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  • Some notes on projectification

    Notes on this paper by Mollie Dollinger for a reading group tomorrow: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2020.1722631?scroll=top&needAccess=true Projectification refers to the temporal organisation of work into discrete time-limited projects. This involves an atomisation of work so that projects can be compared in terms of their process and outcomes. Dollinger queries what is lost, overlooked or squeezed out by this…

  • Proper old school academic hostility to social media

    I feel almost nostalgic to see this comment on something I wrote. I haven’t seen this kind of unabashed contempt for social media for years:

  • What if we have achieved postcapitalism but it isn’t socialism?

    I read the book last week. It’s extremely engaging but shallow in points. There’s a tedious academic dispute about whether this is postcapitalism or high platform capitalism. But this is an important intervention nonetheless:

  • AI, digitalisation and the crisis of post-pandemic capitalism

    There’s a lot in this but the main thing it’s left me preoccupied by is understanding generative AI in terms of a crisis of over-accumulation; there is too much capital accumulated by the transnational capitalist class for it to be profitably reinvested, leading to stagnation. Projected AI investment (~$150 billion according to Goldman Sachs) does…

  • Alan Levinovitz on empowerment epistemology

    I’m struggling to find an academic source for this but I’m book marking an idea I’m very interested in: ’empowerment epistemology’ as decisions to believe motivated by the feeling of agency which the beliefs in question give rise to. And then on top of that, the other thing about an empowering epistemology I think is…

  • “You just cannot trust someone who is publishing ten papers a year in top journals.”

    This line from a brilliant New Yorker essay about the current scandals in behavioural economics immediately jumped out to me from the page (context attached below). I’ve thought for a while about doing a project scraping Google Scholar data to test my hypothesis that the upper bounds of productivity have been steadily increasing over the…

  • When we get together, take apart my fantasy; when we are done, we’ll work on you

  • The coming wave of document forensics about to hit the university: the weak signals of generative AI

    It was interesting to read how much of Data Colada’s recent investigations rested on ‘data forensics’ which involves, inter alia, utilising understanding of the nature of file formats to make inferences about the behaviour of the user: A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files…

  • Urban geometries

    I shut down my Instagram account a while ago but I’ll keep this collection here instead. The hobby has stalled until I get myself a proper camera and some training but it’s a really enjoyable way of engaging with the urban environment:

  • My 30 favourite films of the last two years

    Over the last two years I’ve been keeping a film diary on Letterboxd. Turns out I’ve watched 175 films since November 2021 and these are my 30 favourite, roughly in order. I’ve not included films I’ve rewatched during this time which would otherwise be near the top of the list e.g. Boyhood, Inside Llewyn Davis.

  • DALL-E 3: Draw me a picture of a capybara taking over the world

    What’s fascinating about this is how it articulates different interpretations of a deliberately ambiguous prompt to produce four quite different images:

  • Academic censorship on sexual misconduct and power abuse: Not in our academia

    Please consider signing this open letter:

  • I guess this is growing up

  • The impending wave of innovation in generative artificial intelligence

    I found this mind blowing from Ethan Mollock. I understood the three new modalities which are coming with GAI (machine vision, machine speech and connecting it your own data) combined with performance increases sparked by Google’s Gemini. But it hadn’t occurred to me that these things will be combined: We have these pieces which let…

  • CfP: The future of conspiracy scholarship: New epistemologies and imaginaries

    This looks absolutely fascinating. It’s one of those topics I’ve followed closely for years without serious engagement. I’m wondering if I should start. Special Issue Editors: Zelly C. Martin, Inga K. Trauthig, Alice E. Marwick, Samuel C. Woolley Conspiracy theories are increasingly present in mainstream American political discourse, from those around Covid-19 to the idea that…

  • You’re waiting for more than you can feel

  • Machine translation in higher education

    I’m doing this conversation starter session next week about machine translation in higher education: While chatbots like ChatGPT have dominated the conversation about generative AI, we have also seen remarkable advances in machine translation in recent years. This was a popular dissertation topic for DTCE students in 22/23 and this work highlighted issues raised by…

  • Can academic projects keep up with the UX expectations of students?

