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  • 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…

  • A machine for killing relationality

    This section from Virginia Eubank’s Automating Inequality has stuck in my mind. It describes the destructive roll out of an automated system for allocating benefits in Indiana, leaving tens of thousands of legitimate recipients caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare which required time, energy and know how at precisely the point where withdrawal of their expected…

  • The Digital Condition: The Practical Order as Pivotal

    The Practical Order as Pivotal might seem like an odd choice to initiate a reading group on the digital condition, as it makes no reference to digital technology. However it’s been central to my own thinking as someone who has done a lot of theoretical work on social media and its implications for social life.…

  • Medium as a forum for warring digital elites

    I thought this was a really interesting observation by Jill Abramson on pg 145 of her Merchants of Truth. What other forums are there? The Times ran a definitive investigation of the punishing work culture at Amazon, 23 with grizzly anecdotes about employees crying at their desks and burning out because of the unrelenting pressure…

  • The vested interests of the media in Trump

    From Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth pg 386: The “Trump bump” was mostly responsible for its strong financial reports following the election as the paid digital readership began to explode. By the end of the second quarter there were 600,000 new subscriptions, bringing the total number of digital subscribers above two million. In 2017 paid…

  • Social Media for Academics 2

    It’s only a month to go until the second edition of Social Media for Academics will be released by Sage. It’s a vastly expanded text with almost 100 new pages of material. I’ve also rewritten the existing content from start to finish. There’s a whole range of topics which have been added: live blogging, developing…

  • Whose university? Our university

    A remix by Wanya2k of this brilliant snippet recorded at the Cambridge student protests during the #USSStrikes:

  • The acceleration of journalism

    I’d tended to think of the acceleration of journalism as being a matter of fewer staff producing more copy. But this passage from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth suggests the changing demands of editing are a factor as well. From pg 416: Before she left for ProPublica, Marilyn Thompson, the investigative reporter and proponent of…

  • Were you a fan of Sociological Imagination?

    I’m taking the site offline in the near future. But there’s a PDF available here. It’s a massive (80mb, 5000 page) PDF so it’s a pain to download. Milena, Sadia and myself will be producing a curated version of this at some point next year but it won’t be available for a while.  

  • The nostalgia of centrism

    This is absolutely spot on from Phil BC about the nostalgia animating contemporary centrist politics: This uneasiness on sacred cow politics is compounded by the successive hit jobs undertaken on Corbyn. Because he doesn’t share the same conservative goals as centrism, it follows he does not respect the same rules either. And so the fall…

  • The Platform University 2

    28 – 29 November 2019 Lancaster University Higher education is increasingly ‘platformised’. Indeed, digital platforms have become ubiquitous. They are dominant intermediaries not only in our social, economic and political life, but have become central forms of capitalist accumulation. While platforms differ in terms of openness to developers and public access to data, they operate…

  • The first and second wave of viral publishers

    From Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth pg 281 While the new-media pioneers at BuzzFeed and Upworthy produced LOLs and cultivated trumped-up umbrage over the killing of poor Cecil, a second guard of new-media publishers set out to capture the loyalty of another psychographic swath of America whose disaffection far surpassed mere boredom. The new wave…

  • CfP: Data Literacy in Higher Education

    This is a really interesting call which I’d be contributing to if the deadline wasn’t so tight: The call for papers attempts to address a number of topics potentially connected with the research problem of data literacy for teaching and learning in Higher Education. Our questions include: What type of data is collected in specific…

  • Vice’s ‘non-traditional’ working environment

    From Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth pg 348: One abiding feature was the draconian nondisclosure and nontraditional workplace agreements staffers were required to sign before joining the company, 7 which demanded, “Individuals employed by Vice must be conscious of Vice’s non-traditional environment and comfortable with exposure to and participating in situations that may present themselves…

  • Recension Day

    Unburn the boat, rebuild the bridge, Reconsecrate the sacrilege, Unspill the milk, decry the tears, Turn back the clock, relive the years Replace the smoke inside the fire, Unite fulfilment with desire, Undo the done, gainsay the said, Revitalise the buried dead, Revoke the penalty and the clause, Reconstitute unwritten laws, Repair the heart, untie…

  • Viral populism: what happens when isomorphism through algorithm hits politics?

    This is an admirably prescient post from 2014 by BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith about the viral populism which social media has facilitated. It brings a new dimension to political life which eludes the familiar expectations of pundits: At some point in the next two years, the pollsters and ad makers who steer American presidential campaigns…

  • CfP: PostDigital Humans

    I thought this CfP looked really interesting. Thanks Filvos for sharing. CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS: Postdigital Humans Maggi Savin-Baden (Editor) The development and use of Postdigital Humans is occurring rapidly, but often in unexpected ways and spaces. This, second book in the Postdigital Science and Education book series, will present research-based chapters which explore approaches to…

  • A sketchy first draft of my PhD proposal

    I just stumbled across this sketchy first draft of my PhD project written over 12 years ago: I want to explore the moral experience of young people under late modern consumer capitalism. I’m interested in the way that the changes you discuss in your later work lead to a collapse in the horizon of possible…

  • The Goods Yard, Kings Cross, London, UK

    The Goods Yard, Kings Cross, London, UK 10:13PM, December 3rd, 2026 He tapped forlornly at the phone. It had been a while since it last offered a response. Since that comforting weight had pulsated through his hands, offering out a range of haptic possibilities which his body would instinctively know how to grasp for. It…

  • The scholarly career of BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti

    Viral marketing for the real world Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution Applied sociology in virtual worlds Nativism and nature: rethinking biological invasion Historical role-playing in virtual worlds: VRML in the history curriculum and beyond Teacher’s LAB : a platform for teacher learning The Wandering Eye: an on-line collaboration…

