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  • Your authorial fingerprint

    From Going Public by Arlene Stein and Jessie Daniels, pg 80-81: An author’s voice is simply his or her “unique authorial fingerprint,” according to Theresa MacPhail, a New York University professor of science and technology studies. 19 If an author has a distinctive voice, she writes, “then we can often accurately attribute a text to…

  • The sub-hegemonic power of social media

    This is a fascinating idea from Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine. Exercising power without a strategic framework, shaping the social through a machinic repetition driven by nothing more considered than keeping users on the platform for longer & preparing a climate in which advertising can be sold. From loc 2745: The underground persuasion of reality-shaping…

  • Rethinking the craft of social research

    “It is still the case that most social scientists view the research encounter as an interface between an observer and the observed, producing either quantitative or qualitative data. Equally, the dissemination of research findings are confined to conventional paper forms of publishing, and research excellence is measured and audited through such forms, be it in…

  • The impact of social theory

    The Sociological Review has just published a thought-provoking review of Doug Porpora’s Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. It gives a lucid, though brief, overview of the book’s core arguments: seven myths which afflict American sociology and seven philosophical counter-points. But what caught my attention was the account of how theoretical work can increase the discipline’s capacity…

  • Sociological Images: Blogging as Public Sociology

    In this paper the team behind the continually fantastic Sociological Images reflect on blogging as public sociology: Sociological Images is a website aimed at a broad public audience that encourages readers to develop and apply a sociological imagination. The site includes short, accessible posts published daily. Each includes one or more images and accompanying commentary. Reaching approximately 20,000 readers per…

  • The Political Economy of Publishing Social Theory

    From How to become an internationally famous British social theorist by Stewart Clegg, 585-586: “Giddens’s later concerns with structure and agency allow him to tap into many prestigious intellectual products as resources, such as linguistics, analytical philosophy and the Heideggerian tradition. These connections allow for far great consumption in more differentiated markets. The vague term ‘social theory’…

  • Your ‘daily dose of Sociological Imagination’: reflections on social media and public sociology

    Your ‘daily dose of Sociological Imagination’: reflections on social media and public sociology by Mark Carrigan and Milena Kremakova  This website’s raison d’etre was initially nebulous, tentative and ambitious all at the same time: we wanted to create a new online space for public sociology.  We hoped to establish something that was more than a blog,…

  • Big Data and the ‘‘Book of Society”

    An important point from the paper Big Data, social physics, and spatial analysis: The early years by Trevor J Barnes and Matthew W Wilson: The most immediate invocation of monism by Big Data is its assumption that the social world can be mathematized in the same way as the natural world. Just as Galileo thought that the…

  • Rethinking Empirical Social Science

    In this paper in Dialogues in Human Geography, Evelyn Ruppert from Goldsmiths College makes a case for the need to rethink empirical social science in the face of the epistemological and methodological challenge of ‘big data’: While Big Data – the vast amounts of digital information generated, accumulated and stored in myriad databases and repositories, both online…

  • Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0

    In this 2007 paper David Beer and Roger Burrows suggest that “by the time you get to read this paper in its published form, even in the hypertextual pages of Sociological Research Online, what it describes may well have become part of the cultural mainstream”. Seven years later, the paper certainly seems prescient, even if the eponymous term ‘Web…

  • The Founder

    The Founder tells the story of Ray Kroc, the driven yet craven man who was the first owner of McDonalds. Not the founder, the first owner. The distinction is a crucial one and the plot of the film hinges on how it became possible for Kroc to be one but my the other. While side…

  • The fractal fascism taking shape around us

    From Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine loc 2670-2776: What is more, hasty denunciations risk leaving us with the misapprehension of knowing what we’ve got ourselves into, while injecting an unhelpful nastiness, condescension and paranoia into the conversation. There has been a bonfire of digital vanities, bromides stacked upon platitudes, ‘digital democracy’, ‘the networked citizen’, ‘Twitter…

  • The attention sinks which stop us dreaming

    From Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine loc 1148: The vacancies of attention that we must fill appear during public transport journeys, on lunch and toilet breaks, during impasses in dinner conversation, or in those frequent interludes in working life where there is nothing to do but the employee is obliged to look busy. If we…