    I find myself worrying with ever greater frequency that students with UX expectations formed by mass commercial social media platforms will inevitably find projects developed by academics lacklustre. Academic projects will lack the resources (e.g. UX researchers, data scientists, masses of transactional data and the time/space/resources to exploit it for minute UX improvements) to create…

  • Some thoughts on Bluesky

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #27

  • How to think contextually about educational technology

    Skimming through this thought provoking book by Rob Stones on Social Theory and Current Affairs, I was struck by how his core argument could be expanded into how to think contextually about any social phenomena. I’ve added the bold below to illustrate the core steps he identifies which I would argue are essential to have…

  • Bhaskar’s concept of ‘present-moment awareness’

    Summarised on pg 127 of Jamie Morgan’s extremely useful review article: In the first instance, as a singularized embodied entity the individual is nowhere but where they are, doing what they are doing, at the very time that they are doing it. As such, the human tendency to dwell on the past, or to look…

  • To what extent was Roy Bhaskar’s later philosophy shaped by Theosophism?

    This is a topic I’ve intended to write about for years but I was reluctant to, in case it seemed like an attack on Roy Bhaskar rather than an exercise in intellectual history. But I was struck a long time ago by the obvious connection between Bhaskar being raised in a theosophist family and the…

  • Lauren Berlant on the couple form’s own ordinary dangers

    From On The Inconvenience of Other People pg 45: A foxhole is a place where one hides from bullets and strategizes the next aggression. In theirs, the desire for mutual flourishing in a world that would be worthy of the trust they longed to place in it turned out not to protect them from the…

  • Beyond ChatGPT: what next for generative AI in higher education

  • A list of human cognitive biases and the assumptions underpinning them

    Really interesting table from this paper:

  • Erfahrung: conspiracies, baking and the return of the repressed

    This essay by Rob Horning introduced to me to Benjamin’s distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis described here in an extract from Martin Jay’s book on Adorno: In a now celebrated distinction, Benjamin had divided experience into Erfahrung, the integration of events into the memory, of collective and personal traditions, and Erlebnis, the isolation of events from any such…

  • How Amazon define the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted

    From this week’s Private Eye. It’s interesting to see how the murky grey area between human text and synthetic text is where policy is being made, contrary to the initial moral panic about the former being replaced by the latter:

  • The power of giving language to hidden things

    [W]hen a word is properly defined it loses its capital letter and can no longer serve either as a banner or as a hostile slogan; it becomes simply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity. To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to…

  • The music of the data centre

    You walk down a hall of servers. The room is square, and long, with your only source of light being thin outlines of white reflective tape along the walls, and the blinking flashing lights of the servers. You know they hold data, information, tons and tons of it. The sound of hard drives and fans…

  • Interview with me in VoltEdu about academic social media after Twitter

    From this North American Ed-Tech magazine: Dr. Mark Carrigan is a digital sociologist at the Manchester Institute for Education, where he leads the master’s degree in digital education. He has spoken out about the question of whether it’s time for academics to let go of Twitter. He said Twitter had a significant impact on the culture…

  • Interrogating AI in education: when peeking inside the black box is not enough

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #26

  • “Go, you chicken fat, go!”

    This was a strange rabbit-hole to stumble down but the combination of ebullience and fat-shaming in this 1962 American public health song is quite something… (I also cannot get it out of my head. Hopefully it getting stuck in your head will free me)

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #25

  • Lauren Berlant on writing in a parenthetical voice

    From On the Inconvenience of Other People pg 29:

  • A few thoughts about the difficulty of living a reparative life

    Early in the pandemic I got preoccupied by a throwaway line from Zizek’s Ticklish Subject where he talks of “float[ing] freely in his undisturbed balance“. His point was that this narcissistic fantasy was defined by a “precarious imaginary balance” plagued by threats; in conceiving of myself as pure presence operating in my own gravity, I…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #24

    But love said “If you bring forth what is within you What you bring forth will save you But if you do not bring forth what is within you What you do not bring forth will destroy you” It was Grace Stunned by the last light of the sun Swimming in a green sea as…

  • The three forces that will drive the rollout of generative AI

    This is great from Dave Karpf in a critique of Ethan Mollick’s recent advocacy of the creative gains which can be accrued through working with generative AI. The problem I see is that the two sets of claims are not mutually exclusive, driving my current oscillation between creative excitement and sociological despair:

  • Societal collapse is a process rather an event

  • The hostility to earnestness in 90s/00s British culture

    This brilliant piece by Zoe Williams about Russell Brand powerfully captures something about the cultural environment I grew up in which I’ve always struggled to put into words: There was a baseline assumption that we were all laughing at the same thing. This was an era in which the highest value was in not taking…

  • Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in

    God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything…

  • What we call the beginning is often the end

    What we call the beginning is often the end And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy…

  • Goodbye summer ☀️ 👋 🍂

    We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. – T. S. Eliot I was entirely unfrightened Dozing off and eternally un-alone The flowers cover over everything They cover over everything The flowers cover over everything…

