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  • Post-neoliberal civics and the symmetry problem

    One of the curious features of social media is how it encourages reflection on the use of social media. It has brought novel experiences and the capacity to discuss novelty, leading to a growing focus on online interaction as an object of online interaction. The result is often far from pretty: I take ‘post-truth’ to be in…

  • Neoliberalism is limping to its death: what comes next?

    This short piece on OpenDemocracy captures something I’ve been obsessing about since the UK election: Neoliberalism is limping to its death, and it’s up to us to make sure that what comes next isn’t something worse. The energy, the ideas and the people are all on our side. It seems increasingly clear that neoliberalism is…

  • The emerging contours of (alt)liberal anti-leftism

    This essay about Stephen Pinker raises a number of issues which I think are crucial to understanding the emerging contours of liberal anti-leftism. For example the tendency to profess a concern for social problems and then attack those who are actively seeking to address those problems: What’s maddening about Pinker’s body of recent work is…

  • The lack of normative guidance in the sharing economy

    This extract from loc 335 of Anna Weinar’s Uncanny Valley captures something I find fascinating about the so-called ‘sharing economy’: the challenge of creating normative guidelines for novel forms of interaction which these platforms have facilitated. It was my first time paying to stay with strangers. The apartment was clean and welcoming, full of overstuffed…

  • The parallel between publishing and academia

    This description of life within the publishing industry, from Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley loc 133, struck a chord with me: Every assistant I knew quietly relied on a secondary source of income: copyediting, bartending, waitressing, generous relatives. These cash flows were rarely disclosed to anyone but each other. It was an indignity to talk about…

  • Digital Strategy for Learned Societies

    Digital platforms are driving a tectonic shift in public culture, creating a range of intellectual challenges for research, scholarship and higher education. Learned societies have a uniquely important role to play in responding to these problems. But it can be difficult to do this when social media, open access and academic precarity make their organisational…

  • The politics of seeking a less clamorous place

    I was fascinated by the account Adam Phillips offers in this conversation of psychoanalysis as a less clamorous place from which to come to terms with our lives. Obviously each individual is going to be different. But for a lot of people, the political world seems unintelligible, overwhelmingly complicated and frightening. And yet everybody feels…

  • The challenge of post-neoliberal civics

    From The Convivial Society vol 1, no. 1:  At the same time, however, it also seems to me that especially given the scale and scope of our problems, it may be that we need to draw attention again to very basic and fundamental realities. That we must learn again what it means to take responsibility…

  • Transhumanism and Marxist

    This call for papers looks brilliant: Special Issue CFP: “Marxist Transhumanism or Transhumanist Marxism?” To be published in New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry  Guest editors: James Steinhoff and Atle Mikkola Kjøsen In this special issue call, New Proposals asks authors to explore how Marxism and Transhumanism might be brought into conjunction. Could…

  • From data-driven politics to weaponised social media

    This illuminating Vanity Fair article captures an important transition in digital politics, as the data science driven Clinton campaign was eclipsed by the social media savvy Trump campaign: While Democrats spent the last decade running A/B tests and refining their voter models, Republicans stumbled into learning how to weaponize content on social media by going…

  • Europe is lost

    Europe is lost, America lost, London lost Still we are clamouring victory All that is meaningless rules We have learned nothing from history

  • The perpetual warfare of the populist president

    This extract from Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants pg 343 captures something important about the sociology of Donald Trump’s presidency. I think he’s correct about the use of constant strife, echoing the argument by Will Davies about the blurring boundary between war and peace, to dominate the media agenda in a way which ensures the…

  • Inviting regulation once you’ve already won

    We should be cautious about apparent signs of Big Tech’s willingness to accept regulation when we consider the history of AT&T. As Tim Wu documents on pg 56 of The Master Switch, the telephone monopoly was willing to accept regulation once it had already won: The trick of the Kingsbury Commitment was to make relatively painless…

  • The immersive challenge of the hyperserial narrative

    This passage from pg 333 of Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants connects to my analysis of cultural binging. It brings to life the specific cultural characteristics which encourage binge watching, even if they don’t create it: While House of Cards might have made binging mainstream, in the decade before, writers of shows were inventing what Vince Gilligan (of…

  • The macro-economic costs of distraction

    This suggestion from Tim Wu on pg 352 of The Attention Merchants asks a question which has been on my mind a lot in the last year. If we accept the idea that distraction increases in a digital environment, in the sense of a difficulty in sustaining focus driven by the multiplication of disruptions, what does this…

  • How BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti literally discovered viralityx.

