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  • 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…

  • Who are the super-rich and what do they want?

    My notes on Davies, W. (2017). Elites without hierarchies: Intermediaries,‘agency’and the super-rich. In Cities and the super-rich (pp. 19-38). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Who are the super-rich, and what do they want? This is the question which a thought provoking paper by Will Davies begins with and it’s one which has preoccupied me in recent years.…

  • Are you interested in sociological fiction?

    Are you interested in sociological fiction? Did you know there’s a new online home for it at The Sociological Review, edited by Ashleigh Watson? The first few pieces in our new section are online: Who Are Your Friends? Smiling Gives You Wrinkles Oil on canvas See here for guidance about how to contribute to. We…

  • Everything’s connected, right? Everything’s connected

    You’re with me all the time I think I know you better than I did when we were hanging out together What’s it like where you’ve gone? Well, I can feel it, it’s ok, I know you can’t say But you’ve been with me all day, I have to tell you When it happened, I…

  • How does one become a competitive Rubiks cube player?

    My sociological question after discovering the world of competitive Rubiks cube: how does one become a competitive Rubiks cube player? Is there an identifiable moral career in Goffman’s sense? There’s a vast internet subculture relating to this and I’m curious about the role it has play in enabling the competitive Rubiks cube world to coalesce. Here’s…

  • A few questions about Marvel’s Secret Wars

    If you’re here for the social theory or social media, please ignore this massively nerdy post. I’ve now read Marvel’s Secret Wars twice and there’s a few things I’m mystified by. Have I missed a big chunk of the storytelling? Or were these Chekhov’s rifles gone wrong: elements introduced into a vastly complex plot which…

  • Are you interested in blogging about social science methodology?

    The International Journal of Social Research Methodology has a new blog and we’re seeking contributions. We’re hoping it can be a vibrant space in which emerging methodological debates can unfold, tentative ideas voiced for the first time and professional discussions held in a public forum. This recent post on complexity and health inequalities gives a…

  • Why doesn’t technocrat have an antonym?

    My notes on Hudson, M. (2018). Ending technocracy with a neologism? Avivocracy as a conceptual tool. Technology in Society, 55, 136-139. What does it mean to call someone technocratic? In this intriguing paper, Marc Hudson observes that the term is “thrown about as a term of abuse, but without a clear alternative other than ritual(istic) invocations of…

  • Towards a neo-Khaldunian digital sociology: @morteza_hm on the Bedouins of Silicon Valley

    My notes on Hashemi, M. (2019). Bedouins of Silicon Valley: A neo-Khaldunian approach to sociology of technology. The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118822823  This hugely original paper seeks to counteract what Morteza Hashemi sees as an excessive focus on technological development in accounts of Silicon Valley, looking beyond this macro-social (often Schumpeterian) approach to “the evolution of Silicon Valley…

  • What happens when you meet a troll?

    This is one of the most engaging things I’ve ever seen on YouTube. I’d enthusiastically watch an entire web series built around this premise. There’s a whole research agenda waiting to be undertaken exploring the troll’s claim that he needed to be abusive in order to get noticed by Owen Jones.

  • The media must take responsibility for recent far right attacks on left wing journalists

  • Why have generic, popular services proved so enticing for digital academics? From 2011 to 2019

    My notes on Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Russell, B., Canty, N., & Watkinson, A. (2011). Social media use in the research workflow. Learned Publishing, 24(3), 183-195. I was fascinated to stumble across this paper from 2011 which I’d somehow managed to miss in the past, reporting on a project funded by Emerald investigating social media use…

  • Call for Papers: Academics, Professionals and Publics: Changes in the Ecologies of Knowledge Work

    Kicking myself I can’t make the date for this conference organised by Eric Lybeck: Call for Papers (LINK) Academics, Professionals and Publics: Changes in the Ecologies of Knowledge Work 4 April 2019 University of Manchester, UK Organiser: Eric Lybeck, Manchester Institute of Education Contact: eric.lybeck@manchester.ac.uk Keynote speakers: Andrew Abbott, University of Chicago Vivienne Baumfield, University…

  • The intellectual legacy of Charles Taylor: securing the vantage point of (historical) philosophical anthropology

