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  • 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…

  • The pre-crime assemblage: building the machine that eats bad people

    My notes on Mantello, P. (2016). The machine that ate bad people: The ontopolitics of the precrime assemblage. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716682538 Since 9/11 the politics of prediction and risk have created an alliance between security agencies, technology firms and other commercial actors which seeks to create a precrime assemblage: the first generation sought to…

  • One rule for Zuckerberg, another rule for everyone else

    A recurrent theme in stories about Facebook is the privilege which Mark Zuckerberg accords for himself which his radical transparency denies for others. My favourite example had been the opaque meeting room hidden away at the back of his glass fronted office, allowing him to retreat into privacy while everyone around him stands exposed. But…

  • Talking to people on trains

    Before I got a smart phone, I used to wander around talking to people all the time. I began to fall out of this habit during my mid 20s and getting my first iPhone was the nail in the coffin. Now I’m more likely to go out of my way to avoid talking to people…

  • Algorithms and institutional isomorphism

    My notes on Caplan, R., & Boyd, D. (2018). Isomorphism through algorithms: Institutional dependencies in the case of Facebook. Big Data & Society, 5(1), 2053951718757253. Are data-driven technologies leading organisations to take on shared characteristics? This is the fascinating question addressed in this paper by Robyn Caplan and danah boyd which they begin with the…

  • Ataraxia as a solution to the problems of social media 

    The notion of ataraxia comes from Pyrrhonism, a form of Ancient Greek scepticism which advocated a suspension of judgement in the face of invocations to believe. It sought to cultivate a calmness of spirit through an affirmation that things could not be known in themselves. The point is not to actively doubt but rather to…

  • Digital capitalism and the global police state

    My notes on Robinson, W. I. (2018). The next economic crisis: digital capitalism and global police state. Race & Class, 60(1), 77-92. This paper places digitalisation in historical context, framing the current boom in terms of the fallout from the 2008 crisis. We are seeing a restructuring grounded in digitalisation and militarisation which will aggravate the conditions…

  • The perils of being a source of friction in a company that wants to move fast and break things 

    There an interesting extract in Roger McNamee’s Zucked about the position Sandy Parakilas found himself in as an operations manager for Facebook platform, with responsibility for user privacy in relation to third party apps. From loc 2684: In classic Facebook style, the company installed an inexperienced and untested recent graduate in a position of great…

  • Social theory as sociology’s meta-conversation

    My notes on Lichterman, P (2017) On Social Theory Now: Communicating Theory Now. Perspectives 39(2) In this response to Social Theory Now, Paul Lichterman offers a compelling vision of social theory as sociology’s meta-conversation, with communicating theory being “to keep track of and facilitate that conversation, treating it as always in movement”. It is a sprawling conversation about…

  • Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem

    My notes on Pasquale, F. A. (2018). Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem. American Affairs, 2(2) The most philosophically important aspect of Hayek’s work was his epistemological objection to central planning. He argued that the market was indispensable because it permitted distributed knowledge of a sort which a centralised decision maker couldn’t possibly hope to reconstruct. In this…

  • The anxiety of inertia: binge watching as death drive 

    I’ve been reading the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s Not Working: Why We Have To Stop for the last few days, during a week in which I have been forced to stop by a chest infection which prevented me from making a trip to Sweden I’d been looking forward to for months. It’s a useful time to…

  • Are there any safeguards against Amazon using AWS to monitor competitors? 

    This is a suggestion which Roger McNamee makes on loc 2041 of Zucked. Note that he’s not suggesting corporate espionage but rather inference of trends from superficially innocuous data Amazon have privileged access to as platform provider: Amazon can use its cloud services business to monitor the growth of potential competitors, though there is little…

  • The intimacy of writing

    My notes on Strathern, M., & Latimer, J. (2019). A conversation. The Sociological Review, 67(2), 481–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119832424 In this interesting conversation with Marilyn Strathern, who I had the pleasure to meet when Jana Bacevic organised a a masterclass with her at our department, Joanna Latimer explores the act of writing and the influence Strathern’s has had on…

  • Social media as a living CV for academics

    This weekend I went back to my CV for the first time in a year and a half, condensing it down from nine pages into two pages for a particular application. Any work on it is always a strange and alienating experience. As Barbara Ehrenreich has put it, CVs “should have an odd, disembodied tone,…

  • The institutionalisation of behavioural surplus: a quick recap on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    I’m slowly making my way through Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I thought I’d benefit from a quick recap of where I’d got to so far. In essence the first part of the book is an account of behavioural surplus: data about user behaviour  left over after narrowly technical requirements that can be…

  • What images do universities use on Twitter and Instagram?