    In Tim Wu’s Attention Merchants pg 276-277 he tells the story of BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti going viral for the first time as a graduate student, as an e-mail exchange with Nike circulated to millions after he forwarded it to a few friends: While goofing off—“ surfing the web” in the vernacular of the time—Peretti went…

  • The Transformation of Higher Education: Acceleration, Platformisation and Digitalisation

    Friday, 03 April 2020, 11am-5pm in London, UK  Register online here: https://www.srhe.ac.uk/events/details.asp?eid=456 There is widespread agreement that universities are undergoing a profound transformation but much less agreement on what these changes mean and how we should characterise them. The Digital University Network has stressed the role of new technologies in transforming practice within the university.…

  • The arms race of celebrity

    This passage from Tim Wu’s The Master Switch pg 225 offers a useful account for making sense of the rise of a figure like Lawrence Fox. When the ‘arms race of exposure’ is more intense than ever because social media means a great many of us have entered into it, new strategies become necessary to…

  • The problem of British towns

    I’ve resisted blogging about the Labour leadership election in spite of the fact I’m both obsessing about it and deeply conflicted about who to support. To my surprise I’m taking Lisa Nandy very seriously and this is in large part because she seems to be the only candidate to have thought deeply about the profound…

  • Durkheim on bounding variety

    There’s an interesting parallel between Durkheim’s conception of social regulation and what Archer calls ‘bounding variety’ and Cybernetics describes as ‘attenuating variety’. As Durkheim writes on pg 300 in a discussion of marriage and divorce, “One cannot avoid looking outside the place where one is when one no longer feels the ground to be solid…

  • AOL as the first mass commercial social media

    From Tim Wu’s Attention Merchants pg 202: Among the sources of such comfort would be AOL’s infamous chat rooms. Chat rooms had actually been invented by CompuServe in the 1980s (under that ’70s handle “CB simulator”), but AOL allowed the creation of “private rooms,” which anyone could open, hosting up to twenty-three total strangers. By…

  • When does an immersive video game become an addictive one?

    This extract from Tim Wu’s Attention Merchants pg 192-193 makes clear how the immersive character of video games has been treated as addictive from the outset. It raises the question of where the former characteristic ends and the latter begins: In both markets Space Invaders was a sudden and unexpected success—nothing quite like it had…

  • Wikibombing

    I saw an exhibition at the Scott Polar Museum yesterday which made a passing referencing to ‘wikibombing’ as a practice. In this case there was a concerted project to produce wikipedia entries for female explorers and scientists who were absent from the site. I’m recording it here because it’s a useful phrase I hadn’t heard…

  • The quality of attention

    I’ve written before about the ontological assumptions inherent in the framing of the attention economy. To consider the issue in economic terms tends to imply the fungibility, commensurability and valorisation of attention. There’s much of value here but it easily overlap is the quality of attention, described usefully by Tim Wu on pg 125 of…

  • Durkheim on individualisation and the weakening of collective experience

    From On Suicide pg 215-216. If I understand correctly this is what Durkheim understands by social integration. As he write on pg 216, “to say of a group that it has less communal life than another is also to say that it is less strongly integrated, because the state of integration of a social aggregate…

  • Durkheim on the origin of reflexivity

    From Suicide pg 163: Reflection only develops when it becomes necessary for it to develop; that is to say, if a certain number of unconsidered ideas and feelings which, until then, had sufficed to govern behaviour, have become ineffectual. At such times, reflection intervenes to fill the void that has been created–but which has not…

  • Digital Anthropology, Digital Geography and Digital Sociology

    In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of Digital Anthropology, Digital Geography and Digital Sociology as distinctive subdisciplines. However there has been relatively little dialogue between them, least of all with regards to common challenges they respond to and common concerns they share. We feel this absence matters for the subdisciplines themselves but also for…

  • Thematic issue in Digital Capitalism

    This looks brilliant. If only I could have seen it earlier! Thematic issue in Digital Capitalism   Coordinators: Aitor Jiménez (University of Auckland) & César Rendueles (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Vol 17 (2) June-December 2020 Teknokultura: Magazine of Digital Culture and Social Movements (Complutense University of Madrid) (https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/TEKN), indexed in Emerging Sources Citation Index, calls for…

