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  • Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to…

  • What we mean when we talk about the Platform University

    Via Janja Komljenovic

  • The cultural consequences of start-ups remaining private

    There’s an interesting anecdote on loc 3960-3972 of Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s gripping account of the Theranos scandal, recounting a follow up meeting between Rupert Murdoch and Elizabeth Holmes which sealed the former’s investment in the latter’s company. I thought it was a vivid account of the distinctive corporate culture which had emerged within Theranos and how…

  • Understanding the agency of people we disapprove of

    Why do people do what they do? It is a question at the heart of the human sciences but it is also one we ask in everyday life. However the way we ask it often tracks our prior feelings towards the people we ask it of. For instance, as Jana Bacevic has argued, many fail…

  • The #Undisciplining Meta-Conference

    Now that I’ve recovered from last week, it seemed the right moment to do a round up of the live blogging project Pat Thomson and myself initiated at The Sociological Review’s Undisciplining conference. There were 43 posts from 13 live bloggers over four days. This is a pretty substantial outpouring of thought and reflection over…

  • Why quote tweeting as a form of reply is creepy

    I’ve edited the final two paragraphs of this post for clarity because an awful lot of people read it and thought I was criticising quote tweeting rather than one particular use of it.  Imagine you were sitting in a cafe having a conversation with a friend. You greeted each other warmly when they arrived, you ordered coffees…

  • The existential challenge of changing tempo

    After the busiest few months of my life, I’ve spent the last couple of days doing what feels like nothing. I’ve been for a shave, bought a graphic novel, seen a (crap) film, had a walk, been out for dinner and had a massage. But otherwise I’ve just read, slept and watched tv. It’s obviously…

  • When a conference has a meta-conference: reflections on the first day of live blogging at #undisciplining

    Though Pat, Kate Thomas and I made initial contributions to the live blogging project yesterday, it really kicked off today when the main Undisciplining conference began. The day started with a short meeting for our co-researchers, before we all set off on our way through the conference. These are the results of day one: Trying to…

  • Accelerating into the singularity 

    The singularity is a speculative notion referring to the point at which exponential innovation generates a fundamental transformation of human civilisation. As Murray Shanahan puts it in on loc 78 of his book The Technological Singularity: In physics, a singularity is a point in space or time, such as the center of a black hole…

  • Why we shouldn’t take social media metrics too seriously

    In the last year, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied by why we shouldn’t take social media metrics too seriously. In part, this preoccupation is analytical because following this thread has proven to be a useful way to move from my past focus on individual users of social media to a more expansive sociological account of platforms. The…

  • Things I’ve realised in 45 days of not drinking

    I began a lifestyle experiment 45 days ago, cutting out alcohol from my life to see what happened. It’s been much more enjoyable than I thought it would be and here’s a few things I’ve realised: Higher education runs on booze. It’s remarkable how many events involve free alcohol and how much socialising after other…

  • Carrying a book around inside your head

    As any regular reader of this blog will know, I’ve been working on The Distracted People of Digital Capitalism for over three years. I’ve made little progress in that time and my reliable line “I’m working on a book about distraction but I keep getting distracted” has begun to be depressing. But for the last year, the…

  • Social media as asshole amplification technology, or, the moral psychology of platform architecture

    This is Jaron Lanier’s memorable description of social media in his new book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Social media is a technology for asshole amplification. To be clearly seen in the fact that “since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world” (pg 43). His…

  • Our social media guidelines for @thesocreview #undisciplining conference

    Undisciplining Social Media Guidelines @TheSocReview www.undisciplining.org #Undisciplining Social media has been central to our journal in recent years, helping us build a new relationship with our readers and expand beyond our traditional audience. We enthusiastically embrace it as a means to promote sociological thought, as well as a way to work towards a more engaged…

  • Platform capitalism and its interplanetary horizons

    To frame the commercialisation of space as being somehow related to ‘platform capitalism’ risks misunderstanding. It is certainly the case that Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, owes his wealth to Amazon but this has become a platform over time rather than being founded as one. Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, owes his early success…