  • A really interesting spin on interdisciplinarity in digital scholarship

    This paper by Sebastian Benthall frames it as disciplinary collapse, connecting the ease with which interdisciplinary interactions take place on social media to the broader phenomenon of context collapse: This paper is the result of context collapse. Davis and Jurgenson review how the collapse of social contexts is a noted characteristic of interactions in networked…

  • Incorporating ChatGPT into Moodle

  • Lacan’s ‘objet a’: you still haven’t found what you’re looking for (and you’re never going to)

    I really like the analogy he draws in this video: the objet a is like the wrapping paper which turns an exchangeable commodity into a gift. if you put unwrapped Christmas presents under the tree they would not provoke the desire of children in a way that the wrapped presents do. McGowan describes the objet…

  • 9 Stoic Rules For A Better Life (From Marcus Aurelius)

  • On learning what matters to us

    This essay by Alasdair MacIntyre was a powerful reminder that I should get back to Platform & Agency. The main argument of the book is that we have to understand platformisation as changing the parameters of the biographical process which MacIntyre describes here in a philosophical register: We learn what place in our individual and…

  • How to reduce the environmental impact of generative AI

    There are some important points at the end of this piece, particularly with regards to how we develop norms around sustainable GAI use:

  • The beat that completes your shit these days

    ‘Cause every little bit counts Sometimes in death and disorder You look for shooting stars In the reflection of the water And you open the gifts that you didn’t expect On the birthdays of the dead friends that are stuck in your head Like love, and hugs and songs and rage And the keys that…

  • The looming crisis in higher education

    This is a powerfully succinct statement from the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee on the Office for Students: The higher education sector faces a looming crisis. Long-term problems with financial sustainability were compounded by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, with in-person teaching disrupted and acute financial pressures on providers. Subsequent inflation has…

  • Void left by decline of academic Twitter ‘will be hard to fill’

    I was interviewed for this Times Higher article about the death of academic Twitter: Mark Carrigan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester’s Institute for Education, said this might result in a “retrenchment into existing networks”, which would be most keenly felt by early career researchers. “Finding your research community is a crucial part of getting established in…

  • Why are conspiracy theories coalescing into a heterogenous world view?

    I’ve thought for the last year this is an urgent question which I’ve yet to see an adequate answer to. What is it about the cultural machinery of platform capitalism which facilitates the coalescence of incredibly heterogeneous elements (wellness culture, anti-globalisation, QANon, anti-lockdown, anti-pharma, ‘save the children’ etc) into the ‘truth community’? Was this always…

  • Mad Explosive Spontaneity

    I gets in where I fit in, ’cause life’s too short So you could all label me weirdo, but yo I know it’s talent Mad explosive spontaneity

  • Current mood in AI generated images #23

  • Nick Cave on the importance of humility in a bizarre and temporary world

    ❤️ this from today’s Red Hand Files: Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do…

  • Shock as a narrative vacuum

    From Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger, in which she explores the relationship between the shock doctrine and how the pandemic catalysed conspiracy culture: A state of shock is what happens to us, individually or as a society, when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have an adequate explanation.…

  • Maurizio Lazzarato’s a-signifying semiotics and the computational infrastructure of generative AI

    Following the keyword of ‘machinic enslavement’ I stumbled across Maurizio Lazzarato’s notion of a-signifying semiotics, that which “tune[s] in directly to the body (to its affects, its desires, its emotions and perceptions) by means of signs” and “trigger an action, a reaction, a behaviour, an attitude, a posture”. There are other less rhetorically cumbersome and…

  • Music that is helping me finish my book #4

  • It’s all in the game though, right?

    I’m finding Games: Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen a wonderfully thought provoking exploration of the role of agency in games. He argues they involve a form of ‘temporary agency’ in which we adopt time-limited ends which we pursue. What makes this fascinating is the immersion it necessitates: That end must phenomenally engulf us,…

  • Kill yоur maѕters, kill уour mаker, kill thе dawning of creatіon

    Kill the lаbels, kill the vultures, kіll your grеed, and kill jehоvah Kill the broken infrastructurе, kill your ego, kіll your сulture Kill yоur maѕters, kill уour mаker, kill thе dawning of creatіon Кill your mоther, kill your father, kill yourself, and kill your kаrma Kіll, kill, kill, kill, kill samsara, rеіncаrnate, reach nirvana Kill…

  • What do plants sound like?

  • Ain’t it a sin?

