1. Agency
Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.
2. Reflexivity
Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.
3. Reflexive imperative
The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.
4. Internal conversation
Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.
5. Internal conversation as object relating
This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.
6. Modes of reflexivity
I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.
7. Concerns
Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.
8. Personal morphogenesis
Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.
9. Distraction
Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.
10. Cognitive triage
Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.
11. Communicative escalation
Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.
12. Cultural abundance
Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.
13. Accelerated academy
The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.
14. Busyness
Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.
15. Platform capitalism
Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.
16. Platforms as structure
I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.
17. Platformisation
Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.
18. Epistemic chaos
Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.
19. Epistemic flooding
Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.
20. Post truth
I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.
21. Meta content explosion
The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.
22. Lifeworld
Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.
23. Colonisation of the lifeworld
Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.
24. LLMs in the lifeworld
This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.
25. Assessment panic
Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.
26. Detection scepticism
Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.
27. Dialogical toxicity
Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.
28. Public scholarship
Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.
29. Enshittification
Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.
30. Exit costs
Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.
Mark Carrigan 