    My notes on MacIntyre, A. (2018). Charles Taylor and dramatic narrative: Argument and genre. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 44(7), 761-763. This short reflection by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of my favourite philosophers, concerns the intellectual legacy of Charles Taylor, undoubtedly my favourite. He stresses how the reputation of Taylor would have been ensured by his earlier work, establishing himself as…

  • When sociology becomes a source of legitimation rather than critique: the case of Anthony Giddens

    My notes on Skeggs, B. (2019). The forces that shape us: The entangled vine of gender, race and class. The Sociological Review, 67(1), 28-35. How do we make sense of the influence of Antony Giddens? The first page of his Google Scholar profile shows 149,243 citations with many more to be expected if one were inclined to dig…

  • Social volatility and the shrinking time horizons of political life: the case of the Remain campaign’s war book

    There’s an interesting account in Tim Shipman’s Brexit book of how the Remain campaign constructed their war book. This contained the core message of the campaign, anticipated their opponent’s strategies and distilled the findings of their research. It was written over a number of months by the two lead strategists, condensing the outcomes of activity undertaken over…

  • I hate to think I’ll make it to 70, potentially 75, and realise I’ve never been alive

    I try new things, I shoot films on my phone And I play them back when I’m alone, did that happen? I walk around, trying to understand every sound Trying to make my feet connect with every inch of ground The sky flattens my cap, battens me down Everything’s in its category, packaged in self flattering…

  • Call for Papers: Lies, Bullshit and Fake News Online: Should We Be Worried?

    Thanks to Filip Vostal for pointing me towards this superb cfP: Special Issue of Postdigital Science and Education Call for Papers: Lies, Bullshit and Fake News Online: Should We Be Worried? Link to Call for Papers Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and the alleged interference of Russia in that election, there have…

  • Critical Pedagogy HE Teaching Practice (CPHETP) Lab

    Organised by Dyi Huijg at London South Bank University: The Critical Pedagogy HE Teaching Practice (CPHETP) Lab is intended for all of those who teach in Higher Education (from professors to graduate teaching assistants) and who seek to practically develop their HE teaching practice and, grounded in critical pedagogy principles, expand their teaching tools (e.g for…

  • What does it mean to talk about work as dehumanising? A critical realist perspective

    My notes on Al-Amoudi, I. (2018). Management and dehumanisation in Late Modernity. In Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina (pp. 182-194). Routledge. What does it mean to talk about work as dehumanising? In this insightful paper, Ismael Al-Amoudi identifies a number of senses in which management practices can be dehumanising: The “oppression or denial of human flourishing” such…

  • Margaret Archer: The Catholic Church as a Social Movement

  • An introduction to Emmanuel Lazega’s neo-structuralism

    My notes on Lazega, E. (2005). A Theory of Collegiality and its Relevance for Understanding Professions and knowledge-intensive Organizations. In Organisation und profession (pp. 221-251). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. I came to know Emmanuel Lazega over the last five years through my involvement with the Centre for Social Ontology. I initially found his approach difficult to follow, simply…

  • Data Power 2019: anyone interested in putting together a digital universities panel?

    Call for Papers Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2019 DATA POWER: global in/securities A two-day, international conference Date: Thursday 12th and Friday 13th SEPTEMBER 2019 Venue: University of Bremen, Germany With increasingly globalized digital infrastructures and a global digital political economy, we face new concentrations of power, leading to new inequalities and insecurities with respect to data…

  • ‘Free speech’ as the unifying principle of a resurgent right

    I find this suggestion by James Smith deeply plausible, echoing a point made by Will Davies last year that ‘free speech’ is becoming the unifying principle of a right-wing in the process of recomposition: a successor conservative movement to Trumpism with appeal to many nominal centrists would be one that retains Donald Trump’s break with political…

  • Analogue and digital chronopower: the example of Trump university

    I’ve been dwelling on this passage from Trump University’s sales manual, republished on loc 980 of this insider account of the ill-fated ‘university’, which it should be added had a MOOC system (in its first phase) and a recruitment strategy (in its second phase) which were extreme manifestations of what can be found in US…

  • Overcoming the micro/macro divide

    From Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979), pg 37. I thought this was a remarkably apt summary of what her next seven books actually did, even if her  trajectory as a whole is constantly misread as a turn away from the macro. The whole point of it was building a theoretical framework adequate for the interface…

  • Digital labour in the university: understanding the transformations of academic work in the UK

