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  • The loneliness of knowledge production during a pandemic

    We need to recognise the pandemic doesn’t have an ‘off’ switch, but rather will fade through a gradual process of normalising for increasingly large swathes of people alongside an ever present background of resurgent threat. This means that we won’t have a return to ‘normality’, but rather a slow, precarious and contested transition into a…

  • The civic challenges which come after the pandemic

    In the last year we have been forced to disengage from the larger society, with so much of our emotional energy turning towards sustaining close relationships at a distance through the affordances of social platforms. Even when we’re ‘opening up’ the folk epidemiological self-consciousness of the last year can’t be wished away, with wider interactions…

  • The rook can look left, right, just turns his head. But the knight might rise up, investigate the grid…

    I didn’t come looking for loveI didn’t come to pick a fightI didn’t come to wave or take picturesPander to some benefactor, ring on every broken fingerWon’t extend my wings to be clippedI know the culture here is to stay humble but shitIf we all go round bowed heads, button-lippedIf none of us go for…

  • The politics of bad sex

    From Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again loc 398: Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs. It occurs because of inadequacies and inequalities in access to sexual literacy, sex education and sexual health…

  • Teaching as a design science: a few reflections on Diana Laurillard’s approach to digital education

    I’ve found the approach of Diana Laurillard extremely helpful for articulating what I’ve tended to think of as user cultures and public pedagogies for social media within higher education. As she puts it on pg 2 of her book of the same name, “education must now begin to drive its use of technology”. I’ve sometimes…

  • The reservoirs and amplifiers of SARS-CoV-2

    There’s not an ‘off’ switch to a pandemic but rather a tendency for it to fade as a daily concern for ever larger swathes of the population, in a process of normalisation liable to be interrupted by resurgences which can easily be cast as coming from undesirable elements who are outside the mainstream of society.

  • The public discussion of higher education and research

    I thought THE’s Chris Havergal discussion (viz 21-22 mins) about the effects of social media on the coverage of universities was extremely interesting. This is something I wrote about a few years ago as the shift from the ivory tower to the glass tower which is a metaphor which didn’t really have much effect but…

  • Call for Participants – Digital Inequality in Education: Pasts, Presents and Futures

    Digital inequalities have long existed within education, both within traditional educational spaces and practice, and within specifically digital interactions. These inequalities have deep roots in extant socio-cultural and socio-economic inequalities, and yet emerge in unique ways through the macro and micro dynamics of education and digital technologies.

  • The point of life is live, love If you can, then pass it on

    We die so the others can be bornWe age so the others can be youngThe point of life is live, loveIf you can, then pass it on, right?

  • The importance of the library

    From Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People pg 33-34: Libraries are not the kinds of institutions that most social scientists, policy makers, and community leaders usually bring up when they discuss social capital and how to build it. Since Tocqueville, most leading thinkers about social and civic life have extolled the value of voluntary associations…

  • Platform socialisation and the changing character of education

    We can’t find meaning in the world, in the sense of a process of maturing and coming to find a place for ourselves which is satisfying and sustainable, simply through the internalisation of a symbolic order and/or the replication of our natal circumstances.

  • RIP Jim Steinman

    And some nights I lose the feelingAnd some nights I lose controlSome nights I just lose it all when I watch you dance and the thunder rolls And maybe I’m lonelyThat’s all I’m qualified to beThere’s just one and onlyThe one and only promise I can keep As long as the wheels are turningAs long…

  • What is social infrastructure?

    The outdoor spaces which functioned to facilitated interaction have been problematised as spaces of viral contagion, leading our movement through them to be restricted to the functional.

  • How to be a male ally in a culture of sexual violence against women

  • What is asexuality and why is it interesting?

    There’s a video of me from 10 years ago on YouTube and it makes me feel old:

  • Platform socialisation and the possibility of freedom

    I wrote in yesterday’s post about being an ‘efficacious agent‘. Dewey has a much better term for this: freedom. The freedom which comes from the “power to frame purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the consequences which will result from acting upon them; power to select and order means to carry chosen ends…

  • I don’t control life, but I can control how I react to it

  • Do you have an idea for a book about public sociology?

    This is a new monograph series on public sociology which will include work that addresses public and community engagement and the relationship between sociologists and their publics.

