Even if I wasn’t a supporter, I’d have been fascinated by Labour’s use of social media in the last election and how this built upon prior successes in successive leadership elections. The new book by Steve Howell, deputy director of strategy and communications during the election, contains many fascinating snippets about this that I hadn’t […]
Month: July 2018
An artistic answer by Andrea Luka Zimmerman to a question I have found myself reflecting on with disturbing frequency:
For the next edition of Social Media for Academics, I’ve been thinking a lot about hybrid formats for presenting theoretical ideas through social media. A really powerful example of this is the video essay Camera Ludica by marco de mutiis which explores photography in video games through a three-part essay combining in game footage, plain […]
I saw a wonderful exhibition this weekend, collecting work by Alex Prager combining photography and film in intricately staged hyper-real scenes. The collection that has been playing on mind since seeing it is Face In The Crowd. If you click on the screenshot below, it will take you to the website where you can see the […]
This one-day event intends to raise awareness of the Foundations of British Sociology archive maintained by Keele University. This remarkable resource collects a diverse array of materials from the 1880s to the 1950s, gifted to the university when the Institute of Sociology was dissolved in 1955. ‘Members of the societies founded The Sociological Review, contributed to early […]
A few months ago, I recounted to a collaborator the details of a foolish mistake I made when planning a special occasion. Assuming the cake would be the easiest item on a long to do list, I left this till last, failing to recognise that cakes of this sort would require a lot of notice. […]
In his wonderful October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville uses the phrase ‘epochal tetchiness’ to describe the political contribution of Russian liberals prior to 1917. Their angry, disjointed responses to events failed to influence the changes which provoked their outrage, leaving them acting frantically without consequence as they were superseded by history. […]
From the Third Treatise: What Do Ascetic Ideals Means of On The Genealogy of Morality: Much more frequent than this sort of hypnotic general suppression of sensitivity, of susceptibility to pain – which presupposes even rarer forces, above all courage, contempt of opinions, “intellectual stoicism” – is the attempt at a different kind of training against conditions of […]
The Party by Elizabeth Day The Power by Naomi Alderman The Secret History by Donna Tart The Space Barons by Christian Davenport Machine Platform Crowd by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Alt-Right by Mike Wendlin The People vs Tech by Jamie Bartlett Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier Bean Counters by Richard Brooks The […]
The Idealist by Nina Monk, cited by Daniel Drezner in the Ideas Industry, presents a vivid account of the frantic pace at which the economist Jeffery Sachs has tended to work. This intensified work, fitting as much action as possible into each day, will appear to his detractors as a desperate lust for influence. His […]
I just realised this keynote I did in Nottingham last year is available online as a videocast: https://mediaspace.nottingham.ac.uk/media/UoNSMart+KeynoteA+Mark+Carrigan+-+The+Glass+Tower/1_qwp6r8ah
December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to […]
Via Janja Komljenovic
There’s an interesting anecdote on loc 3960-3972 of Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s gripping account of the Theranos scandal, recounting a follow up meeting between Rupert Murdoch and Elizabeth Holmes which sealed the former’s investment in the latter’s company. I thought it was a vivid account of the distinctive corporate culture which had emerged within Theranos and how […]