  • Using ChatGPT to fix spreadsheets

    I’m putting together the marking plans for our MA, matching first and second markers to student IDs. Obviously I count the markers to ensure the allocations are correct but there’s an annoying discrepancy: 107 students but only 105 markers counted, despite the fact there are marker names next to each student ID. I suspect this…

  • Current mood in (non) AI generated images #22

  • On platform and agency

    This by Tarleton Gillespie in Custodians of the Internet perfectly captures what I mean by platform and agency. It cuts through descriptive and explanatory work on platforms but is rarely ever analysed in a thorough and multifaceted way: On the other hand, it is also easy to overstate the influence platforms have as straightforward and…

  • In defence of the lecture

    I couldn’t agree more with this. The problem is not the lecture in itself, the problem is an over-reliance on the format, dependence on Powerpoint, poor delivery and a lack of confidence in improvisation. Like any method it serves some purposes in certain contexts but not others in different contexts. The point should be to…

  • Generative AI and the destabilization of cultural objects

    There’s a powerful description in Burdick et al’s Digital_Humanities of the “iterative and (almost) infinitely mutable and expansive nature of digital media” which “stands in contrast to inherited notions of ‘writing’ or ‘picture-making’ or ‘printing’ – all of which are stabilising practices with slow refresh rates” (pg 15). Generative AI intensifies this mutability in a…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #21

  • Music that is helping me finish my book #3

  • The sociology of the digital daemon

    In Eliot Peper’s Analogy trilogy, the feed is a crucial part of near future society. It offers a real time curated input of culture, mediated by a global monolith firm Commonwealth who have effectively amalgamated social media & search then internalised them in what is implied to be a neural link: The feed was your…

  • If Librarians Were Honest, by Joseph Mills

    If librarians were honest,they wouldn’t smile, or actwelcoming. They would say,You need to be careful. Herebe monsters. They would say,These rooms house heathensand heretics, murderers andmaniacs, the deluded, desperate,and dissolute. They would say,These books contain knowledgeof death, desire, and decay,betrayal, blood, and more blood;each is a Pandora’s box, so whywould you want to open one.They would post…

  • ChatGPT’s advice on examining student essays for evidence of generative AI

    Yes, “track changes” and “document history” features, commonly found in word processors and collaborative document editing platforms (like Google Docs or Microsoft Word), can be used to examine the evolution of a document over time. When investigating the possible use of generative AI by students, these features might offer some insights, but there are caveats.…

  • On sociological cynicism about AI

    This is half-formed argument I’ve had percolating in my mind for a while. But i’ve been struck by the tendency to evaluate conversational agents vis-a-vis an imagined ideal contributor e.g. horror at the idea of AI peer reviewing in comparison to the imagined ideal of the engaged intellectual who sets aside a day to immerse…

  • The cognitive load of conversational agents is a feature not a bug

    Interesting quote from the US DoD’s chief AI officer in this FT piece: For some users, this inbuilt unreliability is a deal-breaker. Craig Martell, the US Department of Defense’s chief AI officer, said last week he would demand a “five 9s” [99.999 per cent] level of accuracy before deploying an AI system. “I cannot have…

  • Chatting in natural language with a massive archive, built from hand-picked trustworthy sources

    Interesting to see that Casey Newton shares my preoccupation with how generative AI might enable us to interact with our archive through natural language. My blog has 5000+ posts over 13 years containing every idea I was interested in enough to write about. There is no good way to interact with this using present tools…

  • The business case for generative AI in organisations will be surveillance

    I’ve been suggesting for a while that generative AI will create new forms of accounting, evaluation and surveillance within organisations. What hadn’t struck me until recently was how intrinsically connected these functions are, based around new capacities to qualitatively summarise (as opposed to quantitatively track) real-time behaviour within organisations. Transactional data will become human readable…

  • The capacity of the algorithm to create monsters

    I love this concept from Annie Kelly, shared on the most recent episode of the QAnon Manclan podcast. She compares a prominent anti-feminist influencer to the Jewish folkloric figure of the golem, “a being created entirely from inanimate matter, but in her case the materials are likes, views and comments from the very dregs of…

  • Techno-optimism as boomer dogma

    I thought this was interesting about Tony Blair’s dogmatic faith in technology, often interchangeable with ‘globalisation’, which we should always remember was propounded by a man who got his first mobile phone in 2008 and didn’t use e-mail until 2006: Others I spoke to said it is not possible to judge Blair’s enthusiasm for this…

  • The ethical paralysis facing millennials

    This is great from Carolina Bandinelli. It’s exactly what I planned my dying world zero book to be about, even if the project has stalled since I realised that my initial framing for the book was a terrible idea: Think about what it means to live a life as a young adult after the 2008…

  • Sociotechnical change as an invitation to reflexivity

    I’ve always liked how Noortje Marres (in Material Participation) links the familiar argument from the philosophy of technology, that the failures of technology render them newly legible, to the ethnomethodological observation that breaking routines invites actors to account for them: According to ethnomethodologists, the disruption of everyday routines generates insights into social life insofar as…

  • What will generative AI do to the zone of proximal development?