  • Andrew Chadwick on Donald Trump’s social media engagement advantage

    From The Hybrid Media system pg 254-255. It’s not about followers, as much as the capacity to leverage a following into online events which invite media coverage which would otherwise be restricted to those with greater political capital. He notes how this is compounded by the tendency for journalists to use social media influence as…

  • Durkheim’s argument about social contagion is immensely relevant to contemporary discussions of ‘fake news’ and computational propaganda

    From Suicide pg 120-121: We must beware, indeed: when one speaks of imitation, one implies a phenomenon of contagion and, not unreasonably, we may pass very easily from the first of these ideas to the other. But is there anything contagious about carrying out a moral precept, or deferring to the authority of tradition or…

  • Fascism and the pleasures of joining in

    From Richard Seymour’s wonderful Patreon blog: It was in this context that what Evans calls “communal listening”, in which the Führer’s speeches were broadcast to workplaces and schools each week, worked. They were, yes, propaganda. But they were also a form of entertainment, organising a grotesquely celebrified relationship between leader and followers. They were glamorous,…

  • The widespread sense of homo distractus

    The popular character of this diagnosis, summarised by Tim Wu on pg 6 of his Attention Merchants, poses the question of how we should treat it as common sense, in the Durkheimian tradition of skepticism about received wisdom. How widespread is this? To what extent does it misrepresent the nature of the problem? To what…

  • An Agenda for Platformisation Studies v1.1

    This is somewhat out of date at this stage but it captures my sense of where my research was going in mid 2019 There are a wide range of topics I have worked on in the last decade: online communities, social movements, digital scholarship, realist social theory, the transformation of higher education, the rise of…

  • Why social media matters for academics

    The philosopher Daniel Little has long been my favourite theory blogger. I was so pleased to read this thoughtful reflection on the scholarly purposes of social media which included a generous endorsement of Social Media for Academics: The appearance of a second edition of Mark Carrigan’s Social Media for Academics is therefore timely. Both young academics —…

  • Durkheim on neuropathy and the inability to settle into a stable life

    There’s a fascinating connection between this account on Suicide pg 46-47 and what Bourdieu describes as hysteresis and Archer as contextual incongruity: Because of the extreme sensitivity of his nervous system, his ideas and feelings are always in a situation of unstable balance. Because the faintest impressions have an abnormal effect on him, his mental…

  • To what extent is political Twitter pointless?

    There’s a simple question at the end of Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System which rewards serious thought. From pg 288: Today, we might ask whether the average citizen interested in influencing politics but without ambitions for high political office should join a political organization or create a Twitter account and start interacting with others…

  • Do you edit an academic journal?

    Do you edit an academic journal? Would you like it to have a higher profile and greater impact? Do you need advice on navigating the changing landscape of scholarly publishing? I can help you develop a cost effective and powerful strategy customised to your journal, with a particular expertise in community building and digital engagement.…

  • Liberating ‘digital’ from ‘technology’

    found this quote from Craig Elder, a former senior Conservative comms strategist, fascinating as an account of how ‘the internet’ has ceased to be a siloed technological function and instead become something integrated into the existing communications functions of the party. It’s from Andrew Pickering’s The Hybrid Media System pg 225: Basically the internet used…

  • The micro-foundationalism of Erich Fromm

    From the forward to Escape from Freedom: The basic entity of the social process is the individual, his desires and fears, his passions and reason, his propensities for good and for evil. To understand the dynamics of the social process we must understand the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual, just as…

  • Encouraging a collective identity in the absence of organisational mechanisms

    This extract from Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System illustrates the difficulty which digital campaign groups face in sustaining mobilisation. Their power arises from their capacity to mobilise a diverse range of people, with little cost for either the organisation or the people themselves. But it follows from this that those mobilised have little inherent…

  • The future of the influencer amidst declining engagement rates

    This is a fascinating finding from a report tracking engagement rates for influencers within a number of sectors. This finding from Instagram reflects my hunch the same thing has happened on Twitter. There are a number of reasons that can be invoked here: the commercial imperatives leading to the decline of organic reach, algorithm tweaks…

