Committee for the Rights of Human Participants in Research and Training Programs (IRB). Any questions about human rights issues should be directed to the IRB Chair, Dr. James P. Elliott:(508) 793-7152 or by e-mail (humansubjects@clarku.edu).
To participate, please follow the link:
https://clarku.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1ZbVuLudzxQyWdn
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Ford’s Sociological Department
A fascinating snippet from No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, loc 932:
The Ford Motor Company established its own Sociological Department, employing an initial team of fifty and then a total of 160 ‘investigators’ tasked with circulating in the community and paying impromptu visits to the homes of Ford’s workers, each of whom needed to be confirmed as sober, thrifty (through making regular bank deposits), and ‘clean of person’ to qualify for the new five-dollars-a-day remuneration scheme.
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What makes the sharing economy go round?
A question I’ve been asking myself since I reluctantly started using Uber a few months ago: what makes the sharing economy go round? ‘Uberness‘ does:
Uber rides require some “Uberness” from both the client and riders. We’re commited to making sure to work with quality drivers and do our best to keep your rides as smooth as possible. Please help to do the same for the drivers! Uber has the potential to really change the way transportation occurs and is utilized; we just need people on all ends to help make it happen!
https://newsroom.uber.com/cancelations-no-one-likes-being-stood-up/
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On Digital Qualitative Research
At the end of last week, I attended a really thought provoking workshop at Bath university on Digital Qualitative Research. It was organised by Phil Brooker and Dina Vasileiou, both based at Bath, inviting a really interestingly diverse range of people (theorists, qualitative researchers, commercial social researchers, computer scientists, HCI researchers and software developers) to discuss the challenges entailed by qualitative digital research and to discuss how existing software could be changed or new software developed to meet these needs.
These are the ideas and problems we compiled as a group which structured the subsequent workshop:
These are my scrawled notes on the discussion I had with smaller groups:
We had some fascinating discussions about the necessity of ‘up-skilling social scientists’ for digital research but doing so in a way which avoids lionising and imitating computer science. This raises the obvious question for me though, as to what digital qualitative research is for: what are we seeking to preserve and why? What’s lost if we lose a qualitative perspective in digital social research? My instinct here is to go back to interpretation, to argue for the irreducibility of the interpretive dimension of social life. To go back to a critique of behaviourism and a critique of positivism, both of which are currently being rearticulated in complex and interconnected ways, but to develop these as part of a methodological engagement with the dazzling array of social scientific opportunities that digital research is opening up. Theory should be at the heart of Digital Social Science, but not theory for theory’s sake.
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Social media for academics and the risk of becoming ‘TED heads’
One of the anxieties I’ve regularly encountered about social media for academics is that it might lead to a devaluing of academic culture. What if I were to tell you that the spectre haunting the imagination of academics is the TED talK?
There’s a lovely expression used by Linsey McGoey in her No Such Thing as a Free Gift, ‘TED Heads’:
amiable entrepreneurs and executives who congregate at exorbitantly priced TED events around the world, flocking to headline events (‘ speaking innovation to power’; ‘branding for good’) with the earnestness of a Grateful Deadhead on his fifth tour.
Vacuous thought leadership, nuggets of easy digestible platitudes, perfect for cultivating vast audiences of overly-influential idiots. It’s a compelling vision, as far as fears go. It’s one founded on a conflation of simplification and being simplistic. But it’s nonetheless something which advocates of social media for academics need to do more to counter substantively, rather than merely dismiss.
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The Janus-faced ideology of philanthropic elites
A fascinating observation in No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, loc 785. I wonder if the digital elites who interest me see their wealth in similar terms?
It was a Janus-faced ideology; one side of Carnegie was extraordinarily generous, expending time and vast financial sums on goals such as military disarmament and racial equality. On the other side, he adopted ever more draconian policies towards his workers the more convinced he became that his wealth would ultimately benefit the larger community.
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Social Media and Academic Labour
Notes for my talk in Leeds tomorrow.
