Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • 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…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #17

    Oh, I can’t breath I said oh, I can’t breath All I know is I forgot how to be me At risk of reading too much into the behaviour of a giant rodent, I was struck earlier today by the Capybara’s instinct to sit beneath an apple tree; the apples fall and it feasts on…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #16

  • Memorial to Margaret Archer at the 2023 IACR conference

  • “We all have a sense of what really living, and not just existing, would be. We know that there’s a level of life that’s rare to attain”

    This is a brilliant New Yorker profile of Charles Taylor: In Taylor’s view, cool disengagement is a fiction; an ardent search for goodness is the human reality. “We all seek a sense of what it would be like to be fully connected to something. We all have a sense of what really living, and not…

  • Interview with Nature about post-Twitter social media

    This is a great piece I was interviewed for about what comes next in social media within higher education: Mark Carrigan, a digital sociologist at the Manchester Institute for Education, UK, argues that the idea that Twitter helped democratize academia “was a bit simplistic” because social media created a space where academic celebrities thrived. Even…

  • Podcast: the future of the post-pandemic university

  • 9 ways to use use conversational agents as a tool for thinking rather than a substitute for thought

  • Charles Taylor on the Four Modes of Modern Seeking

  • Another GAI hallucinated book which I really want to write

    Claude suggests The Reflexive University is forthcoming, by me. I’ve never heard of it but I think it’s a great idea. Here’s a synopsis: Major case of shiny new thing syndrome kicking in here, given that Generative AI for Academics and Platform & Agency are both 80% complete, but I really like the idea of…

  • Interview with Times Higher Education about the viability of Threads for academics

    Full article available here (£): While Elon Musk’s tumultuous Twitter takeover has resulted in the mass sacking of thousands of staff, accusations of a rise in hate speech and a dubious rebrand, it is not yet known what the long-term impact will be on so-called “academic Twitter”. Reports have suggested that Twitter – or X,…

  • Theory is most productive not when it gives the right answers but when it poses the right question

    From Principles of a general social theory, by Alain Caillé, Frédéric Vandenberghe pg 29: Although we admire well-crafted systematic theories, we think that theory is most productive not when it gives the right answers (and even less when it gives a priori answers) but when it poses the right questions; to organize questions in such…

  • Using generative AI to summarise conversations in order to feed them into future projects

    I was a guest on Will Brehm’s brilliant FreshEd podcast (due to be released next week) with Susan Robertson, talking about the post-pandemic university book we edited with Hannah Moscovitz and Michele Martini. Will’s a brilliant interviewer and Susan a superb interlocutor, leading to a conversation in which lots of new ideas emerged. I come…

  • The poetics of disruption obscure the sociotechnical transformation of knowledge production

    From Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery pg 10: The change described in this book is like this. It’s not a single event, nor is it a change that’s happening quickly. It’s a slow revolution that has quietly been gathering steam for years. Indeed, it’s a change that many scientists have missed or underestimated, being so focused…

  • The relational possibilities of generative AI in knowledge-production: an initial sketch from realist relational sociology

    In the beginning there is the relation – Pierpaolo Donati Within the category of ‘using’ conversational agents are a range of relational possibilities which map onto human/agent interaction, human/human interactions and agent/agent interactions. Single prompt command interaction with a conversational agent Ongoing dialogue with a conversational agent(up to the technical limit of the context window)…

  • GenAIEdu 2023: Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education conference, Ulster University, Derry

    Explore the Future of Education and Generative AI at the GenAiEdu 2023 conference GenAIEdu 2023, National Conference on Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education will take place at the Derry ~ Londonderry campus of Ulster University from the 11-13 September 2023. The conference, hosted by the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems, will explore the…

  • Music that is helping me finish my book #2

  • I didn’t come looking for love, I didn’t come to pick a fight

    I didn’t come looking for love I didn’t come to pick a fight I didn’t come to wave or take pictures Pander to some benefactor, ring on every broken finger Won’t extend my wings to be clipped I know the culture here is to stay humble but shit If we all go round bowed heads,…

  • RIP Sam. I can’t believe it’s been 11 years.

    Freckled angels stand strong Freckled angels live on Freckled angels climb higher Freckled angels still inspire Freckled angels won’t forget you Teach me to live my life better Thirteen years and still I miss you Now my wings are missing feather Otherwise, I’d come and join you But for now, I’m here on Earth Stuck…

  • Music that is helping me finish my book #1

  • Hey Claude, how would Alfred Whitehead have analysed the cultural ontology of generative AI?

