Why do people do what they do? It is a question at the heart of the human sciences but it is also one we ask in everyday life. However the way we ask it often tracks our prior feelings towards the people we ask it of. For instance, as Jana Bacevic has argued, many fail […]
Month: June 2018
Now that I’ve recovered from last week, it seemed the right moment to do a round up of the live blogging project Pat Thomson and myself initiated at The Sociological Review’s Undisciplining conference. There were 43 posts from 13 live bloggers over four days. This is a pretty substantial outpouring of thought and reflection over […]
I’ve edited the final two paragraphs of this post for clarity because an awful lot of people read it and thought I was criticising quote tweeting rather than one particular use of it. Imagine you were sitting in a cafe having a conversation with a friend. You greeted each other warmly when they arrived, you ordered coffees […]
After the busiest few months of my life, I’ve spent the last couple of days doing what feels like nothing. I’ve been for a shave, bought a graphic novel, seen a (crap) film, had a walk, been out for dinner and had a massage. But otherwise I’ve just read, slept and watched tv. It’s obviously […]
Notes for the closing panel at Undisciplining Today’s session has a twofold purpose. It’s intended as a celebration of the paper which was awarded The Sociological Review’s prize for outstanding scholarship last year. But it’s also a continuation of the opening session, extending the discussion while introducing some new elements. It can perform both these roles […]
Though Pat, Kate Thomas and I made initial contributions to the live blogging project yesterday, it really kicked off today when the main Undisciplining conference began. The day started with a short meeting for our co-researchers, before we all set off on our way through the conference. These are the results of day one: Trying to […]
The singularity is a speculative notion referring to the point at which exponential innovation generates a fundamental transformation of human civilisation. As Murray Shanahan puts it in on loc 78 of his book The Technological Singularity: In physics, a singularity is a point in space or time, such as the center of a black hole […]
In the last year, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied by why we shouldn’t take social media metrics too seriously. In part, this preoccupation is analytical because following this thread has proven to be a useful way to move from my past focus on individual users of social media to a more expansive sociological account of platforms. The […]
I’m doing a webinar tomorrow as part of the Critical Realism Network series which I’m really looking forward to. It draws together much of my work, encompassing my contributions to the Centre for Social Ontology’s social morphogenesis and humanism projects, the Accelerated Academy, the Digital Social Science project I ran for the ISRF, my applied […]
I began a lifestyle experiment 45 days ago, cutting out alcohol from my life to see what happened. It’s been much more enjoyable than I thought it would be and here’s a few things I’ve realised: Higher education runs on booze. It’s remarkable how many events involve free alcohol and how much socialising after other […]
As any regular reader of this blog will know, I’ve been working on The Distracted People of Digital Capitalism for over three years. I’ve made little progress in that time and my reliable line “I’m working on a book about distraction but I keep getting distracted” has begun to be depressing. But for the last year, the […]
This looks really interesting Here comes the final reminder about the symposium organized by The Cultural Matters Group at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University on Sept. 27-28 this year. The symposium is called Dis / Connection: Conflicts, Activism and Reciprocity Online and Beyond and we look forward to receiving your papers! Deadline for submissions […]
This is Jaron Lanier’s memorable description of social media in his new book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Social media is a technology for asshole amplification. To be clearly seen in the fact that “since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world” (pg 43). His […]
Undisciplining Social Media Guidelines @TheSocReview http://www.undisciplining.org #Undisciplining Social media has been central to our journal in recent years, helping us build a new relationship with our readers and expand beyond our traditional audience. We enthusiastically embrace it as a means to promote sociological thought, as well as a way to work towards a more engaged […]
To frame the commercialisation of space as being somehow related to ‘platform capitalism’ risks misunderstanding. It is certainly the case that Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, owes his wealth to Amazon but this has become a platform over time rather than being founded as one. Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, owes his early success […]
What does it mean to write? For a long time, it carried a sense of total immersion for me, letting the world recede in order to lose yourself in the production of a text. This is ‘binge writing’ and it was my standard mode for the six years I spent doing a part-time PhD. I […]
I’ve never completely understood my attraction to kitsch. As much as part of me would like to suggest otherwise, it’s not a knowing embrace of excessive sentimentality and contrived garishness, as much as these things genuinely appealing to me in a way that can prompt knowingness when I reflect upon it. For instance, I saw these […]
There’s a fascinating mea culpa in Jaron Lanier’s new book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. On loc 411 he describes how early design decisions, inspired by the libertarian ethos taking hold within the tech community, created the openings for the global monopolies we now see emerging: Originally, many of us who […]
In the last year, I find myself obsessing ever more fequently about agency and platforms. Given I spent six years writing a PhD about human agency, it is inevitable that this would be the lens I bring to the analysis of platforms. But it also reflects a sustained weakness in how the role of agency […]
How good does this look? So much of this chimes with the paper I’m currently struggling to finish The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies Preconference Workshop, #AoIR2018 Montréal, Canada Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre, INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique) Wednesday October 10th 2018 Machine learning (ML), deep […]