It is increasingly hard to move without encountering the idea that social media is something of value for academics. The reasons offered are probably quite familiar by now. It helps ensure your research is visible, both inside and outside the academy. Many of us might be sceptical of the dominant discourse of impact within which such a concern for visibility tends to be expressed. I certainly am in many ways, worrying that this is irrevocably tied up in the instrumentalisation of research, the declining autonomy of researchers and the marketisation of the Academy within which research takes place. Nonetheless the imperative to make and demonstrate impact is already an entrenched characteristic of the research economy and looks likely to stay that way.
In this short talk, I will make the case that social media in general and blogging in particular represent a way to expand academic autonomy, improve the quality of our scholarship and nonetheless meet the demands of what I have elsewhere called the Accelerated Academy, all at the same time. This might seem implausible, so please bear with me. If it seems overly optimistic, let’s talk about this at the end because my actual view of the research economy is pretty grim and depressing. My enthusiasm for social media comes in large part because I see it as something that can, at least potentially work to ameliorate a whole series of problems that afflict those within the contemporary research economy.
A good way into this is to consider some of the other benefits increasingly held to obtain through academics using social media. I already mentioned visibility, internal to the academy and outside of it. Related to this, is the chance to practice communication with nonspecialist audiences. It’s a faster way to get your research findings out. It allows you to build an audience for future publications, in advance of their actual release. In doing so, it allows you to find people who share your research interests, as connections more or less inevitably form on the basis of what you publish and what you read online.
But the advantage that I’m most interested in and the one that will be key to the argument I’m making here, is that the more you write, the easier writing gets. The more you think, the easier thinking gets. My enthusiasm for social media in general, as well as blogging in particular, stems from the endless occasions they offer for thinking and writing.
But isn’t thinking and writing what we do anyway? Well yes, on one level, it is. Though I think there are important questions to be asked about how the accelerating pace of working life in contemporary universities impacts on the time and energy available for thinking and writing. But talk today is not about that.
It’s this presumably everyday quality to academic thinking and writing which has increasingly left me confused about one of the most common concerns, even objections, to academic social media: isn’t it just one more thing for already busy people to do? On the surface, this makes complete sense. This is certainly true for some people. It’s almost certainly true for everyone at least some of the time. But much of what academics do on social media should not be something extrinsic to their scholarship but instead should be constitutive of it. As the sci-fi author, digital rights activist and blogger Cory Doctorow puts it: blogging is “my major way of thinking through the stuff that matters to me”. This is true of myself as well. I think it’s true of many academics using social media, even if they don’t recognise it. Furthermore, I think much of the value that social media has for academics within the contemporary research economy won’t be actualised until this has become a ubiquitous feature of how we talk about the way we can use social media as researchers.
There’s a lovely extract of the Academic Diary in which Les Back reflects on the life and work of the social theorist Vic Seidler. Remarking on the vast range of topics on which Seidler has written, Les suggests that this deeply committed man “writes not because his academic position expects it but because he has something to say and communicate”. For someone like Seidler, writing is something a person does because they are “trying to work something out”.
This captures what I see as the promise of academic social media. It’s a platform for trying to work things out. More so, doing it in the open grants each of these attempts a social existence, one that comes with undoubted risks but also enormous rewards. Little bits of thought shrapnel, brief attempts to make some sense of the ‘feel of an idea’, come to enjoy their own existence within the world. They’re mostly forgotten or even ignored from the outset. But there’s something quite remarkable about occasions when these fragments resurface as someone sees something of value in them, perhaps when you saw no value in them yourself.
In this way, it attunes you to the impulse to write because you have “something to say and communicate”. This isn’t always the case and I worry that the metricisation of scholarly blogging will prove immensely destructive of it. But there is at least for now something deeply rewarding about seizing on an inchoate idea, developing it and throwing it off into the world to see what others make of it. For no other reason than the pleasure inherent to it. Whether this non-instrumental exploration of ideas remains the norm or could be sustained in the long term is a different question – as I’ll come on to, I think there are reasons to worry that the research economy is inimical to this.
