Mark – Page 16 – Mark Carrigan

Blog: https://markcarrigan.net/
Profile: https://markcarrigan.net/author/streetlightmanifesto/
Homepage: http://www.markcarrigan.net/

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…
What’s been sticking in my eye? I got something sticking in my eye
Crypto is Vegas without the drinks, the dinner or the show

At least when you go to Vegas you know the odds. There’s a long list of rules and regulations a casino must follow. There’s also entertainment value in the experience. Gamblers may win or lose money at the tables but at least they’re comped a few drinks, they can have a nice dinner and catch…
To be traumatized is to be unable to innovate, or improvise, or surprise oneself
A Lacanian approach to ChatGPT

What does iterative interaction with conversational agents mean for the chain of discourse which manifests phenomenologically during the writing process? How do the formal structures of language at scale (the LLM) intersect with the formal structures of language in the subject (the Lacanian unconscious) in the context of ongoing interaction? Certain words and expressions present…
When the earth opens up in front of you
Nothing is more entertaining than fucking with words and their arrangement

From Lacan by Lionel Bailly pg 124: There is just as much, if not greater jouissance in the functioning of the mind than in the functioning of any other bodily part. The ability to cross the bar of metaphor, to operate in the symbolic realm – to conceptualise, to analyse, and to rationalise – are…
Current mood in AI generated images #14

And you wanted more and you got less, and it hurt Oh, but it could be worse, yeah Things could be so much worse
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time

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. Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The…
Ontological and cultural humanism

One of the interesting things which came out of the Centre for Social Ontology’s four year project on humanism (this was the volume I edited) was a clear distinction between an ontological commitment to humanism and a cultural commitment to humanism i.e. a conceptual affirmation of the irreducible properties and powers of the human and…
The ontology of the unconscious

From Lacan by Lionel Bailly pg 49: Rather than the topological representations used by Freud, one may think of the unconscious as the force field that orientates the molecules of a liquid crystal, where the molecules are the signifiers. The analogy of the liquid crystal is useful when describing the relation of signifiers inside the…
Beneath the waves an ocean
The radicalisation of landlords

This is such an interesting discussion of the ideological implications of macro-economic shifts for the 2.74 million landlords in the UK. In a low interest rate environment buy-to-let felt like a remarkable opportunity for essentially passive income, facilitated by a service economy to eliminate the labour involved in the process. What happens when the taps…
Personal change as paradigm shift

I found this interview when searching for videos with the psychiatrist, philosopher and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist. I was initially put off by the fact Jordan Peterson was the interviewer, as I suspect many readers of my blog will be, but this is a genuinely fascinating interview. McGilchrist conceives of the two hemispheres of the…
The powerful cultural pull to the right which has been felt in parts of the left

As is often the case Richard Seymour perfectly captures a diffuse thought I’ve been troubled by for months, particularly with regards to what can usefully be talked about as the post-left. This is not a new tendency, consider for example Steve Hall and ultra-realist criminologists in the 2010s, but it has certainly built up a…
Paz Lenchantin’s cover of Venus in Furs

How spectacular is this cover? I hadn’t listened to the original for years but I think I prefer this to it.
It’s time for academics to let go of Twitter

Imagine discovering that a colleague was regularly posting on Gab, Parler or Truth Social. These alt-media platforms became notorious over recent years as spaces parallel to the mainstream of social media where the reactionary right has gathered. Defining themselves in opposition to the asserted liberal dominance of social platforms, where censorious moderators are accused of…
And maybe that’s what getting older is, an accumulation of loss that turns you into a different sort of person
Chat GPT and Assessment Reform: A Practical Introduction

Video of a session I did with my DTCE colleagues in May:
The old web is dying, while the new web struggles to be born

This feels like an extremely important article by James Vincent about how rapidly AI generated text is swamping the web, as well as what this means for its longer term evolution. It hinges upon something I’ve been preoccupied by, namely that generative AI has emerged at exactly the point where the (possibly) mature business model…
Have you used Social Media for Academics in your teaching or training?