    My notes on What image types do universities post online? Twitter has become a mainstream activity for universities in the UK and the US, with most institutions now having a presence. The platform has taken an image based turn over the last few years, since native photo sharing was introduced in 2011 and Twitpic et…

  • How growth hacking is leading to a pandemic of amplification-itis on social media platforms

    One of my obsessions in the last year has been how firms seeking to optimise their platforms influence user behaviour in the process. On one level, influencing users in this way is the goal, as real time data allows continuous optimisation to increase user engagement i.e. encouraging users to engage with more content, spend longer…

  • I’ve finally finished the second edition of Social Media for Academics

    Rewritten line by line, including new ideas, insights, suggestions, references One huge new chapter (the dark side of social media) One 50% rewritten chapter New forward with lots of substantive content & overview of my approach to SMA Large new section on podcast, videocasting, live streaming, working with freelancers Large new section on using social…

  • The long, slow decline of organic reach on social media

    There’s an interesting extract in Roger McNamee’s Zucked about how strategically Facebook have reduced the significance of organic reach (i.e. unpaid distribution of content) on the platform. The promise of being able to communicate directly to a vast audience through Facebook pages has been central to the motivation of individuals, networks and organisations who have…

  • The tightness of engineering constraints and the organisational sociology of tech startups

    I’m enjoying Zucked by Roger McNamee more than I expected to. What’s useful about his account is the stress it places on the engineering capacity of startups. What makes cloud computing significant is not just enabling growth without major capital investment in infrastructure, but also “eliminating what had previously been a very costly and time-consuming process…

  • The awkward silences of digital elites

    The fascination with the propensity of tech founders to go silent reminds me of how the earliest philosophers were framed as unworldly due to their capacity to go into thought trances. From Roger McNamee’s Zucked, loc 269-284. This little speech took about two minutes to deliver. What followed was the longest silence I have ever endured…

  • The security apparatus of digital elites

    One of the most interesting aspects of the Bezos story earlier this month was the insight it offered into the security apparatus he surrounds himself with, particularly his instruction for Gavin De Becker “to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts”. There’s something oddly thrilling to read this, inviting us to imagine…

  • Open science and platform capitalism: a love story?

    My notes on Mirowski, P. (2018). The future (s) of open science. Social studies of science, 48(2), 171-203. In this provocative paper, Philip he takes issue with the “taken-for-granted premise that modern science is in crying need of top-to-bottom restructuring and reform” which underpins much of the open science movement, as well as its tendency to obscure the key question of…

  • The ontology of toxicity

    My notes on Liboiron, M., Tironi, M., & Calvillo, N. (2018). Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world. Social studies of science, 48(3), 331-349. The authors of this paper take “a permanently polluted world” as their starting point. It is one where toxicity is ubiquitous, even if unevenly distributed. Unfortunately, “[t]he tonnage, ubiquity and longevity of…

  • Critics of Amazon don’t understand how popular it is

    This is such an important point in Tim Carmody’s (highly recommended) Amazon newsletter. Not only is Amazon enormously popular but critics of the firm fail to understand the basis of this popularity, as opposed to the insight they have into the popularity of a firm like Apple: One study last year showed that Amazon was the second…

  • 😪 How not to prepare the second edition of a book 😪

    I’m increasingly hopeful that I’ll submit the second edition of Social Media for Academics to Sage next week, meeting a deadline which I suspect my editor had expected I would break. The book is six months overdue, I’ve broken countless deadlines and the impending date was only agreed after a period in which we agreed…

  • But you can recognise me because I’m you

    But you can recognize me because I’m you, mate It’s never too late to see deeper than the surface. Trust me, there’s so much more to it. There’s a world beyond this one That creeps in when your wits have gone soft And all your edges start shifting I mean it A world that it…