What does this all mean practice? I’m talking about quite straight forward practices which all of those conducting research engage in to differing degrees. I’ve often used the term ‘public notebook’ and the existence of non-public notebooks is the most obvious point of comparison here. Prior to starting a research blog early in my PhD, I use to scribble notes in a succession of moleskin notebooks – ones I would later struggle to decipher due to my scrawled handwriting. The radical sociologist C Wright Mills wrote a wonderful appendix to his famous The Sociological Imagination about scholarly craft: he argued for the necessity of keeping a ‘file’ in order to ‘keep one’s inner world awake’.
These are activities we all engage in but which, rather interestingly, tend not to feature in public discourse: the daily minutae of scholarship. Notebooks, filing cabinets, file cards, newspaper clippings, print outs, drawings, marginalia in books, annotated papers, reading lists etc. Modern digital equivalents involve tools like Evernote or OneNote. These have many of the advantages of using social media – they can also of course be integrated with them, for instance by quickly sharing notes from Evernote or automatically clipping content you discover on social media into the appropriate Evernote folder. But as with social media use, they have the advantage of mobility, in so far as that one can use them across devices and across contexts – rather than the careful work of keeping physical files or the necessity of ensuring one always has one’s physical journal and never, under any circumstances, lose it.
The features I discussed earlier might all sound individualistic. But it’s in considering how the use of social media differs from contemporary alternatives like Evernote that it becomes apparent how the benefits of social media are intrinsically social. Later in the book I mentioned earlier, Les Back suggests that Twitter sometimes facilitates our “inhabiting the attentiveness of another writer” by providing “signposts pointing to things going on in the world: a great article, an important book, a breaking story”. Through the things that others share, we sometimes enter into their world and participate in an economy of “hunches and tips” which is the “lifeblood of scholarship”. These provide pathways through the literature, allowing others to use them as guides into and through often difficult bodies of work.
It’s in this sense that I’m arguing social media increases the autonomy of researchers, both individually and collectively. If we accept the argument that metrics necessarily entail the evisceration of self-governance, with hierarchical regulation replacing horizontal norms, then this new horizontal space of collaboration and cooperation begins to looks exceedingly valuable. It’s a new kind of space and one which could be easily destroyed if we too easily accept that what we do within it should be measured and incorporated into the logic of career advancement.
The kinds of scholarly communities of practice we can see perpetually coming to life online are obviously not confined to the digital sphere. But academic social media is at present profoundly generative of them, whereas the broader research economy is increasingly characterised by a competitive individualism which works to preclude them However I think this not just important within the academy but also in the relationships between academia and other institutional spheres. For instance, academic social media is changing how journalists and academics interact: it’s easier to identify academics, but it’s also easier to make demands upon them which might be unreasonable or unwelcome, often with only a cursory understanding of what they hope to achieve through such a potential collaboration. It’s also changing the relationships between social scientists and the communities they research, as organised groups increasingly monitor and engage with academic research, in ways that can throw up all such of problems. This is why the nature of the ‘third space’ of academic social media is so important.
There are all sorts of instrumental gains to be had through engaging with social media: increasing your visibility, expanding your network, ensuring your work is widely read, engaging with non-academics publics and making an impact outside of the academy. But there are gains to scholarship which are more important and perhaps more diffuse than this. What increasingly interests me is the tension between them the two tendencies: how the instrumental use of social media, encouraged within the contemporary research economy, might imperil the gains which I’ve suggested can be made on the level of craft and collaboration.