  • Our tributes to the power the machine has over us

    From Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine loc 1467: A feed filled with topless mirror shots, gym photos, new hair, and so on, might be seen as a peculiar form of idolatry. But it is less a tribute to the user than to the power that the machine has over the user. A power which, without…

  • Why social media shouldn’t be ignored by research policy

    I wrote this as a contribution to the Society for Research Into Higher Education’s contribution to the ESRC Consultation on Leadership Development: The research literature suggests a significant minority of academics use social media as part of their working life, with social trends suggesting this number will only grow with time. It has become an…

  • George Soros on the threat of techno-fascism

    From this speech at Davos: The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called “the freedom of mind.” There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will…

  • Becoming ourselves through the media

    From John Thompson’s Media & Modernity pg 41-42: In interpreting symbolic forms, individuals incorporate them into their own understanding of themselves and others. They use them as a vehicle for reflection and self-reflection, as a basis for thinking about themselves, about others and about the world to which they belong. I shall use the term…

  • The political significance of realism

    This useful essay in the Hedgehog review links the contemporary flourishing of realism to the politics of ‘post-truth’, making a change from crass accusations that trump is the fault of postmodernism. While his focus is on speculative, critical and new realism, the point could be generalised to include new materialism, agential realism, ANT and assemblage…

  • What is an institution?

    From John Thompson’s Media & Modernity pg 13: In some cases these positions acquire a certain stability by being institutionalized–that is, by becoming part of a relatively stable cluster of rules, resources and social relations. Institutions can be viewed as determinate sets of rules, resources and relations which have some degree of durability in time…

  • The overaffectation of the crowd

    From pg 163 of Material Participation by Noortje Marres: Among concepts of the community of the affected we could also include theories of affective politics developed in recent cultural theory (Thrift, 2008; Terranova, 2007; Blackman, 2008). Such ‘post-emotive’ conceptions of the public propose to understand the mobilization of publics in terms of the quick and…

  • The Digital Condition: An Experiment in Mediated Dialogue

    What does it mean to speak of a digital condition? How can we describe, explain and understand our digital condition? What is it, that we are trying to come to terms with? Where exactly does ‘the problem’ of technology lie? Beginning in October 2019 we will embark on an experimental discussion group centred around those…

  • Boris the introvert

    I found this interesting from pg 13-14 of Sonia Purnell’s immensely readable biography of Boris Johnson: Boris–or rather ‘Al’–would move house but he would do so a total of 32 times over the next 14 years. 8 As a whole, throughout his childhood he lived in five cities, five London boroughs, one Somerset village (in…

  • This is how it works

    This is how it works You’re young until you’re not You love until you don’t You try until you can’t You laugh until you cry You cry until you laugh And everyone must breathe Until their dying breath No, this is how it works You peer inside yourself You take the things you like And…

  • A few sketchy thoughts on how theory is accelerating

    To speak of the acceleration of social theory can sound counter intuitive, as we often regard theory as a quintessentially slow pursuit in which careful reflection leads to a gradual accumulation of insight. But there are a number of mundane senses in which theory is getting faster: There is likely to be more being published…

  • CfP: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    Call for Papers for the Second Annual Conference: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University 28 – 29 November 2019 at 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…

  • A conversation between empirical and theoretical ontology

    The tendency for critical realists to get irritated when people talk about political/empirical ontology gets in the way of what has the potential to be a fascinating dialogue if constructed in an open and engaging manner. In my experience, critical realists treat this tradition as self-evidently absurd or simply insist “that’s epistemology, not ontology” without being…

  • Experiments in everyday life

    This section from Material Participation by Noortje Marres brought home the sociological significance of lifestyle experiments to me. I’d been prone to framing things like lifestyle minimalism as a form of neo-asceticism and I can easily see a more charitable framing along the lines of pg 91 here: They can be likened to the experimental…

  • So what do I actually research?