  • The gamification of virality and the pleasures it brings

    A few creepy extracts from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth about the office culture at BuzzFeed. The pursuit of virality has been gamified, with these ostentatiously fun undertakings matched by an underlying threat that those who can’t reach these standards won’t survive at the company in the longer term. In light of this we should…

  • Staying small in order to grow

    I thought this was an interesting extract from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth about the rise of Vice. Limiting their circulation was a deliberate strategy to facilitate its expansion in the longer term, enabling them to side step some of the pressures they would have been subject to if they had dived headfirst into growth.…

  • A few notes the digital aristocracy

    Many of the leading figures in contemporary Silicon Valley are those who survived the fall out from the earlier crash. Thiel made his fortune by co-founding the online payments platform Paypal, acting as CEO until its sale to eBay. He subsequently founded Clarium Capital (a hedge fund), Founders Fund (a venture capital firm) and Palantir…

  • Apps and their users: a few initial ontological thoughts

    It’s important to grasp how much the development cycle for apps and platforms differs from that of software from a previous era. The typical app will go through a far higher number of iterations than a comparable piece of software would have in a pre-smart phone era. There are numerous reasons for this ranging from…

  • Never say Amazon in a bookstore

  • Human Tetris

  • The Poetics of Data Analytics

    Originally a 2003 book by financial journalist Michael Lewis, the 2011 film with Brad Pitt tells the story of the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season. Struggling with fewer resources than his competitors and lacking the resources to replace star players who have been poached, general manager Billy Breane embraces data analytics to assemble “an island of…

  • The situational geography of everyday life

    From Zizi Papacharissi’s A Private Sphere pg 68: Meyrowitz (1986) described this as the ability of electronic media to remove, or at least rearrange, boundaries between public and private spaces, affecting our lives not so much through content, but rather “by changing the ‘situational geography’ of social life” (p. 6). In the seminal No Sense…

  • The rise of platform studies

    This is an interesting reflection from Jean Burgess and Joshua Green in the second edition of YouTube. I think this defence of the platform as an object is really important and this is something I want to expand up on in upcoming writing. From pg 13: But at the time, writing a whole book about…

  • The cynical lure of online celebrity

    I recently co-authored a paper with Mark Johnson and Tom Brock about the moral economy of celebrity streamer on Twitch. We attempt to understand how the aspiration for celebrity, the imperative to be seen, reflects the broader conditions in which the aspirant streamers make their way through the world: More broadly than the phenomenon of…

  • The supersurfaces of social media

    If I understand this notion from Zizi Papacharissi correctly*, it captures something important about social media. These platforms create an experience of expansiveness which doesn’t hook into the social world in a significant way. It’s a free-wheeling expansiveness, to use a term from Roy Bhaskar’s critique of Richard Rorty, a trick of perspective which affects…

  • Why slowness and attentiveness aren’t the same thing

    I co-organised an unusual conference last week. Thinking on the Move hosted 11 sociological walks over two days, leading from a room at Goldsmiths College where we began and ended each day. I went on an infrastructural walk around Bermondsey, a digital mapping walk in Nunhead cemetery, a blindfolded sensory walk around New Cross and a…

  • Call for video entries: city and night

    Call for Video Entries for the 3rd Urban Audiovisual Festival, with the theme “City and Night”. The Urban Audiovisual Festival – UAF emerges as a place for discussion and dialogue between professionals who work on urban life. This scientific meeting aims to promote the production of quality and the dissemination of the audio-visual work carried…

  • On Manchester

    THIS IS THE PLACE (full version) written and performed by Tony Walsh for Forever Manchester This is the place in the North West of England It’s ace, it’s the best and the songs that we sing From the stands, from our bands set the whole planet shaking Our inventions are legends! There’s nowt we can’t…

  • We were always waiting for something to happen

    I can’t go on My head has grown too heavy I need that song Those trusty chords could pull me through And early on They saw the warning signs and symptoms all day long Wonder how far from you we’ll fall We were always waiting We were always waiting We were always waiting for something…

  • Showing up, standing, breathing, moving

    From Judith Butler’s Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, from pg 17: Asserting that a group of people is still existing, taking up space and obdurately living, is already an expressive action, a politically significant event, and that can happen wordlessly in the course of an unpredictable and transitory gathering. Another “effective” result of…

  • Social media and improvising our careers

    The familiar repertoires of scholarly interaction are called into question by the emergence of social media. One way to grasp their routine character is to consider notable exceptions in which networks, projects and fields emerged in unfamiliar and exceptional ways. Pickering’s (2010) accounts of the emergence of British cybernetics provides a fascinating example of this,…

  • Social media and academic flying

    The travel of academics is achingly prominent on Twitter and Instagram, projecting an alluring collective image of globetrotting intellectualism even if many of the individuals contributing to it would resist this connotation. Users of these platforms are exposed to far more details of where there colleagues are going and what they are doing than was…

  • On sociological walking, without obsessing about the ‘sociological’

    My notes for the opening talk at The Sociological Review’s Thinking on the Move conference, co-organised with Emma Jackson, Les Back and Jenny Thatcher.  I feel like a fraud talking in the opening session of this event because there’s no sense in which I’m an expert on sociological walking. This is obviously compounded by talking…

  • The spiritual death of the digital age

    From The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour loc 3166: No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict. Its veto power over all other possible attentions takes place, cumulatively, through every apparently free choice made as a user. We drop into the dead zone, the ‘ticker trance’ of feed…

  • Should we read the platform in post-human terms?

    To elevate _the platform_ in this way can easily be read in post-human terms, building analysis around inhuman agents which in an important sense act behind the back of our familiar human subjects. This would be a reading in keeping with the theoretical mood of the times where, as theorist of the post humanities Rosi…