I’ve suggested that the value of social media for academics can be seen in terms of craft and careers. These two dimensions often overlap but I think it’s useful to separate them analytically: contributions to individual and collaborative scholarship on the one hand, contributions to the development of careers on the other. Obviously the former usually takes place in the context of the latter – though the rise of the ‘alt-academic’, pursuing scholarship without pursuing a traditional academic career, can be seen to break this link. But the relationship between them isn’t always clear. For instance, in recent work, myself and Filip Vostal have been exploring the manner in which the accelerative pressures found in the contemporary academy militate against good scholarship. If people are asked to do more with the same or less, then what effect does this have? If we construe it in traditional terms, particularly as something conversant with and contributing to ‘the literature’, then good scholarship becomes structurally difficult 28,100 journals publishing 2.5 million articles a year. Under such circumstances we come to encounter surface writing rather than depth writing, rearranging ideas rather than developing new ones: scholasticism on the one hand, empiricism on the other. My point is not to explore the accelerated academy here but simply to flag up how institutional changes complicate the link between craft and careers. This is the environment within which the latent value of social media for academics comes to be actualised along either dimension.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m particularly interested in how time pressure figures into the developing discourse about social media for academics. On the one hand, I think the idea of social media being ‘just one more thing to do’ is straight forwardly a mistaken way of understanding what academics do on social media. On the other hand, I think the temporal pressures to which academics are subject in their institutional lives will inevitably shape the character of their social media use:
- Time-pressure can be a symbol of status and flaunting it can represent one of the few socially acceptable forms of conspicuous self-aggrandizement available (Ian Price)
- Time-pressure can reduce the time available for reflexivity, ‘blotting out’ difficult questions in a way analogous to drink and drugs
- Time-pressure can facilitate a unique kind of focus in the face of a multiplicity of distractions: past commitments ‘choose’ for us
- The accelerative pleasures and creative inducements of ‘binge writing’ and working to a deadline (Maggie O’Neill)
- Time-pressure can leave us feeling that we are living life most fully. If the good life is now seen as the full life then living fast feels like living fully (Harmut Rosa)
These all contribute to a broader context in which speed becomes problematic within the academy. It comes to enjoy an immense psychic charge as something which feels like, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, the cause of and solution to all life’s problems:
Coupled with intense competition within the academic career structure, as well the broader spectre of redundancy which Bauman argues characterises academic life as a whole in late modernity, it’s inevitable that what Ruth Müller theorises as anticipatory acceleration arises as a situationally logical strategy: going faster without specific goal in mind, seeking to outpace competitors given limited positions available for a cohort. As I understand her argument, which I really recommend reading directly, this gives rise to a subjugation of present pleasures to anticipated future rewards, with a contraction of alternative futures envisaged by the subject. The more hyper kinetically you commit yourself to career advancement, pursued through anticipatory acceleration, the more difficult it becomes to climb off the treadmill because your horizons narrow to the next goal. Though her empirical work has focused on post-docs in the life sciences, the scope of her concepts seem broader than this, both in terms of discipline and career stages. The conditions she describes in the condition from post-doc to faculty surely also obtain in the transition from lecturer to senior lecturer, from senior lecturer to reader and from reader to professor.
The ensuing dynamic of competitive escalation is crucial to understanding labour in the contemporary academy. It is a social mechanism driving the intensification of labour and destroying solidarity, tied up in a life-destroying feedback loop with the systems of audit which work to replace the horizontal regulation of professional standards with the vertical regulation of metrics. The value of social media for academic craft can mitigate these effects by grounding individuals in non-instrumental motivations for their work (curiosity, playfulness, exploration) and facilitating collaboration between such individuals outside the rubric of competitive individualism. But how likely is this to continue? I’m interested in how what Jose Van Dijck calls the popularity principle intersects with the competitive individualism of the accelerated academy: will the metrics of social media become just one more way in which academics can evaluate themselves in relation to others and be evaluated as they proceed through an increasingly rigidly defined career structure? If the logic of careers comes to dominate academic social media, can the logic of craft survive? If not then what does this mean for the broader conditions of academic labour? The institutionalisation of alt-metrics seems likely to be the most important vector through which the answer to these questions will begin to unfold. How will social media activity be measured and how will this new process of measurement intersect with existing processes of measurement? Will alt-metrics unsettle existing hierarchies or simply lead to dual hierarchies that might converge upon the same academic celebrities who dominate the intellectual attention space?