    My notes on Woodcock, J. (2018). Digital labour in the university: understanding the transformations of academic work in the UK. TripleC, 16(1), 129-142. This important paper by Jamie Woodcock sees to rectify the lack of application of ways of analysing work to the work conducted within the university. His main focus is on the introduction of…

  • The mundane reality of neo-fascism

    There’s a really powerful piece by Pedro Rocha de Oliveira in Red Pepper placing Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power in Brazil in socio-political context: There have been hints of fresh horrors ahead during the presidential campaign. A young woman in Porto Alegre was punched and held by a group of men while one cut a swastika…

  • Cambridge as a platform city

    My notes on Philip Cooke (2018) Generative growth with ‘thin’ globalization: Cambridge’s crossover model of innovation, European Planning Studies, 26:9, 1815-1834, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2017.1421908 Since moving to Cambridge in July 2017, I’ve become fascinated by the transformation underway within the city and what it reveals about the political economy of the UK. This paper by Philip Cooke…

  • 🐈 The Skiathos Cats 🐈

  • I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies

    I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies And hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these Mockeries, lyrically perform armed robbery Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion when my pen hits Tremendous, ultra-violet shine blind forensics I inspect view through the future see millennium Killa Beez sold fifty gold sixty platinum Shackling…

  • What the fuck!? The great question of our age

    I really liked this piece David Roberts on Vox, summarising Ezra Klein on the transformation of journalism. This is the context in which there’s a great unexplored potential for public sociology, as I’ve tried to argue: The internet changed all that. There are no longer supply constraints — it is trivially cheap and easy to publish something on…

  • A few videos on quantum computing and the physics of time I want to come back to later

  • The social ontology of trans-human life

    My notes on Maccarini, A. M. (2018). Trans-human (life-) time: Emergent biographies and the ‘deep change’in personal reflexivity. In Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina (pp. 138-164). Routledge. One of the interesting features of the recent Centre for Social Ontology project on defending the human has been the realisation that many in the group are entirely open to the…

  • Against spontaneous sociology: Michael Burawoy’s attempt to rescue Bourdieu from Matthew Desmond and what it means for public sociology

    My notes on Burawoy, M. (2017). On Desmond: the limits of spontaneous sociology. Theory and Society, 46(4), 261-284. The work of Matthew Desmond has won enormous acclaim in recent years, with Evicted being a book I recommend to anyone keen to understand the relevance of contemporary sociology. While recognising his talents as an ethnographer and writer,…

  • Look at me now 

    I am transforming I am vibrating I am glowing I am flying Look at me now

  • Programming as practice

    My notes on Yuill, S. (2005) Programming as Practice in J. Gibbons and K. Winwood, eds., Hothaus Papers: perspectives and paradigms in media arts, Birmingham: ARTicle Press. What does it mean to program? In this intriguing paper Simon Yuill takes issue with responses to this question which reduce programming to a technical practice, reduced to…

  • Sally Rooney on Theory Anxiety

    There are many reasons to like Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends but the one I hadn’t expected was her depiction of theory anxiety: I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the…

  • Cultural studies of data mining

    My notes on Andrejevic, M., Hearn, A., & Kennedy, H. (2015). Cultural studies of data mining: Introduction, European Journal of Cultural Studies 18(4-5), 379-394 In this introduction to an important special issue, Mark Andrejevic, Alison Hearn and Helen Kennedy that the ubiquity of data infrastructure in everyday life means that “we cannot afford to limit our thinking about data…

  • Liberalism and neoliberalism in communications research

    My notes on Phelan, S., & Dawes, S.  (2018, February 26). Liberalism and Neoliberalism. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Ed.   Retrieved 18 Dec. 2018, from http://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-176. Liberalism and neoliberalism are nebulous categories, used in different ways to identify and disassociate from other identities. Liberalism has long been the hegemonic common sense of communications research while also being the explicit…

  • The Flat Earth phenomenon and what it reveals about YouTube

    My notes on Paolillo, J. C. (2018). The Flat Earth phenomenon on YouTube. First Monday, 23(12). Even if the resurgent belief in a flat earth remains a marginal phenomenon, it is fascinating for what it reveals about YouTube. In this paper John C. Paolillo documents the emergence of this YouTube community and the issues which preoccupy…

  • Beyond fast and slow: temporal ontology in critical higher education scholarship

    My notes on The Shifting Rhythms of Academic Work. On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 1(3) In this short paper Fabian Cannizzo takes issue with an assumption he (plausibly) suggests underlies the vast majority of critical higher education literature, namely that “broad social transformations to the policy and organisational infrastructure of global academia have a…

  • Social Media and Doing a PhD: what do you need to know?