    Saved here because I’m deleting the tweet:

  • The public role of academics in a social media era

    It’s difficult to be precise about how many academics use social media, as it depends on what is meant by ‘use’ and ‘social media’. For example how do we draw a consistent boundary between personal and professional use when social media tends to complicate this distinction in all manner of ways? Furthermore what counts as…

  • The light we steal when we write our books

    “Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows – images in black and grey of what had…

  • Did oil prices cause the financial crisis?

    I’m a little wary of the causation here but it’s a provocative claim. Perhaps it does constitute an INUS condition, as J.L. Mackie put it, with the oil price spike igniting a precarious system which could have gone up in flames for other reasons. From Societies beyond Oil, by John Urry, pg 34-35: But this…

  • This is not a pipe

  • The analytical space where ‘publics’ meet ‘problems’: keeping it open rather than shutting it down

    From Material Participation by Noortje Marres pg 57-58: By defining the public in terms of a problem of relevance, pragmatism undid two persistent attempts to solve the problem of material publics by conceptual means: the tendency to either internalize or to externalize the problems of the public. They warned against the attempt to externalize public…

  • Turn those clapping hands into angry fists

    Sleep on pillows made in Singapore. Wrapped in comforters, sweating through sheets. Drink your coffee in the morning, flown in on airplanes across vast seas. And your house is made of wood, central air, central heat. You’ve got your furniture of particle board. Your doors are locked for, for safety. And you walk in leather…

  • Prospecting: Extraction, Speculation, and Liberation in the Accelerated Academy

    CFP – Prospecting: Extraction, Speculation, and Liberation in the Accelerated Academy  (Accelerated Academy 7) Nov. 22-23, 2019 Michigan State University Digital Scholarship Lab An interdisciplinary symposium on the future of academic life and labor, organized by Zach Kaiser (MSU) and Erin Glass (UC San Diego) In theory, the academy is an institution of research and…

  • Neurodiversity Reading Group

    This looks really interesting: You are invited to participate in the Neurodiversity Reading Group that will run monthly in London (UK) in the academic year 2019-20. The first meeting will take place on Friday 19 July 2019, 3-5pm, at London South Bank University (Room K503, Keyworth Centre). During the summer (2019), the meetings will take…

  • The object turn in the social sciences

    From Material Participation by Noortje Marres, pg 6: This field of work finds its starting point in the rejection of the critique of objects that has been dominant in twentieth-century social science: the idea that things, technology and materiality render engagement impossible. This work suggests that this negative critique has lost its plausibility, and proposes…

  • Who needs actions when you got words?

    OR what Joan Pedro-Carañana calls discursivism: “the belief in the almighty power of discourse. This is a form of wishful thinking based on what Freud called the infantile belief in the omnipotence of ideas (and communication)” and Jana Bacevic has written a superbly original PhD thesis about.

  • The liquid powering liquid modernity

    From John Urry’s Societies beyond Oil pg 9: Leading social analyst Zygmunt Bauman famously described the twentieth-century development of all this movement as a ‘liquid modernity’. But what he did not examine was how there was in fact a literal liquid –oil –that made this modernity, oiling the wheels of a globalizing society. It seemed…

  • Professionalisation as capture 

    From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 203: These are the tough tools with which the environmental movement won its greatest string of victories. But with that success came some rather significant changes. For a great many groups, the work of environmentalism stopped being about organizing protests and teach-ins and became about drafting laws, then…

  • Twitter and the internal conversation

    My notes on Rainford, J. (2016). Becoming a doctoral researcher in a digital world: Reflections on the role of Twitter for reflexivity and the internal conversation. E-Learning and Digital Media, 13(1-2), 99-105 In this paper Jon Rainford brings together two of my favourite things, the internal conversation and Twitter. He uses the framework of the…

  • Coming soon: Social Media for Academics 2.0

    Completely rewritten with 100 new pages. Full details here

  • Fast movements struggle with slow issues 

    From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 158: Because this is a crisis that is, by its nature, slow moving and intensely place based. In its early stages, and in between the wrenching disasters, climate is about an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake, the late…

  • Becoming who we are 

    From Figuring by Maria Popova pg 3-4: We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives.…

  • What is global competence?

    My growing interest in how digital competence is being conceptualised, pursued and enacted by national and international organisations has led me towards the slightly older concept of global competence. In this paper on global competence in engineers, it is presented in terms of a mismatch between the requirements of working as an engineer in global society and…

  • Why the EU matters for the future of the climate 

    I’ll add this to reigning in big tech as the best argument I can see for supporting the EU. Could any other power structure in Europe achieve this outcome? From pg 137 of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: A 2012 report by the German National Center for Aerospace, Energy and Transport Research (DLR), for instance,…

  • Making time to think

    It occurred to me yesterday that I spend less time thinking than I once did. One of the reasons I wanted to leave The Sociological Review and have a period of (sadly self-funded) underemployment was because I’d felt for a year or two that I was  as cognitively occupied as I’m capable of being. I keep running…

  • And I always dreamed of classic cars and movie screens

    And I always dreamed of classic cars and movie screens And tryin’ to find some way to be redeemed….  

  • Silicon startup schools

    My notes on Williamson, B. (2018). Silicon startup schools: technocracy, algorithmic imaginaries and venture philanthropy in corporate education reform. Critical studies in education, 59(2), 218-236. The technology sector has turned its gaze towards education in recent years, manifesting in a whole range of initiatives as well as the increasing prominence of education in how digital…

  • Can capitalism survive climate change?

    From The Uninhabitable Earth pg 162-163: The question is a prism, spitting out different answers to different ranges of the political spectrum, and where you fall on that range probably reflects what you mean by “capitalism.” Global warming could cultivate emergent forms of eco-socialism on one end of the spectrum, and could also conceivably produce…

  • Learning to live with social media

    Far from being the contribution to social media quit lit which I thought it would be, this piece by Elisa Veini nails the question which has become my overriding obsession: How then, faced with the inescapable need to have a professional profile on LinkedIn and maybe the will to see what is happening on Twitter,…

  • The cruel optimism of educational technology

    My notes on Macgilchrist, F. (2019). Cruel optimism in edtech: when the digital data practices of educational technology providers inadvertently hinder educational equity. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(1), 77-86. It is now widely affirmed that overcoming the ‘digital divide’ is crucial to ameliorating inequality, providing everyone with the digital skills and access they need to fully participate…

  • The epistemology of apocalypse 

    From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 105: The word “apocalypse” derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which means “something uncovered” or revealed. Besides the need for a dramatically better health care system, there was much else uncovered and revealed when the floodwaters retreated in New York that October. The disaster revealed how dangerous it is…

  • What does it mean to take Twitter seriously?

    What does it mean to take Twitter seriously as a form of intellectual production? This is the question I’ve been asking myself a lot in the last few weeks, as I start what I hope will be an extensive break from a platform I’ve been using daily for years. My immediate motivation for this is…

  • The world’s a stage and we play a character, I found him

    So I stare into this paper instead of sitting at a cubicle Take all the ugly shit inside and try to make it beautiful Use the cement from rock bottom and make it musical So the people can relate to where I’ve been Where I’m going, what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard From the guts,…

  • Critique as consumerism 

    This insight from Richard Wilkinson’s forward to Andrew Sayer’s Why We Can’t Afford the Rich reminds me of some of the (many) arguments from Jana Bacevic’s superb PhD thesis on the sociology of critique. From loc 164 of Andrew Sayer’s book: But too often reading books or articles on the threats the world faces becomes…

  • How many professors are part of the 1%?

    An obvious question raised by this fact on loc 270 of Andrew Sayer’s Why We Can’t Afford the Rich is how many professors are part of this 1%? Many can be found within business schools and medical schools but anecdote suggests they can be found throughout the university system: In fact, the inequalities within the…

  • How do dentists use social media?

    My notes on Bhola, S., & Hellyer, P. (2016). The risks and benefits of social media in dental foundation training. British dental journal, 221(10), 609. One of my main interests in recent years has been social media and professionalisation. Once these platforms become a routine feature of working life, it’s necessary to prepare professionals to…

  • Digital capitalism or digital socialism?

    My notes on Morozov, E. (2019) Digital Socialism? The Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data. New Left Review 116/117, 33-66 A range of terms have entered circulation in recent years which suggest a transformation in capitalism. Digital capitalism, platform capitalism, data capitalism and surveillance capitalism point to a shift which is significant in…

  • Neoliberalism: the ideological wall blocking climate action 

    From This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, pg 72: Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our…

  • Making sense of visual digital data

    Kicking myself I can’t make this upcoming SRA event: ‘Visual digital media: Everyday content, everyday challenges’ Tim Highfield, Assistant Professor, New Media, University of Amsterdam The wealth of visual digital and social media, from Instagram and Snapchat to animated GIFs and emoji, has enabled new and evolving ways of using the visual and the digital…

  • Game of Thrones: from sociological to psychological storytelling

    My notes on Tufekci, Z (2019) The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones. Scientific American: Observations. May 2019. This fascinating piece reflects on Game of Thrones as “sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual”, driven by characters who “evolve in response to the…

  • Climate change as doorstep politics

    A few months ago James Meadway, advisor to John McDonnell, predicted on Novara media that climate change would soon become a doorstep issue in the UK. If unpredictable weather events become a regular part of life for people, the recognition of their underlying cause is immensely significant. However this passage from Naomi Klein’s This Changes…

  • Thinking on the Move: The Possibilities and Problems of Walking Sociologically

    I’m so excited for this event I’m doing with Emma Jackson and Les Back, kindly funded by The Sociological Review and Goldsmith’s CURC. Full information and registration available here. The Sociological Review is delighted to bring you a 2-day walking conference organised by Emma Jackson, Mark Carrigan and Les Back. The event has been funded…

  • The ecological limits of datafication

    I went to a mind blowing talk by Kira Allmann this morning about the ecological costs of digital activity. This is something I was aware of but entirely in the abstract, recognising that digitalisation manifests itself climatically without any specificity about what this relationship entails. There are many things this talk made me think about which…

  • Are you interested in the future of digital sociology?

    Myself and Huw Davies are organising this networking event for the BSA Digital Sociology group, taking place in London on July 17th. If you’re interested in meeting other digital sociologists, talking about common issues, finding collaborators for projects and defining the future of the subdiscipline then please consider coming along. There are full sign up…

  • To what extent are intellectuals responsible for how their ideas are taken up?

    To what extent are intellectuals responsible for how their ideas are taken up?There a great example of this on pg 126 of Winners Take All. Stephen Pinker’s entirely legitimate study of declining human violence is taken up as theodicy for contemporary capitalism, explaining away the appearance of injustice as a failure to take a sufficiently…

  • A social media sabbatical

    After five years of scheduling 50+ social media posts per day, I’m stepping down as The Sociological Review’s Digital Engagement Fellow next week. This seems like the perfect time for me to take a break from social media. I’ve locked my Twitter and Instagram accounts, deleted my Facebook account and the only place you will find me online is here…

  • Interviews with Nature Index about social media

    I did an interview with Bec Crew from Nature Index recently and it featured in a series of articles: For scientists skittish about Twitter, here’s a plan 10 tips for tweeting research How academics should use Twitter

  • The strange fate of ‘culture’

    Meaning in Action is a thought provoking book by Rein Raud, motivated by the strange fate which has befallen ‘culture’. At precisely the time when “the concept of culture, sloppily defined or not at all, is occupying an increasingly central place in social and political debate” the study of the concept has become ever narrower,…

  • Climate change and digitalisation

    I’ve been thinking a lot in the last couple of weeks about climate change and digitalisation. For instance the climatic significance of digital technology is increasingly recognised, as well as the resource constraints this implies for some of the wilder claims made about the coming frontiers of digitalisation. This also represents an ideological tension as one emerging grand…

  • Emerging computational mega structures

    My notes on Delic, K. A., & Walker, M. A. (2008). Emergence of the academic computing clouds. Ubiquity, 2008(August), 1. I was intrigued by this short paper from 2008, prefiguring a number of themes which are central to contemporary debates about digital infrastructure. It reflected on the “emergence of the cloud as the generic infrastructural…

  • The singular innovation which explains capitalism’s growth

    I thought this was an incredibly evocative description, from pg 116 of The Unhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Contrary to the hagiographic orthodoxy we find in accounting for the history of capitalism, the reality is that one single innovation explains the turbo charged growth which the world saw over a comparatively short period of time. It…

  • Unbundling the university

    My notes on Newfield, C. (2019). Unbundling the knowledge economy. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1-9. Far from being distinct institutions at a remove from society, this special issue explores their many interconnections with social and political life. Once we recognise the mutating character of the university, transforming and growing in a way which reflects wider…

  • The fantasies of wealthy city dwellers

    From The Unhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells pg 89: Sitting in a living room in a modern apartment in an advanced metropolis somewhere in the developed world, this threat may seem hard to credit—so many cities looking nowadays like fantasies of endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy. But of all urban entitlements, the…

  • Should climate change be a master narrative?

    Should climate change be a master narrative? It certainly has competition from neo-conservative narratives of the Chinese century, techno-dystopian narratives of the ‘rise of the robots’ or populist narratives of the great revival. But I find David Wallace-Wells very plausible here in The Unhabitable Earth on pg 53: In this way, climate change appears to…

  • Datafication and discipline in educaiton

    My notes on Manolev, J., Sullivan, A., & Slee, R. (2019). The datafication of discipline: ClassDojo, surveillance and a performative classroom culture. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(1), 36-51. To understand how digital technology is reshaping education, it’s necessary to analyse how datafication (“the conversion of social action into quantifiable data in a manner that enables…

  • Gobal Personhood in Education

    My notes on Robertson, S.L. & Mocanu, A.M. (2019) The Possibilities of a Radical Diasporic Epistemology for the Development of Global Personhood in Education. International Studies in the Sociology of Education The notion of ‘global competence’ was added by the OECD to its Program of International Student Achievement (PISA) in 2018. This was necessary in order to equip…

  • The environmental impact of Bitcoin

    From The Unhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells pg 33: Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of Bitcoin; today mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled, out of distrust…

  • What comes after 2100?

    I was fascinated to learn in The Unhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells that climate models end in 2100 as a matter of convention. I’d be interested to learn about how this convention emerges and what effect it has had on climate science. It’s easy to see the epistemological reasons for this, as the conditions being modelled become…

  • The ontology of (digital) testing

    My notes on Thompson, G., & Sellar, S. (2018). Datafication, testing events and the outside of thought. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(2), 139-151. In this paper Thompson and Sellar cast a Deleuzian lens upon the data hungry character of contemporary educational institutions. As they put it on 139, “Education institutions, and the people who work…

  • The movement of people around an uninhabitable earth

    The full significance of this cannot be overstated. If a million Syrians pushed Europe to the brink of fascism, what might ten or a hundred times that number do? The horrible irony is that the far right coming to the power makes it less likely that steps will be taken to control the climatological processes…

  • Does social media make young people unhappy?

    My notes on Orben, A. & Dienlin, T. & Przybylski, A.K. (2019). Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction. Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences Does social media make young people unhappy? This is the question which this paper by Amy Orbena, Tobias Dienlinc and Andrew K. Przybylskia addresses using the Understanding Society…

  • The Platform University

    This special issue of Discover Society collects articles from speakers at last year’s inaugrial Platform University conference at the University of Cambridge. It has been published to coincide with the release of the call for papers for the second conference, taking place in December at Lancaster University. The Platform University, by Mark Carrigan Assembling the…

  • Platform Surveillance

    My notes on Wood, D. M., & Monahan, T. (2019). Platform Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 17(1/2), 1-6. In this editorial, David Murakami Wood and Torin Monahan introduce a special issue of Surveillance & Society which considers platform capitalism from the perspective of surveillance studies. Their focus is on how “digital platforms fundamentally transform social practices…

  • The three essential steps for any thought leader

    I love this list by Anand Giridharadas on pg 96-99 of his Winner Takes All. These three steps can be found in the approach of successful ‘thought leaders’: Focus on the Victim, Not the Perpetrator Personalise the Political Be Constructively Actionable His point is how knowledge becomes plutocrat friendly, stripped of any critical impulse without becoming so…

  • The alliance between the billionaires and the thought leaders

    Why the great disruptive project needs thought leaders, from Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas pg 94: The Hilary Cohens and Stacey Ashers and Justin Rosensteins and Greg Ferensteins and Emmett Carsons and Jane Leibrocks and Shervin Pishevars and Chris Saccas and Travis Kalanicks of the world needed thinkers to formulate the visions of change by…

  • The birth of machinology

    My notes on Rahwan, I. et al. (2019) Machine Behaviour. Nature, 568, 477–486 The proliferation of intelligent machines, ranging from machine learning systems through to their embodiment in robotics, raises the question of how their behaviour should be studied and understood. In this agenda setting paper, the team of authors suggest this now requires the deliberate formation of a…

  • When political theory restages the ‘Corbynism is a cult’ trope

    From Corbynism: A Critical Approach, by Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton, loc 3122 It is the Corbyn movement’s reliance on this kind of hyper-moralised Schmittian identitarian politics of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ which explains why the Corbyn movement appears at its strongest when it comes under attack from internal or external foes, real or imagined, while…

  • What is digital literacy and how do you teach it?

    My notes on Chase, Z., & Laufenberg, D. (2011). Embracing the squishiness of digital literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(7), 535-537. Even if widespread disagreement remains about what constitutes digital literacy, everyone seems to agree that it is important to the success of students. As Chase and Laufenberg point out, “if digital literacy…

  • Academics like the idea of Twitter in the classroom but what do students think?

    My notes on Boath, E., Vigurs, K., & Frangos, J. (2018). Twittering Away-Is twitter an appropriate adjunctive tool to enhance learning and engagement in Higher Education?. Innovative Practice in Higher Education, 3(2). Twitter has often be framed as a potential tool for teaching and learning. It can be used for virtual peer support groups, developing…

  • The cultural entrepreneurs behind your favourite thought leaders 

    From Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas pg 88: Zolli was a kind of MarketWorld producer, standing at the profitable intersection of companies wanting to associate themselves with big ideas, networkers looking for their next conference, and writers and thinkers who wanted to reach a broader audience and perhaps court the influential elites of the…

  • Technology and the billionaire class

    As Anand Giridharadas points out on pg 86 of his Winners Take All, the eight billionaires who can account for half the world’s wealth all owe their income to technology, albeit to varying degrees: Six of those eight made their money in the supposedly equalizing field of technology: Gates, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry…

  • Why education and technology is full of bullshit

    My notes on Selwyn, N. (2016). Minding our language: why education and technology is full of bullshit… and what might be done about it. This wonderfully title editorial takes issue with the tendency for educational uses of digital technology to be “discussed in enthusiastic and often exaggerated terms”, leaving “idealistic and impassioned talk” proliferating in an…

  • Who would be against the people?

    There’s a profound scepticism running through Corbynism: A Critical Approach concerning the people and its role within Corbynism. Their concern is that a prevailing sense of socialism as natural, what people do when left to their own devices, constructs them as “inherently moral and naturally good beings, and ‘the people’ as a whole a unified, self-sufficient, organic community” (loc…

  • Social media and education… now the dust has settled

    My notes on Selwyn, N., & Stirling, E. (2016). Social media and education… now the dust has settled. Learning, media and technology, 41(1), 1-5. This special issue of Learning, Media and Technology is a sequel to a 2009 issue which began to inquire into the emergence of ‘social software’ and what it meant for teaching.…

  • The dark possibilities incipient with Universal Basic Income

    This is such an interesting argument from Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton, loc 2987. I think it’s slightly hyperbolic, understating individualised domination within the corporation and overstating individualised domination by the state, but it’s an important case which needs to be answered, particularly concerning the economic pressures which corporations and states…

  • Collectivising public sociology

    My notes on Burawoy, M. (2002). Public sociologies and the grass roots, speech to SWS Wrightsville Beach, February 7, 2002. In this short text Burawoy takes issue with the mythology of decline which intellectuals are spreading about their own existence, as well as the associated belief that “a public sociology that dealt with the big issues of the…