However there are other substantive areas in which these issues are currently being played out: online harassment of academics, social media policies within universities, institutional reaction to online academic speech, regulation of the corporate brand, social media training and support offered by staff. I think the way in which the benefits of social media are coming to be framed is particularly interesting and we’re likely to see this come to be dominated by the language of ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’ on the one hand, ‘academic citizenship’ and ‘academic civility’ on the other. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these things but what gets squeezed out in the middle is scholarship. I’ve not really talked about substantive cases in these areas today. There’s a few reasons for this: some of them are very contentious and I’m more comfortable writing about them then speaking about them, doing them justice requires a lot of empirical detail and would take a long time, it’s easy for this reason to get lost in detail and miss the broader picture. After all, it’s this broader picture which interests me. Social media is tied up in all manner of ways with the transformation of the university, as well as the transformation of the universities place within wider social life. There are many other factors, but the institutionalization of social media is a key vector in these unfolding changes. One which, I’ve tried to argue and hope we can discuss further, has important ramifications for academic labour.
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Philanthrocapitalism as an assembly device for elites
From No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, Loc 492:
The William J. Clinton Foundation dispensed money to numerous causes, with a focus on global health and economic development. Band’s idea was something new. He saw the need for an annual event, similar to Davos, which could bring powerful elites into contact with each other to forge ‘partnerships’ aimed at solving global problems. The first meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was held in 2005 and the get-together has grown larger ever since. Organizations pay a membership fee of $ 20,000 each year ($ 19,000 of which is tax deductible). This fee includes attendance at the CGI annual meeting, held in New York, as well as what the Clinton Foundation describes as “media support and showcasing opportunities.” The meeting is billed as a chance to publicize one’s philanthropic efforts to the “nearly 1,000 members of the media [who] are on-site at the Annual Meeting each year to report on the accomplishments of CGI members.” The $ 20,000 membership fee is just to get past the door. Corporate donors often spend hundreds of thousands extra in sponsoring the annual meeting. Once inside, the event is run a bit like a charity auction.
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The growth of elite philanthropy
I had no idea how rapidly this was growing. From No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, loc 282:
Nearly half of the 85,000 private foundations in the United States alone were created in the past fifteen years. About 5,000 more philanthropic foundations are set up each year.
There are questions that can be raise empirically about whether this represents an overall growth in charitable giving. But the evidence of elite philanthropy seems unsalable. As she observes on loc 302:
The surge in global philanthropy is rooted in growing wealth concentration, something that has enriched the ability to give away eye-popping sums.
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Hip hop culture, philanthrocapitalism and getting shit done
I’ve been fascinated in recent months by the relationship between hip hop and tech. In some cases quite explicitly, senior figures in technology find cultural inspiration for the approach they take to management in contemporary hip hop. I’m interested in the notion of ‘business for punks’ for the same reason.
In essence, I thought this was a product of focusing on ‘disruption’: seeking cultural resources to help motivate oneself to be disruptive. But this fascinating extract from No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, loc 100-118 suggests it might also be a shared concern with ‘getting shit done’:
It took place, reportedly, in New York, where Gates had been hanging out at the back of a bar with Bono and other friends when P. Diddy approached their table. He stood before Gates and nodded. ‘You are a motherfucker’. Gates’s eyes darted at the man. It’s doubtful the world’s most generous philanthropist hears comments like this too often –at least not to his face. Diddy continued his train of argument: ‘You are a motherfucker. What you are doing on immunization in Botswana? Motherfucker’. Gates leaned back in his chair. He realized that Diddy was offering him a high compliment. The encounter is reported by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in their book Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. The book has become something of a bible for a new breed of philanthropist vowing to reshape the world by running philanthropic foundations more like for-profit businesses. In this world, Gates is hailed as the ‘MacDaddy’ of the new philanthropy. Bishop and Green offer a quote from Bono on the appeal of Gates’s charitable work: ‘Jay-Z, all of the hip-hop guys, kind of adore him. Because he is not seen as a romantic figure –well, maybe romantic in the sense that Neil Armstrong is romantic, a scientist but not a poet. He gets shit done’. 8
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Hip hop culture, philanthrocapitalism and getting shit done
I’ve been fascinated in recent months by the relationship between hip hop and tech. In some cases quite explicitly, senior figures in technology find cultural inspiration for the approach they take to management in contemporary hip hop. I’m interested in the notion of ‘business for punks’ for the same reason.