  • What does it mean to be an efficacious agent? Some sketchy notes on critical realism and educational sociology

    In the last few months, I’ve been trying to define my interest in education and often find myself coming back to the idea of the efficacious agent. This is a placeholder really but it rests on my sense that education (in the broadest sense of the formal or informal) leaves people variably placed in terms…

  • Dewey’s conception of collateral learning and platform socialisation

    I’m unsure whether ‘collateral learning’ is a throwaway phrase used by Dewey in Experience and Education or whether it’s more fully developed elsewhere. However I’ve found it a really useful concept to make sense of informal learning through social platforms and their impact upon the socialisation process.

  • Why do platforms matter for public sociology?

    It can seem obvious that there’s some relationship between social media and public sociology. These are platforms which offer free, instantaneous and immediate access to seemingly vast audiences around the world. They hold out the promise of engaging immediately, outside of traditional structures and without relying on the intermediaries who have tended to be involved when…

  • Recovering the Homeric gods

    I understand the point to be that existence is higher or fuller when things are acting through us rather than action arising from us, reflecting an involvement in our situation rather than a detachment from it. To reclaim the Homeric gods doesn’t necessitate polytheism but it does mean cultivating a sensitivity to the range of…

  • An Archerian reading of John Dewey and its relevance for platform socialisation

    What I find particularly valuable in Dewey is his sense of how as an individual “passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment, expands or contracts” with the “knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow” (pg 44). The nature of this…

  • The role of involvement in learning how to learn

    I found this reprint from Hubert Dreyfus quite inspiring to engage with again, over a decade since I read the original book. It feels more relevant than ever when considering the constraints of education during the pandemic, with the core challenge posed by Dreyfus of how much involvement can be established remotely being one which…

  • Chomsky: On Being Truly Educated

    The ability to inquire and create constructively and independently without external controls.

  • What sorts of experiences do social platforms generate?

    What sorts of experiences do social platforms generate? What “attitudes and habitual tendencies” (pg 38) are being generated? Which “are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental” (pg 39)?

  • What do you miss? Research-led music on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education

    I love this music by Simone Eringfeld based on her MPhil research on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education:

  • “Everybody’s hurt, mine ain’t the worst but it’s mine and I’m feeling it now”

  • Covid censoriousness

    I wrote last month about the censoriousness which seems to have proliferated during the pandemic. It frustrates me when I see it in others but I then notice it welling up in myself, in ways connected with but irreducible to behaviours which increase transmission risks.

  • The two competing models of education

    From John Dewey’s Experience and Education pg 17: The history of educational theory is marked by opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without; that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place…

  • From the Margins to the Centre: Defining New Mission and Vision for HCI Researchers in South Asia

    CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:We aim to build ”HCI4SouthAsia”, a strong community of HCI researchers and practitioners who work/will work in the South Asian region (i.e., in and around the countries Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). As a first step, we are organizing a half-day virtual workshop over the Zoom platform at CHI 2021,…

  • The true object of democratic education: to stand up within the context and against the context

    This is a really powerful account by Roberto Unger about the role of education in producing capable agents, able to act within the present order but also to resist it and see beyond it, opening out possibilities for transformation which are latent within the way the world currently is. He suggests states are concerned with…

  • Whom is education for? What is education for? A lecture by Noam Chomsky

    I’ve spent an enjoyable afternoon listening to Chomsky talk about education. The overarching issue this has raised for me is how education relates to agency. How does education support the capacity to act in the world? How does it redistribute power in Weber’s sense of the probability that someone will be able to exercise their…

  • Noam Chomsky on The Purpose of Education

    An education of the kind that Bertrand Russell or John Dewey talked about. That’s a value in itself, whatever impact it has on society. It’s a value because it helps creates better human beings. After all that’s what an education system should be for.

  • The social ontology of education

    What is education? This perspective from Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, drawing on Connell’s work, resonated with me: Here, ‘learning’ is placed at the centre of anything that we might know as education, but it is seen as a collective property of the social world, and our understanding of the education ensemble represents education as…

  • What is my work about?

    I’m a sociologist of technology exploring the intersection between social platforms, human agency and education in the broadest sense. I’m interested in how these platforms, as socio-technical infrastructures which enable users to interact within parameters defined by their operators, become taken for granted features of everyday life. Far from the virtual world ‘out there’ which…

  • What do you do, exactly?