  • Fast and slow writing in the accelerated academy

    What does it mean to write? For a long time, it carried a sense of total immersion for me, letting the world recede in order to lose yourself in the production of a text. This is ‘binge writing’ and it was my standard mode for the six years I spent doing a part-time PhD. I…

  • The consolation of kitsch

    I’ve never completely understood my attraction to kitsch. As much as part of me would like to suggest otherwise, it’s not a knowing embrace of excessive sentimentality and contrived garishness, as much as these things genuinely appealing to me in a way that can prompt knowingness when I reflect upon it. For instance, I saw these…

  • The original sin of the digital utopians

    There’s a fascinating mea culpa in Jaron Lanier’s new book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. On loc 411 he describes how early design decisions, inspired by the libertarian ethos taking hold within the tech community, created the openings for the global monopolies we now see emerging: Originally, many of us who…

  • Human agency beyond platform structuralism and platform voluntarism

    In the last year, I find myself obsessing ever more fequently about agency and platforms. Given I spent six years writing a PhD about human agency, it is inevitable that this would be the lens I bring to the analysis of platforms. But it also reflects a sustained weakness in how the role of agency…

  • CfP: The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies

    How good does this look? So much of this chimes with the paper I’m currently struggling to finish The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies Preconference Workshop, #AoIR2018 Montréal, Canada Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre, INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique) Wednesday October 10th 2018 Machine learning (ML), deep…

  • Some brief thoughts on chronopolitics

    It occurs to me when confronted with this that there are ever more contexts in which contemporary capitalism undermines the ability to plan ahead. This is striking because much of financialised capitalism is predicated on ensuring the calculability of the future through instruments like futures and securities which lock in certain expectations of future outcomes…

  • CfP: Deception on social media

    Saving this interesting CfP for later look up   Contributors are invited to submit abstracts (about 200 words) toward our new edited collection entitled: *Social Media and the Production and Spread of Spurious Deceptive Contents,* to be published by IGI Global (Hershey, PA), under the series: *Advances in Digital Crime, Forensics, and Cyber Terrorism* (ADCFCT)…

  • Techno-nationalism and technological innovation

    In a fascinating account of the private space programs of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Christian Davenport explains how the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) has its origins in the geopolitics of the Cold War. From pg 59: Eisenhower entered the room at 10: 31 a.m., and decided to get right to it, asking, “Do…

  • The role of dichotomies in social theory

    I spent much of the recent Accelerated Academy talking about the limitations of the fast/slow dichotomy and my concern that the framing of our series entrenches it. To talk of the ‘accelerated academy’ implies there was once a slow(er) academy and hints that the pathologies we currently face could be overcome by reclaiming what has…

  • Call: Moral Machines: Ethics and Politics of the Digital World

    This looks fantastic!  CALL FOR PAPERS: MORAL MACHINES? THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF THE DIGITAL WORLD 6-8 March 2019, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki With confirmed keynotes from N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University, USA) and Bernard Stiegler (IRI: Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation at the Centre Pompidou de Paris) As our visible…

  • Expertise and the politics of discipline

    In the last few days, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on a remark Susan Halford made at this event about the difference between expertise and discipline. If I understand her correctly, her point was that capacities for knowing and acting in the world (expertise) can have their reproduction organised socially in different ways (discipline)…

  • CFP: Imagining Radical Futures, Princeton Oct. 5th

    An interesting CfP I’m saving for my future reference *Imagining Radical Futures: Anthropological Potentialities?* Princeton Anthropology Graduate Conference October 5th, 2018 Princeton University *“The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework* *all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society” (Benjamin 2016)* Anthropology has…

  • Critique and Agency in the Accelerated Academy, June 8th @CPGJCam

    June 8th, 12pm to 2pm, DMB 2S4 Faculty of Education, Hills Road, Cambridge In the fifth event in the Accelerated Academy series, the Cultural Politics and Global Justice cluster at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education hosts an afternoon seminar on critique and agency in the accelerated academy. How is temporality changing within the academy?…

