• The manifest and latent function of online reviews

• You’re young until you’re not, you love until you don’t, you try until you can’t

• 📍Margaret Archer’s final book: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics

• Current mood in AI generated images #51

• Is digital distraction the 21st century equivalent of neurathemia?

• How else could your time on social media be used?

• Generative AI beyond assessment: what could happen over the next few years?

• Margaret Archer’s final paper: Coincidence – A word with two meanings for explaining and predicting the future

• Why aren’t libertarian conspiracy theorists interested in Project 2025?

• I don’t like walking around this old and empty house. So hold my hand, I’ll walk with you my dear

• Why does South Manchester monopolise the economic gains of the city’s growth?

• The (thin) relational reflexivity of working with conversational agents

• A dramatisation of Freud’s Dora and Frau K

• Current mood in AI generated images #50

• These kids don’t play my shit I never had a top ten, maybe it’s because I sing about violence and depression  

• Psychoanalysis as literary tradition

• On the machinic qualities of human interaction and the human qualities of the machine

• Lacan’s twelve-fold typology of desire: a case study of Elena Tonra’s Romance

• ChatGPT as the Big Other: the imagined limitlessness of knowledge

• The first use of the phrase ‘publish or perish’ was in a 1928 journal article

• The value of a long-term personal blog in the next phase of GAI

• Will OpenAI eventually resemble Netflix?

• The alternative to avant-garde theorising

• Making ghosts into ancestors

• We cannot do all things, become proficient in all areas, or master all fields

• Maybe there is some fucking magic in giving language to hidden things

• Understanding concepts by tracing their journey through the theory/practice nexus

• Current mood in AI generated images #49

• Not only can DALL-E not spell, it can’t hide stuff either

• “My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies”

• Why are we so bad at online meetings?

• There is a Wikipedia page on obsolete occupations

• Human cognition meets machine cognition, human cognition gets better

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #48

• What’s the point of online conferences where people don’t actually meet?

• Chekhov’s gun in academic writing

• Generative AI and the challenge for professionalism

• Two feet standing on a principle

• Do people dismiss GAI-supported work because it doesn’t involve the sacrifice of time?

• Current mood in AI generated images #47

• Which of the three forms of creativity is GAI capable of?

• The Borromean Knot of Jacques Lacan; Or, How to Beat Your Death Drive

• The days are reeling past in such squealing blasts

• What happens when we can’t stay on the stage any longer?

• Disavowal as a scholarly habit

• The impending reality of the digital daemon

• Is generative AI predicated on digital enclosure?

• Derek Hook on diagnosis in Lacan

• The starting point for my second attempt to write a novel: Trinity College Cambridge, after the crash 🌊☀️☠️

• The psychodynamics of the post-left

• Capybaras and chess: together at last

• He pretends that he’s understanding and you know in the grand scheme of everything he’s probably called a nice man

• A Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the meta-reflexive as hysteric

• Nick Cave on the world, in its complexity, rearranging itself toward meaning

• What are the analytical payoffs of Margaret Archer’s realist social theory?

• Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

• Accelerating (social) science with human-aware artificial intelligence

• What are your strengths?

• 📍Digital Sociology Wikipedia Editathon/Meetup – Feb 1st in Edinburgh

• What you’re doing to me now, ouch

• Computational sociology of knowledge as a tool for redesigning the knowledge system

• Why did Giddens largely ignore Bourdieu?

• We need jungle, I’m afraid (I can’t accept drum and bass)

• Epistemic relativism and the escape from the real

• How much are academics paid in different national systems?

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #46

• 📖 Books I’ve read in 2024

• The myth of the ‘perfectly analysed’ person

• “I feel like I’m gaining some kind of power by expelling all of my inner thoughts and secrets to people in rooms”

• The Lacan gang

• Mobile generative AI as the next stage of surveillance capitalism

• The Gish Gallop as an academic technique

• CfP: Symbolic Interactionism and AI

• Procrastination

• “You must have been subjected to another AI generated audiotrack, I never said any such thing”

• The existentialist Lacan

• Current mood in AI generated images #45

• See he saw me as a human, this one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse

• I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

• Attention digital sociologists – HELP NEEDED with the Wikipedia page!

• The book scene from The Remains of the Day

• Why does The National’s Matt Berninger write so many beautiful songs about divorce despite being (seemingly) happily married?

• To what extent is ketamine shaping the culture of Silicon Valley?

• Lacan tried to save the subject from structuralism

• Will ChatGPT eventually be unmasked to its users?

• A Tour of Lacan’s Graph of Desire

• Are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon?

• Current mood in AI generated images #44

• Lacan vs the situationist heckler (1972)

• When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

• Platform capitalism, historciality and Andrew Abbott’s sense of modernist temporal ontology

• A pop-punk cover of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

• Total existence needs meaning and myth, many misjudged the way and got lost in the mist

• 10 highs and 10 lows of 2023

• Alex Garland’s Civil War film looks superb

• Andrew Abbott on the practice of theorising

• What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do

• The sensory pleasure of ideas and the displaced joys of academic life

• CFP: Generative AI Governance – Special Issues in Information, Communication & Society

• Lacan on the biographical momentum of partial objects