Have you used my book Social Media for Academics in your teaching or training? If so would you mind telling me a little bit about how you used it? Either in comments below or by sending me an e-mail.
Digital convenience as an engine of routinisation

This is an important point in Rogers Brubaker’s Hyperconnectivity and its Discontents which runs contrary to the assumption that digital technologies in the lifeworld are inherently generative of reflexivity. From loc 609: Convenience resets expectations, forms habits, and insinuates its way into our routines. And these expectations, habits, and routines are unobtrusively but powerfully world-transforming.…
The impending automation of grant writing

I was slightly unsettled to be sent details of this impending webinar about automated grant writing using generative AI. I have no doubts it can be used effectively in this way as a means of supporting an existing process, particularly with regards to discerning and reproducing a best guess as to the form which a…
In universities, a stir, automation is to occur

In hallowed halls where scholars thrive, In chambers where keen minds arrive, There stirs a change, an unseen tide, That soon may sweep far and wide. The gears of progress turn and whir, While innovations fast occur, In universities, a stir, Automation is to occur. Robes of data, silicon brains, Programmed not to…
Current mood in AI generated images #13
Industrial action and the broken funding system in higher education

This is a great piece jointly authored by York UCU and the York VC which captures the immense pessimism which has been growing in me over the last 6 months. There simply isn’t enough money in the system to resolve this dispute and until there’s a new political settlement it’s going to run endlessly, possibly…
Oscillating between technopessimism and technooptimism

I often feel like I’m oscillating wildly between believing (a) generative AI is a slow motion car crash that is going to destroy enjoyable work, human culture & public knowledge (b) we are in the early stages of an unprecedented expansion of human intellectual and creative capacities which is making me reevaluate my hostility towards…
How to use blog length prompts to ask ChatGPT 4 complex conceptual questions

Over the last month I’ve become far more enthusiastic about ChatGPT as I’ve learned to write blog post length prompts. I’ve often feeding blog posts I’ve written into it to have a conversation about the ideas. Here’s an example of what a freshly written long form prompt looks like: I recently read an anthropologist and…
“I try not to look ahead at the moment. If I don’t look ahead I don’t worry”

This quote from the recent Guardian Politics Weekly podcast by John Harris (see the accompanying piece here) about social insecurity in the fashionable and prosperous market town of Frome connects to Bourdieu’s point towards the end of Pascalian Meditations about the relationship between economic security and a sense of the future. To have expectations about…
Current mood in AI generated images #12
The disavowed uncertainty of Kierkegaard’s eternal love

From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 3440: Although ordinary love has eternity within itself, it can nevertheless wane over time (Kierkegaard, 1995, p. 31). But a change in the form of love can occur: “when love has undergone the change of eternity by having become a duty, it has gained enduring continuance, and it…
In a financialised economy raising interest rates actually causes inflation

This is a really plausible, if counter-intuitive, suggestion by Richard Murphy that the extent of financialisation in the British economy (e.g 92% of cars bought on finance, 19% of households in the private rented sector) means that rapid raising of interest rates can actually cause inflation, as the burden is passed on through debtor/creditor relationships.…
Social platforms as a machine for generating apophenia

Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.[1] The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.[2] He defined it as “unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness”.[3][4] He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of…
What happens when we all become vulnerable?

I’m currently reading Julia Ebner’s Mainstream about the normalisation of far-right conspiracies and their societal implications. She asks “what happens when we all become vulnerable?” early in the book when reflecting on the susceptibility of vulnerable people towards radicalisation. It’s not a new idea but I’m not sure I’ve heard the link between social suffering…
How to avoid shiny new thing syndrome

It’s taken me a long time to get here but I’ve finally realised that saying ‘no’ in higher education is partly a matter of simply realising that being interesting is an insufficient reason to commit to something. There are many interesting things we could be doing and I’ve started to perceive the opportunity costs involved…
The impact of the cost of living crisis on the educational experiences of international students

This is a worrying finding which substantiates a concern I’ve had in my interactions with international PGT students this year: The Advance HE/HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey 2023 found that 50% of EU undergraduates in the UK said that they feel their studies have been impacted by the cost of living ‘a little’, while 27% said it has impacted…
Nick Bostrom’s curiously exaggerated expectations of government regulation of AI

I’m not a fan of Bostrom’s work but he’s clearly an astute analyst in many ways. I found this expectation from Superintelligence pg 213 thought provoking in its political naïveté, not least of all expressed in the assumption that technology firms aren’t already bound up in the national security infrastructure. An important question, therefore, is…
What Do Artificial Intelligence Systems Mean For Academic Practice?