  • On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Education Ideal

    It is a time-space granted for self-fulfilment. To become who one is. That’s what the university is. That’s why the university is called the university. Because it fulfils the purpose of the universe. Humbolt’s ideal is that without external pressure or demand, the individual will find within herself or himself, the greatest urge: to fulfil…

  • John Dewey, Habituation and Platform Socialisation

    In his account of socialisation in Democracy and Education, Dewey places a great stress on habit formation. There’s an inevitability to habit as “excessive stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response” necessitate that “certain stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are degraded”.

  • Dewey on the over-socialised conception of ‘imitation’

    I found this extremely interesting from Dewey’s Democracy and Education loc 562-575. He argues that the concept of ‘imitation’ tends to mistake an outcome for cause, imputing to a generic tendency to copy each other what is better explained by commonly constituted agents finding themselves in similar situations which tend to produce similar responses.

  • What are digital inequalities?

    I’m enjoying Massimo Ragnedda’s The Third Digital Divide because of how lucidly he lays out the theoretical issues raised by the notion of digital inequalities. This is from pg 4 of the book: From his neo-Weberian perspective these questions encompass economic, cultural and political aspects. It’s a matter of status and prestige as much access…

  • Food or data? A few thoughts on digital inequality in the UK

    I wish this research by the telecoms regulator Ofcom had received more widespread attention. They found that 4.7 million UK homes have struggled to afford their telecoms bills this year, with over a million households cutting back on spending on things like food and clothes in order to pay these bills.

  • Call for solidarity from BEKS Istanbul

    Dear colleagues and friends, BEKS Istanbul was founded in 2010 by a group of scholars and students from the Sociology department at Mimar Sinan University to make independent scientific research and share their results with the democratic public opinion, especially on “difficult” issues in need of public debate and left a trace in the social…

  • New Book: The Public and their Platforms

    I’m so excited the book I’ve been working on with Lambros Fatsis over the last few years is coming out in June. It’s the result of a long conversation we’ve had about our mutual frustrations concerning ‘public sociology’ which led us to rethink what it means to be public scholars once digital platforms are ubiquitous…

  • The agony of the petite bourgeoisie

    I thought this observation from Dylan Riley in the recent New Left Review was crucial for understanding the class politics of the pandemic. Particularly with regards to what I’ve come to think of as the lumpen-libertarian uprising which is unfolding as a reaction against elites, globalism and lockdown in a way which gets past the…

  • Big Tech’s (apparent) crackdown on the far right

    In the last few months we’ve seen the large social platforms take what appears to be a stand against the far-right. This point from Richard Seymour is absolutely crucial in understanding the ideological significance of this move, lest it be seen as a damascene conversion to civic responsibility rather than a business decision: Hitherto, the…

  • The gap between theory and practice in education

    “Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of “telling” and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice…

  • The socialising role of community

    Following from this afternoon’s post about John Dewey, I wanted to share this extract from later in Democracy and Education about the socialising role played by communities. He explains how the groups to which an individual belongs inevitably exercises an influence over them, by virtue of that belonging. I understanding him to be saying these…

  • Higher education as self-formation

    I found this really helpful for revisiting my PhD, seven years on, in order to finally publish from it. I’m broadly sympathetic with the project expressed in this lecture but the point of departure is his claim that higher education increases the capacity for reflexivity. This just isn’t true as an empirical generalisation and examining…

  • How would John Dewey have understood the socialising influence of digital platforms?

    How would John Dewey have understood the influence of social platforms on adolescents? I found myself wondering this because of the central role which transmission plays in his understanding of socialisation.