  • Durkheim’s account of the boundary between the psychological and sociological

    I’m rereading Durkheim’s Suicide for teaching purposes and I’d forgotten how fascinated I am by his account of the boundary between the psychological and sociological, as well what this means for our conception of the individual: From pg 17: Intention is too intimate a matter for it to be accessible from outside except by means…

  • Knowing when to end projects

    This interesting observation from Robin Sloan (HT The Convivial Society) left me thinking about the duration of projects: For my part, re: craft and theory, I think giving a newsletter some temporal boundaries can be healthy and (weirdly?) productive. Start it up, but decide ahead of time when it will end, and call that a…

  • The unsustainability of 5G and the growth of tech nationalism

    The sustainability implications of 5G are increasingly recognised, as this overview from GSMA makes clear. Note that this is the industry’s own trade body rather than a pressure group external to it: Energy is becoming even more important due to climate change and sustainability considerations. The potential increase in data traffic (up to 1,000 times…

  • How big tech perceives China

    From Rana Foroohar‘s Don’t Be Evil pg 245-246. It’s interesting to read this in light of quite how much Uber burned trying (and failing) to break into the Chinese market: As many Googlers have told me, China is considered the world’s petri dish for digital technology. Even as it’s become more repressive, it’s become more tech saturated. China…

  • Artificial intelligence as the perfect servant

    This monologue by Mrs Wilson at the end of Gosford Park immediately made me consider how digital assistants, driven by datasets such as Amazon’s buying and viewing history for a long term users, might one day come to constitute an ideal of service as thick as the one we see represented in films like this: What…

  • The institutional users of platforms and their intra-organisational dynamics

    This section from The Platform Society provides a useful vocabulary for an issue that I’m preoccupied by. From pg 47: We also need to consider institutional users: governments, corporations, news organisations, universities, and medical institutions that try to build on the platform ecosystem and integrate their activities in an online world. These kinds of legacy…

  • Robot, experience this tragic irony for me

  • Machine learning and authoritarianism

    On pg 258-259 of her Don’t Be Evil, Rana Foroohar poses a question which will become more urgent with each passing year, binding political economy and digital governance together in a way which will define the fabric of social life: Is digital innovation best suited to an environment of decentralization, in which many firms in…

  • Big tech is now too-big-to-fail

    From Rana Foroohar‘s Don’t Be Evil pg 208: At the very least, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the other systemically important platforms should be forced to disclose political advertising in the same way that television, print, and radio firms do. When in the financial markets, they should be forced to stay in their own sandbox the…

  • The things I’ve published in late 2019

    Now I’ve made my escape from Twitter I’m doing more long form writing: Social Media for Academics 2 A series of short videos introducing the book  An article for LSE Impact blog about Why I’ve Left the Twittering Machine An article for LSE Impact blog about the dangers of academic celebrity A guest post for…

  • The Platform Ecoystem

    I love this diagram from The Platform Society so much:  

  • Bernard Lahire’s philosophical sociology

    From his Plural Subjects pg 5: It is not that sociologists need philosophers to dictate their theories, but rather that philosophy – or at least a proportion of philosophical reflections – can sometimes contribute usefully to illuminating the concepts used by sociologists in their inquiries into the social world. There is such a fear in…

  • The place of ontological reasoning in platform studies

    In The Platform Society Jose Van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn De Waal develop “a comprehensive view of a connective world where platforms have penetrated to the heart of societies – affecting institutions, economic transactions, and social and cultural practices – hence forcing governments and states to adjust their legal and democratic structures”. This penetration…

  • Ivan Illich on the myth of limits

    I’m going to be thinking about this section from the (superb) Convivial Society for the rest of the day: Ivan Illich, whose work has played an important role in shaping my own thinking about technology, was not one for measured critiques or timid incrementalism. He targeted not only the usual culprits in his critique of…

  • CfP: Addressing Violent Youth Radicalisation in Europe

    Call for papers At a critical time when European solidarity is questioned, the 8th IARS International Annual Conference will launch the findings of the Erasmus+ “Youth Empowerment and Innovation Project (YEIP)”. Led by young people and coordinated by Professor Theo Gavrielides, YEIP was delivered in partnership with 18 EU partners. YEIP constructed and tested an…