  • Undisciplining: Conversations from the Edges

    The Sociological Review are organising a conference unlike any other next month in Gateshead, UK. There will be sociological walks, a film festival, art work, participatory workshops, a diverse array of plenary sessions and much more. It will be preceded by an ECR day organised by the journal’s early career editorial board. Thanks to the…

  • “Funny, you don’t know the concessions that you’re making until you catalog em. And by then they’re many and you’re battle-hardened”

  • The Political Ontology of Platforms

    These notes are for the fifth and final week of the CPGJ platform capitalism intensive reading group. One of the themes running through the readings over the five weeks has been the political valence of platforms and its relationship to our analysis of them. My own instinct is that valorising platforms in an a priori…

  • Barbara Adam on the practice of theorising

    In her keynote at the Accelerated Academy, Barbara Adam explains how she came to her concept of timescapes. It began with the study of social theory of time, leading her to recognise how “everyone used the same word but they didn’t talk about the same thing” because this was “a multiple compound concept, not a…

  • CfP: Going Live: Exploring Live Digital Technologies and Live Streaming Practices

    For avoidance of doubt, CfPs I post in the ‘interested’ category of my blog are ones other people have organised which I’m archiving for my own use and sharing in case people are interested. If I’m organising an event or project, it’s in the ‘organising’ category of the blog.  *Going Live: Exploring Live Digital Technologies…

  • Call for Papers – (In)Equalities and Social (In)Visibilities in the Digital Age

    *Call for Papers – (In)Equalities and Social (In)Visibilities in the Digital Age – Journal Interações* The influence of new technologies in public and private spheres of society, rather than a reformulation, has given rise to a new social field and directly interferes with how we perceive the world, relate to it and others. In Pierre…

  • CfP: Twitter: Global Perspectives, Uses and Criticisms

    Contributors are invited to submit abstracts (about 200 words) toward our new edited collection *Twitter: Global Perspectives, Uses and Criticisms* to be published by Nova Science (New York). We are interested in new research and perspectives on, as well as criticisms of *Twitter communication*. Topics being covered (though not limited to these) include: ·   …

  • The Fractured Mirror: Narratives of Artificial Intelligence and Humanity

    The Technology and New Media Research Cluster’s penultimate session of this academic year will be on Friday 25th May, 12-1.30pm in Room B of 17 Mill Lane. The session will be led by Dr Beth Singler from the Institute of Science and Religion on ‘The Fractured Mirror: Narratives of Artificial Intelligence and Humanity’. All are…

  • CfP: AI, Robotics and Responsibility

    This looks fascinating: FROM THE HRC-SCHOLARS LISTSERV: Dear members, Please find attached for the call for papers from my institution’s anniversary conference. My institution being TILT (The Institute for Law, Technology and Society in Tilburg, The Netherlands), you might find this one a bit out there but we have several tracks for which we secifically…

  • Putting agents, ethics and politics at the heart of our account of platform capitalism

    Notes for week 4 of the CPGJ Platform Capitalism Reading Group I thought this short talk by danah boyd was really powerful in linking the utopian dreams of internet radicals to the anxieties and outcomes of work. Framing the future of work in terms of automation, as if that says everything which is needed to…

  • The slow university

    Saved here for later reading: https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/the-slow-university-work-time-and-well-being/ https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/16/ii-scholarship-in-a-public-university/ https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/iii-strategies-and-alliance-building-to-slow-down-the-world-of-work/ https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/iv-the-lived-time-of-the-university/

  • Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to…

  • Against slow scholarship

    In preparation for next week’s Accelerated Academy, I found myself reading the Slow Scholarship Manifesto for the first time in a few years, as well as Heather Mendick’s brilliant critique of it. Taking explicit inspiration from the slow food movement, it calls for ‘slow scholarship’ as a response to ‘hasty scholarship’: Slow scholarship, is thoughtful,…