  • CFP: Accelerated Academy #8: Decelerated Academy? Enclosures, Enthusiasms, and Epidemic

    The current health crisis has swept the world, provoking worldwide change at the political, economic, and social levels. Scholars have been caught in two contradicting roles: experts discussing  the causes and consequences of the pandemic and victims of the pandemic workflows’ extensive impact. They have been forced to change their work dynamics and rethink the Academy’s…

  • All hail our new robot overlords

  • This is a test post from a wordpress webinar which I’ll delete

    this is paragraph another paragraph another paragraph This is a paragraph block WordPress can be used in this way Or that way Or another way

  • The Slow Cancellation of the Future

  • My so called life

    In my sixth month of lockdown, I’ve rediscovered my love of breakcore:

  • Us

    They made a statue of us The tourists come and stare at us The sculptor’s marble sends regards

  • A digital citizenship agenda for educators

    “Greater digital literacy is often the recommendation for dealing with the effects of social media within society, but this ignores the fact that educators are actively involved in these conversations not simply aware they exist”

  • Workshop: the Digital Divide in the Post-Pandemic University

    The pandemic has thrown a harsh spotlight on digital inequalities within higher education. The university campus brought staff and students into a shared space, with a degree of infrastructural provision which created at least an appearance of digital equality.

  • Being open to the world

    I wrote this almost 15 years in my first year as a sociology student, having abandoned a planned political philosophy PhD to take a social research MA instead because of a sudden fascination with empirical research.

  • We have to destroy all computers, starting now

    Unfortunately the YouTube embed doesn’t work properly on new WordPress, but please do start this track at 15 minutes 11 seconds:

  • Relying on algorithms for biosecurity

    what extent will we rely on algorithms to sustain social distancing as we move into an intermediate phase of biosecure vigilance rather than biosecurity crisis? What would this reliance exclude? Can we develop collective habits of coordinating ourselves in shared spaces to the same degree if algorithms are orchestrating the underlying dynamics of the process?

  • The return of normality

    One of the key fault lines in post-pandemic politics is likely to be the return of ‘normality’. The pandemic won’t have an off switch, as this useful piece explains. If ‘herd immunity’ is achieved it will likely be a fleeting achievement within national boundaries, leaving countries bound up in a logic of biosecurity which could…

  • Post-pandemic reconstruction

    I’ve been thinking a lot about what reconstruction will look after pandemic, as well as how it will compare to older periods of social reconstruction. There’s something of this captured in Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter last night about the potential significance of online communities after the pandemic. Will the trend of bowling alone be reversed…

  • The creative freedom of post-work

    From Post-Capitalist Desire by Mark Fisher, pg 77: I just think about the Beatles. What does a post-work society look like? It kind of looks like what life was like for them, doesn’t it? They didn’t have to work. They’d made enough money, surely, by the early Sixties to just not work. Then their most…

  • Someone is wrong on the internet: a conversation between web comics

  • Call for papers: Special issue of Journal of Critical Realism on Critical Realism and Pragmatism

    The relationship between pragmatism and critical realism is open to many interpretations

  • Do people annoy you more than they used to?

    Do people annoy you more than they used to? I’ve found my levels of irritation with people in public spaces rising over the last year and I’ve found it interesting to think about why

  • Students Jury on Online/Pandemic Learning: Thoughts To Consider

    I’m taking part in a Students Jury on Online/Pandemic Learning tomorrow. I’ve been asked to prepare some ideas about what students should keep in mind when formulating recommendations for how their department approaches these issues for autumn term in 2021.

  • The sublime high of visibility

    This monologue from speed-fuelled gonzo journalist Cameron Colley in Iain Banks’ 1993 novel Complicity suggested something interesting to me about social media. Have social platforms made this accessible to the masses while simultaneously cheapening it by leading us from who gets to speak to who gets heard?

  • A conversation with Tyler Shores about digital wellbeing

    We recorded this for @CamEdFac’s Digital Learning Working Group. I felt we hit upon some key principles for digital wellbeing during the pandemic

  • Raptor Jesus is Risen

  • Big data, social listening and social futures

  • Who is writing this blog?

    “A theme here is blogging’s tendency to summon a strange double, a second self that seems both alien yet which cannot entirely be disavowed.”

  • Magical voluntarism: I got this

    Even if we didn’t manage to solve it this time, we can defer things forward so that next time we assume it’s going to be possible. Perhaps when I’ve changed in some way? Improved myself? Made myself stronger? Or more resilient?

  • New Book: Post-Human Futures

    This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading…

  • What big tech knows about your children

    The digital platforms you and your family use every day — from online games to education apps and medical portals — may be collecting and selling your children’s data, says anthropologist Veronica Barassi. Sharing her eye-opening research, Barassi urges parents to look twice at digital terms and conditions instead of blindly accepting them — and…

  • Hope, perseverance, a vision (some doubt)

  • Professor Bernhard Steinerhoff, Lecturer

  • Three thoughts about post-pandemic inequality

    What about the people who can’t afford a smart phone? Or can only afford one to share between a household? Furthermore, should we be concerned about the implications for surveillance capitalism of mandating smart devices as a means of personal identification?