  • The governance of platforms

    This ECPR panel looks superb. Saving here to follow up later: please find attached, the call for papers for a panel at the ECPR General Conference in Wrocław (4 – 7 September). Title of the panel:***The Relationship Between Digital Platforms and** **Government Agencies in Surveillance: Oversight of or by Platforms?* If you are interested in…

  • The Data Science & Society Institute

    This looks like an interesting job at a new institute I’d like to keep track of: The Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher to play a major role in a two-year project on Data Science & Society. We invite applications from scholars with a recent Ph.D. in science…

  • The tragedy of the academic commons: when abstraction makes us passive

    Using the communal kitchen at the Faculty of Education last Friday, I noticed that the lid had fallen off the bin and was sitting on the floor. In the middle of something and keen to get home, I didn’t stop to pick it up. I just came back from the same kitchen on Monday afternoon…

  • Breathe Me

  • Mark Fisher on using social media rather than being used by it

    “In sum, the obsession with the web, its monopolisation of any idea of the new, has served capitalist realism rather than undermined it. Which does not mean, naturally, that we should abandon the web, only that we should find out how to develop a more instrumental relationship with it. Put simply, we should use it…

  • Experts, knowledge and criticality in the age of ‘alternative facts’: re-examining the contribution of higher education

    This event looks fantastic. More details and registration here. Chair: Dr Neil Harrison, University of Oxford In their seminal works of the early 1990s, both Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens predicted that one manifestation of late modernity would be a popular suspicion of experts and scepticism about expertise.  Since then, the rise of the individual’s…

  • For a whole range of reasons, I’m finding social media extremely tiresome at the moment. Hence I’ll just be here on my blog for the foreseeable future.

  • The Cambridge approach to social ontology

    My notes on Lawson, T. (2009). Cambridge social ontology: an interview with Tony Lawson. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 2(1), 100-122. Tony Lawson is a key figure in critical realism, leading the Cambridge Social Ontology group over twenty five years and playing a primary role in establishing the International Association for Critical Realism, as…

  • Sociology and anarchism

    What a fascinating resource this is: Sociologists’ Knowledge of Anarchism Project. Thanks to Martyn Everett for passing it on. To explore sociologists’ knowledge about an alternate theoretical paradigm also concerned with society: anarchism. Sociologists tend to have an extremely variable familiarity with anarchist ideas—some who know a lot and others who know very little beyond…

  • The promise of university bureaucracy: academic neoliberalism as project rather than outcome

    My notes on Nash, K. (2018). Neo-liberalisation, universities and the values of bureaucracy. The Sociological Review, 0038026118754780. It is too easy to frame neoliberalism in institutions as an outcome rather than a project. In this thoughtful paper, Kate Nash explores the space which this recognition opens up, the “competing and contradictory values in the everyday life of public sector organisations”…

  • CfP: Political epistemologies of Big Data

    I’m giving serious thought to this, as much as I’m trying to save money and travel less: Call for Papers for the Conference „Scraping the Demos“: Political epistemologies of Big Data Organizers: Research Group Quantification and Social Regulation (Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society) and DVPW Thematic Group “Internet and Politics. Electronic Governance” Date: 8-9…

  • How Should STS Address Inequality? As a Subject, a (Dis)Value)? Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

    An absolutely fascinating 4S panel from Ana Vara and David Tyfield: 4S CONFERENCE OPEN PANEL 2019 New Orleans Sept 4-7 Open Panel 69: How Should STS Address Inequality? As a Subject, a (Dis)Value)? Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives In technoscientific times of huge and increasing inequalities that involve almost all aspects of social life, both within and…

  • The Politics of Big Data: Social Listening and Reclaiming the Future

    From an interesting British Academy funded workshop last November: https://methods.sagepub.com/video/embed/srmpromo/oohinf/social-listening-and-reclaiming-the-future

  • Capturing the classroom: the Google Agenda

    My notes on this report by Google Transparency Project  There are many reasons to be cautious about the educational ambitions of tech firms. If these firms seem likely to be the dominant actors of the global economy over the coming decades, how will shape the influence they exercise over education. To offer the most concrete…