  • A few thoughts on the election

    My activist career began with the campaign against the Iraq war in 2002/2003 when I was a teenager. What political agency I have formed against the backdrop of a New Labour quasi-hegemony which made parliamentary politics seem turgid while nonetheless providing, in combination with being born into steep upward mobility, what I realise in retrospect…

  • The politics of being well-organised

    One of many dangers with acceleration rhetoric is that it creates the impression of what Filip Vostal calls a ‘mega force’, rampaging through society in a way that effects all individuals with equal significance. The reality is that existing resources shape our capacity to respond to acceleration in a way which means a problem for…

  • Political information cycles and the political economy of time

    From Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System pg 101: Political information cycles rest upon a subtle political economy of time. This involves not only the often-rehearsed “speeding up” or “efficiency” of communication but also the importance of continuous attention and the ability to create and to act on information in a timely manner. Those who…

  • Taking tech firms seriously as sources of moral ideas

    I’ve written in the past about the Great Disruptive Project engaged in by firms like Uber, seeking change in the world in a way which expresses a moral vision, albeit often somewhat inchoately. This is something which emanates from the founders and plays a crucial role in establishing their charismatic authority and to varying degrees…

  • Wikileaks and the avant-garde of data strategy

    This is a fascinating observation by Andrew Chadwick on pg 114-115 of The Hybrid Media System concerning Wikileak’s strategic agency with regards to the circulation of data, recognising that ‘information might want to be free’ but the sheer fact of its freedom is insufficient to bring about an effect in the world. As he notes…

  • Election 2019 and journalism

    It’s going to be a while before I feel capable of writing something about this disaster of an election but I’m saving this thread by Guardian media editor Jim Waterson to come back to because it raises an extremely interesting point: to what extent can what many perceived as intentional bias on the part of…

  • Google’s astroturfing operation

    This offers a fascinating insight into Google’s (apparent) astroturfing operation concerning the European copyright directive: Constantin van Lijnden writing in the top German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has uncovered the financial link between YouTubers in the paid service of Google to “protest” in favor of the multinational monopolist’s interests in the European Copyright Directive (aka “Article…

  • So this is why we try? We bet it all on hopeless?

    So this is why we try? We bet it all on hopeless? And swim against the tide ’til until our every bone is broken A sinking ship is still a ship, no captain has spoke the obit ‘Til the crew is flew, crow’s nest slips silent beneath the ocean We set sail without an anchor,…

  • Ontological junctures

    In the last few days, I’ve been gripped by a feature of Doom for Nintendo Switch. There are classic levels hidden throughout the game, waiting to be discovered in unlikely locations in each of the maps. What I can’t get over is how they exist as junctures between two game worlds, inviting the player to step into…

  • The man instead of seeking a kind of…

    The man, instead of seeking a kind of narcissistic exaltation in his mate, would discover in love a way of getting outside himself, of tackling problems other than his own. With all the twaddle that has been written about the splendour of such generosity, why not give the man his chance to participate in such…

  • Online != Grassroots

    I thought this was a crucial observation by Andrew Chadwick about the tendency to conflate ‘online’ with ‘grassroots’. It’s from pg 67 of this The Hybrid Media System. It lingers on in the platform imaginary in a way reinforced by the tendency to conflate the demotic and the democratic: One problem with the “convergence culture”…

  • The role of sovereign wealth funds in big tech

    From Rana Foroohar’s Don’t Be Evil pg 81: Jawbone had to turn to the Kuwait Investment Authority for cash just to stay afloat, never a good sign, given that sovereign wealth funds are not exactly the smart money in Silicon Valley. 20 They tend to come in big but late, offering loads of cash when…

  • The similarity between the dot com boom and the present tech bubble

    From Rana Foroohar’s Don’t Be Evil pg 82: It seems not so much has changed since 2000, when start-ups like Pets.com were able to go public and jack up share prices even as they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Yes, the digital ecosystem has since grown, changed, and deepened. And yes, today it is…

  • The highly structured centralised system of the grassroots campaign

    From Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System pg 149: The Obama campaign was, in the words of Jon Carson, its national field director, a “highly structured, accountable system …. ” “Despite this decentralized system” he says, “I knew every single morning how many phone calls had been made, how many doors had been knocked, where,…

  • The torrents of audience feedback which are reshaping the media

    From Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System pg 220: A central theme in Marsh’s discussion of the rise of online media is how growing torrents of audience feedback have come to shape the style and ethos of the BBC’s approach to political coverage. The rise to ubiquity of e-mail during the 1990s meant that by…