In essence, I thought this was a product of focusing on ‘disruption’: seeking cultural resources to help motivate oneself to be disruptive. But this fascinating extract from No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, loc 100-118 suggests it might also be a shared concern with ‘getting shit done’:
It took place, reportedly, in New York, where Gates had been hanging out at the back of a bar with Bono and other friends when P. Diddy approached their table. He stood before Gates and nodded. ‘You are a motherfucker’. Gates’s eyes darted at the man. It’s doubtful the world’s most generous philanthropist hears comments like this too often –at least not to his face. Diddy continued his train of argument: ‘You are a motherfucker. What you are doing on immunization in Botswana? Motherfucker’. Gates leaned back in his chair. He realized that Diddy was offering him a high compliment. The encounter is reported by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in their book Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. The book has become something of a bible for a new breed of philanthropist vowing to reshape the world by running philanthropic foundations more like for-profit businesses. In this world, Gates is hailed as the ‘MacDaddy’ of the new philanthropy. Bishop and Green offer a quote from Bono on the appeal of Gates’s charitable work: ‘Jay-Z, all of the hip-hop guys, kind of adore him. Because he is not seen as a romantic figure –well, maybe romantic in the sense that Neil Armstrong is romantic, a scientist but not a poet. He gets shit done’. 8
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Who are the world’s 950 billionaires?
From Common Wealth, by Jeffrey Sachs, pg 327-328. Quoted in Jefffey Sachs, by Japhey Wilson, loc 1457:
There are now around 950 billionaires in the world, with an estimated combined wealth of $3.5 trillion. That’s an amazing $900 billion in just one year. Even after all the yachts, mansions, and luxury living that money can buy have been funded many times over, these billionaires will still have nearly $3.5 trillion to change the world … All in all, it’s not a bad job for men and women who have already transcended the daily economic struggle faced by the rest of humanity!113
Who are the world’s 950 billionaires? How do they see the world and their place within it? How do they conceive of their own interests? How are they raising their children and how might this in turn shape their children’s answers to these questions?
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Transformative Horizons
A few thoughts, prompted by the dispiriting act of choosing cosmopolitan austerity over nationalistic austerity in the UK referendum:
- Our perception of transformative possibilities is culturally constructed. Certain ranges of possibility are foregrounded and others backgrounded. Our sense of viability is the most cognitive dimension to this, informed by implicit and explicit ontological assumptions about how the social world works. But perceived transformative possibilities are also shaped by much less conscious factors, ranging from the cultural raw materials with which we conceive of the future to the futurity entailed by conditions of our everyday lives.
- Nonetheless, what concerns us are real possibilities inherent in actually existing states of affairs. The succeptabilty of social formations to transformative change reflects a complex constellation of causal factors: some serving to reproduce the existing social order and others latently contributing to its potential transformation.
- It’s because of this complexity that transformative horizons elude the ambitions of any one corporate agency. The very fact of different socially transformative and reproductive projects means that the social change that does occur is inevitably characterised by unintended consequences.
- This chaotic character of social change too rarely finds itself considered in the cultural construction of transformative horizons. Instead, we think and dream in terms of collective agents carrying forth projects of change, rather than of change as something resulting chaotically from the clashes between such collective agents in circumstances not of their choosing.