    Discovering that intellectually lazy prompting is much less of a problem with Claude than it is with ChatGPT: Whitehead was a process philosopher who viewed reality as a creative, organic process of entities relating to one another and developing over time. He likely would have been intrigued by generative AI as a novel manifestation of…

  • A video reflection for the IACR 2023 Margaret Archer memorial session

  • The slow destruction of ‘the immediacy of the written word’ as technology develops

    In consider what generative AI means for humanism, I’ve found myself getting preoccupied by the continuities which are obscured by an epochal narrative of disruptive innovation. Far from heralding an entirely new world with new rules, the dramatic expansion of automated capacities highlights processes which were already underway; to understand that processes can help us…

  • MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education

    I was rewriting the marketing materials for the MA I lead at the University of Manchester and just realised I’d never shared details about it here. We have an on site programme but we also have a brilliant distance learning programme. Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (DTCE) is a distinguished, award-winning programme with a rich…

  • Conversational AI as a tool for thinking-with rather than a technique for replacing our labour

    What I found fascinating about Twitter in the olden days was how readily it encouraged the development of ideas. The brevity of the format and the always-on character of the platform meant it always provided an occasion (in the dual sense of ‘a particular event, or the time at which it takes place’ and ‘reason;…

  • Cinemas as cultural temples

  • Generative AI and the frictionless digital brain

    I tried using Rewind recently which records the contents of your screen (securely and locally) in order to search for things you saw at a later date. There’s automatic OCR on text it captured on screen which means it can be remarkably effective in responding to keywords. You can then ‘rewind’ through the recordings in…

  • Claude AI the social theorist. Or, can we have theorising without thinking?

    I take no delight in claiming there’s a sense in which conversational agents can do theory. In fact it scares the shit out of me in a number of ways. But as a realist I believe we need to start from our best account of reality, which based on my in depth work over the…

  • Talk to my bot about my work

    Very much a work in progress, please treat responses with caution! https://mediafiles.botpress.cloud/b3cde30e-10f5-47d6-8a73-6197121a53ae/webchat/bot.html

  • Apple’s R&D budget is significantly bigger than the UK government’s

    It’s not a particularly meaningful comparison but it’s nonetheless striking to have noticed this in two articles I was looking at earlier:

  • How do Claude and ChatGPT 4 compare as an interlocutor?

    I tried asking the same question to each after I read James Clear’s Atomic Habits which argues that goals should be dispensed with in favour of systems: I’m interested in James Clear’s idea of atomic habits. I understand the core point that goals can be self-defeating because they leave you refraining from living until if/when…

  • “I think if you start writing a book and you don’t feel as if you’re drowning it’s not worth doing”

    I started sending the draft of Generative AI for Academics to friends earlier today and immediately started worrying “what if it’s shit?”. But then I remembered Maggie Archer once saying to me that “I think if you start writing a book and you don’t feel as if you’re drowning it’s not worth doing”. This feeling…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #15

  • A postdigital approach to platforms in higher education

    One of the virtues of a postdigital approach to technology within higher education is that it helps us unpick two seemingly contradictory stances: marginalisation and the shock of the new. There is a tendency to see technology as a contingent part of the research process which is peripheral to its core operations. For example the…

  • Generative AI for Academics

    The first draft of this is almost done 👇 I was supposed to spend the summer working on my platform theory book and instead I ended up writing something which people might actually find useful. I’m usually a messy and exploratory writer but this time an idea popped into my head fully formed (“it’s like…

  • If you’re writing a critical analysis of ChatGPT you need to learn how to use it first

    I’m increasingly irritated by critical scholars writing terrible prompts for conversational agents and sharing these as if it proves the technology is overhyped. This isn’t the devastating critique they think it is. To critique these technologies we need to learn to engage effectively with them so we are working with a realistic appraisal of their…

  • Social media is EVERYWHERE in the REF 2021 case studies. Initial findings from our study, analysed with Claude AI

    Some initial findings from the study I’m doing with Katy Jordan and Ignacio Wyman, following the analysis Katy and I did of REF 2014. It’s striking to see how institutionalised social media has become at precisely the point where its utility for most academics is rapidly collapsing: This report was written by Claude AI as…

  • Code Interpreter for ChatGPT is mind blowing

    Code Interpreter for ChatGPT is mind blowing. It is writing and running code within the chat interface in response to natural language prompts. This is such a radical shift in how we relate to software that it’s hard to grasp the potential implications. In less than 5 minutes it has written a Python script to…

  • Overcome difficulties by multiplying them

    From Mike Hill in The Ends of Knowledge pg 230:

  • Generative AI as a source of practical knowledge

    I suspect chatbots will rapidly replace YouTube as a source of ‘how to’ knowledge. I’m finding ChatGPT surprisingly effective as a guide to simple practical questions, such as how to get a bit more life out of an ancient sofa before I replace it:

  • What if those who lap up the eschatological enthusiasms of Left Behind and QAnon are in many cases survivors of their own chronic and acute disasters?

    This is excellent by Ricard Seymour on the social suffering underpinning enthusiasm for messianic theories of impending disaster, reflecting the trauma generated as the promised parameters of life unravel; the world gets smaller, things get harder and it never stops. I take Seymour to be saying the eschatological impulse is a fantasised stop to this…

  • Possibly my favourite part of being an academic

    Receiving boxes of books you have written or edited 😊

  • Using generative AI to summarise the key messages of your book

    Our book on the post-pandemic university was recently published after three years of work. It’s a large volume (360 pages) which brings together an international network who coalesced around the Post-Pandemic University network. It’s great to see it out but so much happened in the 9 months since we actually submitted it to the publisher…