    I organised a Sociological Review workshop at the weekend with Jenny Thatcher, Pat Thomson and Inger Mewburn. I’m sufficiently snowed under at the moment that I don’t have the time/energy to reflect on it properly but here’s a sneak preview of the graphic produced by Julia Hayes (below), links to live blogging by Tyler Shores…

  • a machine that’ll speak for me

    This is a sickness that embraces me warmly Something obscene, a machine that’ll speak for me It makes me nervous

  • Debates about the nature of education

    From Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems pg 4: There is nothing more pointless than the debates which have now lasted for centuries about the ideal nature of education. The only function they serve is in helping individuals and groups to clarify their educational goals, to recognize the implications of their chosen aims, and…

  • The origins of the micro/macro divide

    From Margaret Archer’s The Social Origins of Educational Systems pg 6: Historically the origins of the discipline are synonymous with the origins of macro-sociology –most of the early founding fathers asked big questions to which they gave equally big answers. Yet initially there was not thought to be anything distinctive or difficult about, for example,…

  • The social origins of educational systems 

    I’m finally reading Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems, the one major work of hers I hadn’t read which also happens to be the longest. It’s ironic that I’m coming to this now, as someone trained to be a social theorist who is in the process of becoming an (accidental) educationalist. This book was…

  • the school in the sky, the school between the cracks

    I’m finally reading the immensely powerful Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich and I’m gripped by the sense he conveys of the “nonschooled learning” (pg 10) which  institutionalised schooling precludes. From pg 8: School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics,…

  • Nigel Farage the YouTube star 

    This was completely new to me. How much of the audience for these right-wing speaking tours are coming through YouTube? Is there a left wing equivalent? It’s not until I sit through An Entertaining Evening With Nigel Farage in Melbourne that I realise he’s not just a seven-times failed UK parliamentary candidate, but a bona…

  • Masterclass: An Introduction to Machine Learning

    Tuesday December 4th 12pm Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge Everyone welcome! It’s a short journey from Cambridge train station We hear a lot about the coming ‘automation revolution’, but what might developments in machine learning and AI mean for researchers in the social sciences and humanities? In our next masterclass, Associate Professor Inger Mewburn…

  • A really interesting cfp on media and time

    This looks excellent! CALL FOR PROPOSALS Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies Guest editors: Christian Pentzold (University of Bremen, Germany), Anne Kaun (Södertörn University, Sweden), and Christine Lohmeier (University of Salzburg, Austria) Digital media, networked services,…

  • The Corporate Fortresses of Digital Capitalism

    I find it hard to read this excellent piece by Alfie Brown and not speculate about long term trends… how easy is it to imagine a world in a state of ecological collapse dominated by a few corporate city states fortified against the wastelands at their walls, as well as the millions of migrants fleeing…

  • Where is the agency which will reign in big tech?

    A really interesting Vanity Fair piece exploring the assumption amongst American law makers and financiers that outrage against big tech will be limited because there is no constituency liable to be organised against it. In the absence of a collective agency pushing for political action to be taken, diffuse outrage is unlikely to lead to political…

  • Who’s a Bully? Civility, Authoritarianism, and Power in the Contemporary Academy

    This is the most enticing call for papers I’ve seen in ages. My promise to focus exclusively on my (still horribly unfinished) books for the foreseeable future is getting severely tested: Who’s a Bully? Civility, Authoritarianism, and Power in the Contemporary Academy For its next volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2019, the AAUP’s Journal of…

  • Thinking with your feet 

    In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pattern when I see photos of myself in front of an audience. I  am invariably tilting one foot forward as I talk, as in the attached photo from Andrew  Crane. Yet I have no awareness of doing it. Is this some strange adaptation to one leg being…

  • Trying to exist in superposition

      I don’t need to see I disrespect them gleefully and eat the pain, rage and guilt I keep it deep in me Release my fist When my ashes hit the pacific and I’m infinitely swimming in the ether Where the teachers be- Waves Thumbs up Sunglasses emoji Peace Tryna exist in superposition Tryna exist in…