  • Being immersed in work while it rains at night

  • Nick Land’s Poeticisation of Capital’s Obscenity

    It’s a position I’d understood intellectually but reading it left me with a momentary flash of this obscene totality weaving itself materially and immateriality through social reality as it orchestrates its own expansion and continued ascension.

  • Post-Pandemic Hedonism: Thoughts on Mark Fisher’s Final Book

    If our desires are imbricated in the circuits of capital, if we feel and dream in terms of commodities and within the horizon of the existing system, what does this mean for the possibility of moving beyond it?

  • What are the opportunities and challenges for Digital Social Research?

    This is an extract from a conversation with Jana Bacevic recorded for a qualitative research module in the Department of Sociology at Durham University

  • What does it mean to be partners-in-freedom?

    This phrase used by Damon Young has stuck with me in the years since I read the book which contained this acknowledgement in its preface. It immediately resonated yet I’ve only come to understand what it means with time, as well as what it entails for partnership. I thought back to it when reading this…

  • Start the Riot!

  • How disagreements about evidence shaped the UK government’s inaction over face masks

    This is such a useful summary from Trisha Greenhalgh’s excellent Boston Review essay: In relation to face coverings, for example, there was basic scientific evidence on how the virus behaves. There were service-level data from hospital and general practitioner records. There were detailed comparative data on the health system and policy responses of different countries.…

  • What’s been made visible by COVID-19 and what might become invisible once again

    “Like an acid eating away the flesh, COVID-19 has allowed us to see the bones of the social structure, to unveil the inequalities that mean some have to travel to work in care homes and fruit-picking fields, while others self-isolate and edit books. Nice work, if you can get it.”

  • The Project Graveyard

    I just went through my old wordpress.com sites and found a fascinating range of projects I’d forgotten about. In some cases, these were barely started or even immediately abandoned, reminding me of fleeting enthusiasms which soon dissipated. In other cases, they were projects that lived out their natural life course, only to eventually be forgotten…

  • What’s gone wrong with social media in higher education and why we urgently need to fix it

    Social media has gone from fringe to mainstream in higher education within the last decade. A culture has developed around it which shapes how it is used by academics and how that use is evaluated. However a range of problems are emerging which that culture is proving unable to address. I explore these problems and…

  • Rap against dictatorship

  • The case against lockdown

    Following my post a couple of months ago about objections to the anti-lockdown case, I thought I would share/save this formulation of the case against lockdown from epidemiologist John Ioannidis published in May last year as part of a superb exchange in the Boston Review.

  • Hannah Arendt on Conspiracies

    “At a time when full political information, necessarily worldwide ins cope, is available only to the professional, and when statesmen have found no other clue to world politics than the blind alley of imperialism, it is almost a matter of course for the others, who vaguely sense our worldwide interdependence but are unable to penetrate…

  • A collection of sea shanties

  • Hope Not Hate’s recommendations for Zoom security

    It distresses me how easily this can be explained in the terms of 00s cyberutopianism. Does Zoom somehow encourage racist attacks? Or does it simply lower the transaction costs sufficiently that scores of racists not quite motivated enough to attack physical events are now willing to do so.

  • The death march into crisis

    This is a typically astute piece from Richard Seymour on the intersection between social failure and environmental change generating the current crisis in Texas. He offers a disturbing analysis of the (attempted) creation of “mobilised political constituency that is ready, even morally energised, for quite a lot of death”

  • Behold him now, in utter solitude

    Behold him now, in utter solitude, Welcomed by naught save fearful, deathlike silence,— A silence which the echo of his steps Alone disturbs, as through the vaults he paces.

  • Who holds back the electric car?

  • Popular Culture and Pandemic Imaginaries

    It was clear that Songbird was a dreadful film, with atrocious script and terrible politics. However it was impossible to resist as a cultural expression of the ideas about society and the pandemic circulating in these febrile times. The story unfolds four years into a lockdown in America, as COVID-23 devastates the planet with a…