  • Sampling a range of settings in qualitative interviewing

    I’m saving this account from Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System because I want to come back to it later. From pg 185: I chose these interviewees because I wanted to “sample” a range of different political and media settings: those associated with formal organizations but also those working in nonorganizational settings, or settings whose…

  • On Live Ethnography

    It is based in large part upon what we might term “live ethnography”: close, real-time, observation and logging of a wide range of newspaper, broadcast, and online material, including citizen opinion expressed and coordinated through online social network sites. Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System pg 71

  • Big Tech, Nationalism and Globalisation

    There’s an important observation in Rana Foroohar’s The Case Against Big Tech concerning how American tech firms are invoking national interest to avoid the threat of regulation. From pg 10: All of which makes it particularly rich that some Big Tech firms have responded to the growing public concern about privacy and anticompetitive business practices…

  • Automation and the reproduction of knowledge

    I understand the allure which MOOCs can have for those inspired by the idea. Why relegate people to second tier tuition at regional universities when the best teachers in the world could teach everyone remotely at little cost? There are many problems with this vision but one that’s little remarked upon is the question of…

  • A video introduction to Social Media for Academics

    How has social media changed since the first edition of this book?

  • Most recently Amazon has gotten into healthcare—a $…

    Most recently, Amazon has gotten into healthcare—a $ 3.5 trillion industry—working to disrupt how we buy prescription drugs, pick and purchase health insurance plans, and more, by drawing on its supply chain and trove of personal background data that could easily be supplemented with real-time reports from health monitors in homes, hospitals, and doctors’ offices.…

  • Hampered by the need to defend the EU…

    Hampered by the need to defend the EU as a site of cosmopolitanism in the name of stopping Brexit, many remainers have framed any opposition as a threat to a political order that has no need for change. The rightward drift of the Lib Dems as they look to rebuild their vote by becoming the…

  • We’re striking

    Brilliant from Wanya2K who did this live at the CUCU rally yesterday:

  • Connecting with what I’m actually interested in #exhaustionrebellion

    The changing character of publicness and its implications for the public role of the social sciences. What are the opportunities and challenges? What forms of institutional entrepreneurship are they inviting? What does this mean for the future of scholarship? What does this mean for doctoral pedagogy? How can we build institutions and develop practices which…

  • This was drawn by Patrick Tresset’s robot It…

    This was drawn by Patrick Tresset’s robot It was a strange and engaging experience to see the machine compose this through an iterative sequence of seemingly random lines. It was also striking how many people approached me in the exhibition when I was standing next to it drawing me, as everyone immediately began treating me…

  • Why I’ve deleted my Twitter account #exhaustionrebellion

    I wrote two years ago about my desire to escape what Richard Seymour calls The Twittering Machine. It’s a term which Seymour used in a series of blog posts, invoking a painting of Paul Klee. As Dominic Pettman describes it in his book Infinite Distraction: This painting depicts largely featherless avian creatures, attached to a thin wire,…

  • The promise of the populist president

    From this extremely astute essay by Isaac Reed: A widespread ideational feature of monarchical societies (variably realized) is the investment of the common people in a king or queen as their protector against the predations of the aristocracy. The peasant, immediately subject to his lord, reaches to the monarch—the ultimate location of the sacred, the place where…

  • Some screenshots from Social Media for Academics 2

    To type the word ‘scholar’ into Google Image search leaves you immediately presented with images of bearded white men toiling away in obscurity. It has often struck me how apt this is in terms of the cultural connotations which remain attached to the idea of scholarship, even if most people realise these stereotypes aren’t representations…

  • The logic of co-operation in the influencer economy

    An ‘opportunity’ which was e-mailed to me earlier today…  🙄

  • Thinking with dichotomies: ‘old’ and ‘new’ media

    This section from Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System reminds me of a discussion about ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ we’ve been having at the Accelerated Academy. Even obviously problematic dichotomies should not easily be dispensed with because they can be used to capture interactions between changing elements,  as opposed to tracking a linear substitution of one…

  • How to take a social media sabbatical as an academic

    This is an extract from Social Media for Academics 2. I’m posting it to coincide with my own social media sabbatical. The social media sabbatical is an increasingly common occurrence for academics, even if many would see a name like this for what they’re doing as somewhat cringeworthy. Obviously the name doesn’t matter though. What’s important…