- Wilful withdrawl from this complexity can be read psychoanalytically as a refusal of the Real. What I’m describing (ontologically) as the chaotic nature of social change has its (epistemic) corollary in the fact that real horizons of possibility elude our capacity to fully symbolise or conceptualise them.
- This is why dreaming of possible worlds or refusing Utopianism is so psychically charged: we fall into a tendency to over symbolise or under symbolise Real horizons of change because of the affective dilemmas involved in a continual engagement with reality, negotiating between what is and what could be.
- The materiality of our action means that these negotiations between what is and what could be are themselves contributions to the reproduction or transformation of social formations. The landscape is continually changing as we are orientating ourselves within it.
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Sociology Social Media Assistant CfA
An interesting opportunity, though personally the language of ‘assistant’ and one year would put me off a little bit:
*Apologies for crossposting*
Dear Colleagues,
Since its launch in August 2014, the Twitter account for Sociology has become a popular and important means of promoting the journal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Social media are also proving to be a practical way to link the work of the journal to topical news and debates in the media. Sociology is therefore creating the new voluntary role of Social Media Assistant and seeks applicants with an interest in contributing to the current and ongoing development of the journal’s presence on Twitter and other social media platforms.
The role will commence on Monday 3rd October and run for a one-year fixed-term period in the first instance.
For details about the role and the link to the online application form, please see the full call for applications on the BSA site. The deadline for applications is 5pm GMT Friday 22 July.
If you have any queries about the role, please contact Sociology Editor, Kath Woodward: Kath.Woodward@open.ac.uk
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Mark
Digital Market Populists as Intellectually Committed Chaos-Merchants
Absolutely fascinating article about one of the intellectual currents driving #Brexit (HT @Suoman):
So, today I want to write about an element in the Brexit campaign that fascinates me. It’s what I would call its strand of hyper-capitalism – a kind of start-up patriotism, encapsulated in the phrase they drum through their speeches: “Take back control”.
Take back control contains, I believe, a double strategy. A very clever libertarian elite within the Leave side is consciously stoking popular fears about immigration, and consciously linking them to questions of national sovereignty (or in Gove’s repeated phrase, “self-rule”).
Their opportunism is breathtaking. An urbane, cosmopolitan, ideas-driven set of right-wingers are playing with the fires of xenophobia – and this in order to get the chance to exert a wildly experimental brand of policy over one of the world’s major economies and polities.
These libertarian leavers believe they’re catching a wave of anti-institutional, anti-bureaucratic, pro-enterprise and pro-individualist attitudes sweeping across the developed world at the moment. The EU, a structure that penetrates common continental standards deep into the heart of particular nations, is a sworn enemy of this process.
The core message here, buttressed by all the physicists and biologists Cummings cites, is that modern science is currently modest about its ability to predict the behaviour of complex systems. He says that modesty should also include complex human environments like education, or the economy, or health.
So if you want to foment change, say the libertarian Leavers, the last thing you do is pass another crude bureaucratic edict from the Brussels (or for that matter, Whitehall) machine. The point is to encourage experimentation, novelty, variety, non-standard approaches. You need a healthy, market-driven tumult, which will hopefully evolve robust new organisms (or organisations).
This explains the deliberate chaos of Gove’s free school movement, or the steady marketisation of health services – indeed, the relentless marketisation of everything. Inequality, in this picture, is required for the whole ecosystem to work properly.
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Martha Bell
Revival of the shock doctrine.
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Mark
the digital shock doctrine?
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Mark
Ideas for action from Teela Sanders and @RuthPatrick0
I saw a great talk yesterday, at the ESRC’s North West DTC, from Teela Sanders and Ruth Patrick about how to make an impact with doctoral research. I particularly liked this slide near the end, in which they suggested an incredibly diverse range of ways in which doctoral researchers (and others) could take action based on their research:
Mark and 
Martha Bell are discussing. 
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