    There’s a lovely description in Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley of the initial rush of possibility produced in the first stages of learning to code: But what happens if the capacity to write functional code in ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter mean they never have this experience? Is it reproduced at a higher level through the capacity to…

  • Building the Post-Pandemic University – 24th October, 2pm-3pm GMT

    Register Here This webinar considers the radical changes in higher education caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic and outlines ways in which the University has been re-imagined as a result. Based on the recently published volume “Building the Post Pandemic University: imagining, contesting and materializing higher education futures” (Edward Elgar Press 2023), the talk will cover how massive disruptions…

  • Superficial engagement with generative AI masks its potential contribution as an academic interlocuter

    This was just published on the LSE Impact Blog: The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 almost a year ago inaugurated a wave of hype characterised by the same self-interested hyperbole familiar from previous tech bubbles. Except in this case there were a range of immediate use cases that suggested this was not just a hype cycle. Early…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #20

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #19

  • Digital Sociology ECR workshop – Dec 14th-15th in Belgrade

  • Call for Proposals – Posthumanism and Media Studies

    The Journal of Posthumanism (Transnational Press) invites submissions for a special issue exploring the intersection of posthumanism and media studies.  Posthumanism fosters a more inclusive and less hierarchical approach to our entanglements with both human and non-human elements. Posthuman theory, particularly as articulated by N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, has long been influential in media…

  • CfP: The Realist Approach to AI

    Margaret Archer’s prescient work highlighted vital questions about the possibilities for relationship and “friendship” between humans and AI systems. Though written before the rise of chatbots and other interactive AI, Archer’s late papers reveal remarkable insight into issues surrounding AI personhood, sociality, and relationality that remain highly relevant today. Our project seeks to spotlight Archer’s…

  • With this pain I’d rather paint and try to turn this broken picture into something that it ain’t

    With this pain I’d rather paint And try to turn this broken picture into something that it ain’t This pain I’ll rather hold because it’s made me who I am It’s probably time I let it go, I free myself from myself I free you from regret I grant you peace before you rest and…

  • Tfw the only sections left in your book are the difficult ones you have been putting off

    In one sense Generative AI for Academics is almost finished. In another sense it is spiralling out of control because the only bits left are the immensely tricky sections on ethics and politics which I have been determinedly avoiding. The remaining bits of the manuscript are a matter of filling in a few blanks and…

  • Who does the thinking? The role of generative AI in higher education

  • Metrics and comparison in a generative AI-infused university

    A further point I want to come back to later is how metricisation figures into automation. This remark by Andrew Abbott powerfully captures how metrics are contrary to professional self-regulation; the extent to which outcomes can be compared reduces the force with which professionals are able to define exclusive jurisdiction over their problem area: On…

  • Generative AI, the threat of automation and the treatment/diagnosis link

    In Andrew Abbott’s The System of Profession he draws attention to variable link between diagnosis and treatment by professionals. In many cases the problems professionals are asked to address have conventional treatments, frequently outsourced to another group e.g primary medical care being performed by nurses under the guidance of doctors. This distinction between direction and…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #18

  • Generative AI and the threat to the academic profession

    What is a profession? The classical understanding is that professions are self-organised and self-regulating groups of experts who control the application of specialised knowledge in relation to particular areas of social life. This is reflected in the dictionary definition as an occupation “that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification”; these are the means through which a…

  • The role of stories in sociological explanation

    From Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions pg 13: First, stories may assume a central subject of narrative and follow it, or they may chronicle the creation and dissolution of such a subject. Stories proceed by joining a series of specified situations with links that describe the successive resolution of each situation. These links are…

  • 📍Help us build grassroots community media in Manchester

    The Meteor is an independent media co-op in Manchester, driven by a mission to promote social, environmental, and economic justice. As an alternative and community-based publication, we amplify marginalized voices, challenge power structures, and provide accurate and honest reporting. Our aim is to foster engagement and action by offering research, information, and opportunities for a better future while staying accountable to…