  • Social media, attention economies and the future of the university

    This is an extract from Social Media for Academics 2. If you like it please consider buying the book! Social media hasn’t created the celebrity academic but it has made it a category to which a greater number and range of people might aspire. It can be a gateway to the familiar markers of esteem…

  • Humans as blackboxes, machines as transparent

    From Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks pg 167: Parents in Allegheny County helped me articulate an inchoate idea that had been echoing in my head since I started my research. In Indiana, Los Angeles, and Allegheny County, technologists and administrators explained to me that new high-tech tools in public services increase transparency and decrease discrimination.…

  • The end of the opaque classroom

    From The Idea of the Digital University by Frank Bryce McCluskey and Melanie Lynn Winter pg 6-7: What makes the online course so different? When the semester is finished, there is a record of every interaction, every question and every event that occurred in the digital course. There was no such record with the traditional…

  • A machinery for producing rationalisations

    I thought this was extremely powerful by Virgina Eubanks in Automating Inequality. She explains on pg 121-122 how machinic learning systems can operate as a form of triage, sorting people in order to distribute scarce resources in a seemingly more rational fashion: COunter INTELligence PROgram of the FBI), for example, focused on civil rights activists…

  • How machine learning veils human bias

    The promise of introducing machine learning into public administration is that it can counteract human bias. The latent promise of bureaucracy can be realised by systems that won’t be up-ended by the messy imperfections of their human operators. However Virginia Eubanks makes clear in Automating Inequality that the reality is something much more worrying, as…

  • The Great Disruptive Project of Uber

    I’ve blogged in the past about The Great Disruptive Project. We should understand a company like Uber, at least in its earlier stages, as in part a moral project. By this I mean there is a vision underlying the company, a critique of the existing order associated with this vision and a commitment to changing…

  • The economics of attention vs the sociology of attention

    The Attention Economy and the Net is a remarkably prescient piece, widely seen to have coined the eponymous term and containing insights which are still relevant two decades later. The framing of the economy unsurprisingly shapes the approach he adopts and it creates a focus on exchange which I find problematic in some respects. This isn’t…

  • The paradox of the liberal contrarian

    From Emily Chang’s Brotopia pg 52: The beliefs of the PayPal founders—that individual merit is the most valuable metric of human potential and that creativity is deadened by groupthink—have deeply influenced the postcrash tech industry and are consistent with the ideas promoted by Thiel’s cohort at Stanford. There are many counterarguments to this thinking, but…

  • The promise of the ‘passion economy’

    This interesting piece from Li Jin suggests a transition from a gig economy to a passion economy. Both facilitate economic action by individuals but the former reduces their individuality to a single attribute (driving a car, delivering food) whereas the latter allows them to offer services premised on that individuality (teaching students, offering analysis). In…

  • Upcoming Critical Realism webinars

    Join Us Because “Critical Realism Matters” Webinars on Saturday 16th November, 2019 & Launch of The Bhaskar Memorial Fund Critical Realism Matters is a new series of webinar events held to showcase and celebrate the enormous potential of critical realism. The first pair of webinars, taking place on Saturday 16th November, 2019, have been planned to commemorate the…

  • Social Media for Academics: The Changing Landscape of Scholarship

    Social media has become an inescapable part of academic life. It has the power to transform scholarly communication and offers new opportunities to publish and publicise your work, to network in your discipline and beyond and to engage the public. However, to do so successfully requires a careful understanding of best practice, the risks, rewards…

  • The outlook of the digital technocrat

    From Automating Inequality by Virgina Eubanks pg 123-124: The proponents of the coordinated entry system, like many who seek to harness computational power for social justice, tend to find affinity with systems engineering approaches to social problems. These perspectives assume that complex controversies can be solved by getting correct information where it needs to go…

  • An agenda for Digital Sociology

    Originally published in Portuguese in CARRIGAN, M. “Sociologia Digital: Problemas e Propostas” In: ALVES, P. & NASCIMENTO, L. Novas fronteiras metodológicas nas Ciências Sociais. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2018. Only five years ago, Jessie Daniels observed that were “Digital Humanities but No Digital Sociology” (Daniels and Feagin 2011). Since then the situation has changed, with an edited…