I’m looking forward to this SRHE workshop next month. Register here.
“Well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would you want to do? Not, what do you have to do to survive, or appease the Other, but what would you just want?”

I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would…
The technological infrastructure of beatboxing

I’ve vaguely wanted to write about Beardyman for years. I don’t think I have the expertise to do it but his continual exploration of the technological infrastructure for extending, mutating and controlling his voice is something which fascinates me:
Cliodynamics and social collapse

I feel quite ambivalent about the idea of cliodynamics, torn between a left-accelerationist enthusiasm for it and a theoretical scepticism about ‘quantitative history’, but this is extremely interesting nonetheless:
Current mood in AI generated images #11
The ‘decided desire’ of the post-analysis neurotic

From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 2641 The hallmark of neurosis is doubt and uncertainty, particularly with regard to love; the neurotic is full of ambivalence regarding love matters, and is never certain (the way a psychotic can be) of his or her love, except perhaps after analysis, after his undecided desire has become…
I should’ve found a way out so everyone can find a way out
“She says, I’m not your enemy. I said, that sounds like something that my enemy would say”

She says, I’m not your enemy I said, that sounds like something that my enemy would say Instead of playing off the chemistry she said, you’re being difficult I said, I’m being guarded, you’re a quarter mil in debt, I get more guidance from my barber Look, I’m not good at this, I grew up…
ChatGPT as responding to markers of ‘intelligence’

There’s a lot to unpack sociologically here but I’m saving it for future scrutiny, from Zvi Mowshowitz’s AI newsletter. I suspect the kernel of truth in this is that the internally consistent use of domain specific terminology rapidly establishes the context which your prompt is inquiring into.
Two decades as the sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change

From Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence pg 37-38: Two decades is a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change: near enough to be attention-grabbing and relevant, yet far enough to make it possible to suppose that a string of breakthroughs, currently only vaguely imaginable, might by then have occurred. Contrast this with shorter timescales: most technologies that…
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #10
The Lacanian theory of trauma

From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 19662: One of the faces of the real that we deal with in psychoanalysis is trauma. If we think of the real as everything that has yet to be symbolized, language no doubt never completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order;…
Visualising The Real

From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 18789: So too, Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions. localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads that are its “stuff.” It…
Niklas Luhmann’s critique of organisational sociology

From Hans Joas and W. Knöbl’s Twenty Lectures in Social Theory pg 254: Luhmann thus conceives his functional-structural systems theory quite explicitly as a ‘systems-environment theory’ (ibid.), allowing him to extend his analysis of organizations beyond their internal mechanisms to include a broader context. This also enables him to drop one of the core hypotheses of…
The unconscious as overflowing with other people’s desires

From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 12236: Many people sense at times that they are working towards something they do not even really want, striving to live up to expectations they do not even endorse, or mouthing goals they know perfectly well they have little if any motivation to achieve. The unconscious is, in…
Current mood in AI generated images #9
When-I-finally get hold of objet petit a

It struck me during my current Lacanian explorations how well this notion from Oliver Burkeman maps onto the objet petit a. It is that outcome we imagine will bring completion, make possible a fullness to our existence which was previously foreclosed, that suggests the lurking presence of the objet petit a: A central feature of…
Reddit’s API changes and the new business model of social media

I’ve written a lot recently about the shift underway in the business model of social media. The sudden lurch to a subscription model has been provoked by a number of exogenous shocks (changing investment climate, digital ad market going into retrenchment and Apple torching part of the infrastructural basis for surveillance capitalism) but it also…
Science and scholarship in a changing Europe, July 3rd

I’m looking forward to this hybrid event in early July. I’ll be taking part in a debate about generative AI and the future of academic publishing. Full details here. Academia Europaea is a unique pan-European academy of sciences, humanities and letters, created as the means to express ideas and opinions of scientists and scholars from…
The list of things I used to be is longer than the list of things I am
We are what we care about, we are what we lack

I was struck when reading Bruce Fink’s superb Lacan on Love how orthogonal this tradition of thought is to the approach to human agency I’ve tended to work within. Whereas Margaret Archer argued that we are what we care about, the Lacanian approach would suggest we are what we lack. We are defined by our…
Is AI a threat to academic publishing?

I’ve been thinking about this topic in advance of an event next month, though I’m struggling at present to get beyond ‘maybe, maybe not’ as an answer. Here are some thoughts: