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  • 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…

  • Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’?

    My notes on Davies, H. C., & Eynon, R. (2018). Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’?. New Media & Society, 20(11), 3961-3979. It’s so rare for a paper to have such a wonderfully informative title. Huw Davies and Rebecca Eynon interrogate this assumption that “teaching young people digital skills and literacies will…

  • The performance of critique and why it frustrates me 

    In the last week, I’ve been reading Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton. It’s a thought provoking critique of the Labour leadership and the movement which has emerged around it. One which I’m reading because I wanted to be forced to think about things I believe, which the shrill condemnation…

  • The political adulthood of the Occupy generation

    In their Corbynism: A Critical Approach, Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton offer this account of the change that has taken place within the British left, as transformative projects and political power came to displace the concerns of horizontals. From loc 2491-2507: a politically ambivalent ‘left’ populism whose contemporary origins are to be found in the…

  • You can’t have your ‘facts’ back

    My notes on Marres, N. (2018). Why We Can’t Have Our Facts Back. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4, 423-443. “We want our facts back” is a semi-joking remarking Noortje Marres overheard an academic say which captures a wider response to what has been called ‘post-truth’. Many feel increasingly inclined to take a normative stance…

  • The consequences of our expectations

    In his Imagined Futures, Jens Beckert suggests four ways in which fictional expectations make an impact on the social world: They coordinate actors by providing a common focus to their action They are able to shape the future by conditioning what action happens The freedom involved in fiction means they are not constrained by reality and…

  • The concept of ‘mobile literacy’

    My notes on Barden, O. (2019). Building the mobile hub: mobile literacies and the construction of a complex academic text. Literacy, 53(1), 22-29. In spite of the many things which smart phones can do, they have not been welcomed warmly within the classroom with many claiming they are “distracting, promote superficial learning, erode students’ ability…

  • The sociology of expectations (and platform imaginaries)

    In his Imagined Futures, Jens Beckert offers a sociology of expectations which reconstructs the role of imagination in how people orientate themselves to the future. From pg 9: If actors are orientated toward the future and outcomes are uncertain, then how can expectations be define? What are expectations under conditions of uncertainty? That is the central question to…

  • A manifesto for writing and publishing differently

    My notes on Kember, S. (2016). Why publish?. Learned Publishing, 29, 348-353. This short piece is based on Sarah Kember’s inaugrial professorial lecture at Goldsmiths, its writing timed to coincide with the launch of Goldsmith’s new press. Its establishment was explicitly motivated by a sense of “the opportunities afforded by digital technologies and the new…

  • Taking back control: what happens when people realise they were lied to?

    The trope of ‘taking back control’ has become ever more prominent within political life, explicitly in the case of the Brexit movement but implicitly in a whole range of other movements from Trumpism to Corbynism. In their thought provoking, if at times unpersuasive, critique of Corbynism (Corbynism: A Critical Approach) Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton…

  • Theorising as self-work: the case of heuristics

    My notes on Betta, M., & Swedberg, R. (2018). Heuristics and Theorizing as Work on the Self. Sociologica, 12(1), 21-25. Heuristics are commonly seen as either rules of thumb, simple tricks used under conditions of uncertainty, or tools for discovery, practical steps facilitating knowledge about what was previously concealed. However in this short paper, Betta…

  • Externalisation as defence mechanism

    I thought this was a fascinating aside on loc 999 of Joshua Cohen’s Not Working about Andy Warhol’s reliance on a tape recorder to distance himself from his feelings. This is something many people do, thinking around the troubles rather than feeling them, but rarely so explicitly and with an apparatus: According to his account in…

  • The components of digital literacy

    My notes on Eshet, Y. (2004). Digital literacy: A conceptual framework for survival skills in the digital era. Journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia, 13(1), 93-106. There is widespread agreement that the ubiquity of digital technology presents a whole range of challenges to the people living within these newly digital environments, but there is little…

  • Lateral vs vertical evaluation of sources

    My notes on Breakstone, J., McGrew, S., Smith, M., Ortega, T., & Wineburg, S. (2018). Why we need a new approach to teaching digital literacy. Phi Delta Kappan, 99(6), 27-32. The upset of the 2016 American election was immediately followed by a rush to provide guidance on how to negotiate what was widely regarded as…

  • Corbynism without Corbyn

    Does Corbynism have a future beyond Jeremy Corbyn? In their Corbynism: A Critical Approach, Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton argue strongly that it does not because the figure of Corbyn is essential to sustaining the Corbyn coalition. From loc 1882: there can be no Corbynism without Corbyn, or, at least, not without rendering the project…

  • The Kardashian index: social media and academic celebrity

    My notes on Hall, N. (2014). The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists. Genome biology, 15(7), 424. The link between scholarly activity and scholarly reputation used to be more straight forward. A scholar would publish journal articles, gaining standing amongst their peers through the quality of those articles or the…

  • When the venture capitalists tried to get to Edward Snowden

    I thought this was a wonderful anecdote, recounted by Anand Giridharadas on pg 77-78 of his Winners Take All. Edward Snowden was interviewed at Summit at Sea by the venture capitalist Chris Sacca who immediately looked straight past the politics of what his interviewee was saying once there was a fleeting mention of a startup emerging from it:…

  • And who are you supposed to be?

    Sympathy, this is my best disguise. My skin stepped out for my bones to dry up For the rest of the world outside to see. You see I, bleed on the side. It’s a part time thing, a private affair. I try to keep it out of the light. I must confess, I didn’t recognize…

  • Optimism as a political factor in Brexit Britain

    In the last few years I’ve been struggling to make sense of optimism as a political factor. It struck me during the pre-refendum debate that the case being made by someone like Daniel Hannan, with his neo-mercantilist vision of a post-EU Britain, could be seen as considerably more optimistic than anything being offered by the remain camp.…

  • How education imagines the future

    My notes on Facer, K., & Sandford, R. (2010). The next 25 years?: future scenarios and future directions for education and technology. Journal of computer assisted learning, 26(1), 74-93. “Education is a future-facing activity” as Facer and Sandford put it on pg 74. Its future orientation ranges from young people making choices on what to…

  • Austerity politics as reactionary populism

    I thought this was an excellent account in Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton. From loc 627: Austerity is often taken to have caused the contemporary rise of populism. In retrospect, however, it is abundantly clear that austerity itself was a populist project –both in Chantal Mouffe’s sense of the creation…

  • Beyond the myth of the ‘cyberkid’

    My notes on Facer, K., & Furlong, R. (2001). Beyond the myth of the’cyberkid’: Young people at the margins of the information revolution. Journal of youth studies, 4(4), 451-469. In this paper from 2011, Facer and Furlong consider how the assumed digital competence of young people has led them to figure much less heavily in…

  • It’s The Political Economy, Stupid

    My notes on Pacewicz, J. (2018) It’s The Political Economy, Stupid: ​A Polanyian Take On American Politics In The Longue Durée. Perspectives 40(2) This short piece is a valuable reminder that Trump’s capacity to endure countless scandals while retaining the support of his party wouldn’t have been possible without a degree of political polarisation in which…

  • The Great Disruptive Project

    On the same topic as yesterday’s post on the moral theories of platform engineers, Anand Giridharadas recounts a speech by Uber and Airbnb investor Shervin Pishevar on pg 66 of his Winners Take All:  “My biggest thing is existing structures and monopolies—one example is the taxi cartels—that is a very real thing,” he said. “I’ve been in meetings…

  • Do you have an idea for a sociological walk?

    Thinking on the Move: the possibilities and risks of walking sociologically Date: Thursday 5th to Friday 6th September, 2019 Location: Goldsmiths, London: The event will take place primarily outside in Southeast London What are the risks and the opportunities of thinking on our move? This two-day conference explores what it means to walk sociologically. The event will…

  • The moral theories of platform engineers

    I’ve been writing this morning about how platform engineers and entrepreneurs justify what they do, as well as the assumptions implicit within these justifications. I then stumbled across this  example offered by Anand Giridharadas on pg 39 of his Winners Take All and it’s a really good one: Guided by MarketWorld’s win-win values, Rosenstein decided to improve the…

  • So you were born, and that was a good day

    You were gone when we found you You were practically surrounded, you were trapped But the opposition stalled, their blood ran cold When they saw the look of love in your eyes Maybe the times we had, they weren’t that bad And everything else was part of the plan We sang: “I don’t know where…

  • CfP: Knowledge Socialism. The Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence

    Saving this here to come back to later: CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS Knowledge Socialism The Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence Peters, T. Besley, P. Jandrić & X. Zhu (Editors)   Knowledge socialism is a term that refers to a new global collectivist society that is coming online based on communal aspects…

  • Farewell @thesocreview, it has been a wonderful five years 👋😢

    At the end of next month, I step down as Digital Engagement Fellow at The Sociological Review Foundation. It will have been five years at that point since I first received an e-mail from then editor Bev Skeggs inviting me to get involved, joining Marcus Gilroy-Ware to get the digital operation off the ground for…

  • CfP: What do digital inclusion and data literacy mean today?

    CFP – Special issue of Internet Policy Review on What do digital inclusion and data literacy mean today? Topic and relevance As more of our everyday lives become digital, from paying bills, reading news, to contacting companies and services, keeping in touch with your friends and family, and even voting – it has become crucial…

  • Digital literacy as individual and collective empowerment

    My notes on Njenga, J. K. (2018). Digital literacy: The quest of an inclusive definition. Reading & Writing, 9(1), 1-7.\ On a view which associates digitalisation with the globalisation of the economy, digital literacy is “synonymous with the ability of individuals to participate in the economy through skills and creativity enabled by the digital technologies”…

  • The real danger is to linger at the base of the thing

    And this is how we rise by taking the fall Survive another winter on straight to the thaw One day you’ll learn to strain the tea through your teeth And maybe find the strength to proceed to the peak Press on into the thin again till I cannot breathe I swallowed so much of my…

  • Getting hold of ideas while they are clear: note taking as a creative practice

    I often come out of meetings feeling that what we’ve been discussing is utterly transparent to me. I feel I hold the issue in my hands, seeing how the initial steps connect to a broader horizon of action. It couldn’t feel more straight forward. However partly for that reason, I never take notes at the…

  • The epistemological conservatism of the accelerated academy

    There’s an interesting section in Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain discussing Ross Ashby’s experiments in building cybernetic systems and the design philosophy these undertakings led him to articulate. As Pickering describes on pg 128: If, beyond a certain degree of complexity, the performance of a machine could not be predicted from a knowledge of its…

  • Organisational sociology and algorithms

    I’m saving this here to come back to because I’m very interested in this theme. Call for Workshop Participation Algorithms on the Shop Floor: Data-driven Technologies in Organizational Context Deadline for applications: April 19, 2019 Workshop date: June 14, 2019 in NYC at Data & Society <http://datasociety.net/> Application link: http://datasociety.net/algorithms-on-the-shop-floor <http://datasociety.net/algorithms-on-the-shop-floor> For questions, email events@datasociety.net <mailto:events@datasociety.net> On…

  • A cybernetics of distraction?

    There’s an interesting aside in Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain on pg 98 which has left me thinking about why I’m so interested in distraction: Here he tied his essay into a venerable tradition in psychiatry going back at least to the early twentieth century, namely, that madness and mental illness pointed to a failure to…

  • Programming as Social Science: a case study of @pdbrooker’s surprisingly militant bots

    My notes on Brooker, P. (2019). My unexpectedly militant bots: A case for Programming-as-Social-Science. The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119840988 In this thought provoking paper, Phil Brooker takes issue with the scaremongering surroundings bots which positions them as epistemically dangerous due to their quantity and capacity to evade deception. Instead he propose sociologists engage with them as…

  • Driving robots mad 

    From pg 68 of Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Thus if the arrangement is such that the sound becomes positively associated both with the attracting light and with the withdrawal from an obstacle, it is possible for both a light and a sound to set up a paradoxical withdrawal. The ‘instinctive’ attraction to a light…

  • The strange performances of the brain

    This section of Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain just reawakened my interest in psychedelic drugs and their effects upon consciousness. From pg 73: Walter’s 1953 book The Living Brain is largely devoted to the science of the normal brain and its pathologies, epilepsy and mental illness. But in different passages it also goes beyond the…

  • The ontological gap between entities and interaction

    Another theme which feels important to me in Pickering’s superb The Cybernetic Brain is the ontological gap between entities and interaction. If we imagine the world as composed of discrete entities with defined characteristics, it invites an approach to knowledge in which we merely place them into a taxonomy in a manner which leaves them in…

  • Cybernetics and the dual-edged sword of disciplinarity

    It’s difficult to read Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain and not be swept up in his infectious enthusiasm for the British cyberneticians. They were the fun wing of an approach which “emerged from nowhere as far as established fields and career paths were concerned” with the “cyberneticians and their projects were outsiders to established fields…

  • Call For Blog Posts: Reflections On Doing Sociology Outside The Global North

    Despite widespread condemnations of ‘methodological nationalism’, calls for a more ‘global sociology’, and vibrant debates about decolonising the university, sociology cannot sustain the pretence that the ‘global North’ has been decentred. Indeed, sociology, even with its interdisciplinary posturing, remains dominated by theories and methodologies which emerge from and refer to the (over)developed world. In this…

  • “If you are for or against dictatorship, call in”: the terrifying turn in British politics

    On yesterday’s BBC Any Answers, an angry caller shared his wish that Oliver Cromwell could be brought back from the dead because Britain now needed leadership which MPs patently could not provide. The scary thing is that I find it hard to argue with the latter point, even if it leads me to the conclusion…

  • Ontological veiling   

    I’m very taken with Andrew Pickering’s concept of veiling. If I understand him correctly, it refers to how knowledge production can circumscribe reality by taking us on a detour from certain aspects of it. Those features which resist representation in our approach risk dropping off stage, unseen and unheard. He uses it to refer to how…

  • Scholarly centres of gravity

    This is a term which Andrew Pickering uses on pg 10 of the Cybernetic Brain to describe the conference series and dining club around which cybernetics coalesced, as organisationally loose and somewhat self-selecting gatherings substituted for the secure institutional base which the majority of participants lacked. Scholarly centres of gravity are what bring people together…

  • Have you attended a talk or workshop on social media I’ve done over the last few years?

    Have you attended a talk or workshop on social media I’ve done over the last few years? If so would you be willing to write a sentence or two of testimonial about what it was like?  For a variety of reasons, I’m going to start doing more of them this year and it would be…

  • Cybernetics as a way of life

    This is a wonderful section from pg 9 of Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Unlike more familiar sciences such as physics, which remain tied to specific academic departments and scholarly modes of transmission, cybernetics is better seen as a form of life , a way of going on in the world, even an attitude, that…

  • Call for papers: literature and sociology

    This looks like it’s going to be a brilliant conference: CALL FOR PAPERS (deadline: 22 April 2019) The third culture? // Literature and Sociology University of Warwick (Coventry) – 14 June 2019 In 1985 Wolf Lepenies argued that sociology should be considered a ‘third culture’ arising between science and literature. Contemporary discourses and research, however,…

  • The dream of reducing learning to teaching

    I was struck by this phrase by Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society, conveying his scepticism of the promise of educational technology in the 1970s. On pg 67 he writes of an “attempt to escalate an old dream into fact, and to finally make all valuable learning the result of professional teaching”. It left me wondering…

  • lights are out, phones are dead and I’m the only thing that’s runnin in this city

    lights are out, phones are dead and I’m the only thing that’s runnin in this city except for the clouds and man they’re comin down if i knew my way around wouldn’t feel so dizzy where’s tele? nobody can tell me i don’t speak a lick of that language and got a slippery memory if…

  • How do data come to matter?

    My notes on Lupton, D. (2018). How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data. Big Data & Society, 5(2), 2053951718786314. In this paper, Deborah Lupton extends her work on the quantified self into a broader theorisation of how people come to live with data. It foregrounds the voluntary dimension of this process, in…

  • The coming supply crisis in UK higher education

    This is a fascinating analysis of demographic trends in the UK, considering the implications of a coming expansion of 18 year olds for UK higher education in the 2020s. Extrapolating forward from current application rates, 50% of this cohort will be applying to go to university and the system is currently ill equipped to absorb…

  • The Hegelian sociology of Gillian Rose

    My notes on Latz, A. B. (2015). Gillian Rose and Social Theory. Telos, 173, 37-54. and Fuller, B. W. (2018). Back to Hegel? On Gillian Rose’s critique of sociological reason. The British journal of sociology, 69(2), 265-285 The figure of Gillian Rose was a continual presence in the Sociology department at Warwick in the time…

  • Can social media firms remain popular while being perceived as untrustworthy?

    In the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the popularity of social media firms amidst mounting scandal. It has often seemed that there’s a new common sense opening up in which these firms are seen as fundamentally untrustworthy, built around a business model which means the scandals they generate are a feature rather…

  • The ceaseless interpellation of digital capitalism

    This is superb from Richard Seymour on the ceaseless demands which contemporary capitalism places on us and the psychic costs they create. I’ve found his idea of the Twittering machine incredibly thought provoking to make sense of the sprawling entity which social media platforms are tangling us up within: One of the most exhausting features…