  • the magic in giving language to hidden things

    There’s forest fire up in the hills again Always reminds me of the night we spent at the river’s edge For hours standing hand in hand Too chicken shit to just go diving it Too scared to turn away and face the fate that awaits us both back on land Forest fire has a smell…

  • Platform capitalism and the future of education

    In this week’s CPGJ platform capitalism reading group, we turn towards education for the first time with a paper by José van Dijck and Thomas Poell looking at the influence of social media platforms on education, particularly within schools. Much of the literature has addressed social media as tools, with varying interpretations offered about how these…

  • Curation as care

    I knew curation had a root in ‘look after’ but I’d framed this in terms of organise or sustain. The role of care in it makes the notion take on a completely different intonation. Thinking about the way we ‘curate’ online information by selecting, retweeting, sharing, educating. Worth remembering the root of the word means ‘to care’…

  • What is platform literacy?

    In the last couple of years, I’ve found myself returning repeatedly to the idea of platform literacy. By this I mean a capacity to understand how platforms shape the action which takes place through them, sometimes in observable and explicit ways but usually in unobservable and implicit ones. It concerns our own (inter)actions and how…

  • Post-democracy and the transformation of lobbying

    There’s a fascinating passage on pg 164-165 of The Unwinding by George Packer, talking about the evolution of lobbying in the United States: Quinn and Gillespie considered themselves the smart guys in the business. Lobbying was no longer about opening one door for a client—power in Washington had become too diffuse for that. It was…

  • Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to…

  • Social media as a machinery of dispute amplification

    In TroubleMakers, Leslie Berlin summarises the notion of Class 1 and Class 2 disputes propounded by Bob Taylor, founder and manager of Xerox PARC’s famous Computer Science Laboratory. Part of his renowned capacity to build community within the lab involved turning what might have been destructive disputes into constructive ones. On pg 105 Berlin explains how:…

  • When music and fiction mingle

    In the last week, I found myself unable to put down The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Coincidentally, I happened to be listening to The Mighty Ocean & the Nine Dark Theaters by Astronautalis throughout the week. I now can’t listen to the song below without immediately being transported into the world of The Secret…

  • CfP Symposium Dis/Connection: Conflicts, Activism and Reciprocity Online and Beyond, Sept 27-28, Uppsala University, Sweden

    The Cultural Matters Group at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University on Sept. 27-28 organizes a symposium called Dis / Connection: Conflicts, Activism and Reciprocity Online and Beyond and we look forward to receiving your papers! Deadline for submissions is June 18, 2018. The symposium focuses on a fundamental aspect of social relationships, namely the…

  • A quick guide to live tweeting

    I’m writing these notes for the Imagine 2027 project which has a relatively specific remit. Not all of these points will be uniformly valid and there are some things I don’t cover (e.g. the consent of speakers) but I’m sharing them here in case people find them useful: Begin the live tweeting by introducing the…

  • Fateful moments that might have been

    One of the key ideas of my PhD was fateful moments, points in our life which constitute turning points and shape the person we become. I argued the epistemology of such moments is more complex than it might initially appear to be, as turning points have a narrative as well as a biographical existence. The stories we tell about our…

  • Looking back through your Twitter history

    Until Tyler Shores demonstrated it earlier today, it had never occurred to me that the wonderful Wayback Machine could be used to view the history of your social media feeds:      

  • Call for abstracts: DQComm2018 The Deliberative Quality of Communication Conference

    #DQComm2018 The Deliberative Quality of Communication Conference 2018 Citizens, Media and Politics in Challenging Times: Perspectives on the Deliberative Quality of Communication November 8 – 9, 2018 Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), Mannheim, Germany Keynote Speaker: Kaisa Herne (University of Tampere) Roundtable on the Future of Deliberation Research with: André Bächtiger (University of…

  • E-mails outside of office hours

    Taking inspiration from Mark Reed’s e-mail signature: I work two evenings a week, so if this email arrives outside office hours, please do not feel you have to reply until normal working hours. I’ve added this to my own: I often work unusual hours as my preferred way of balancing multiple roles. If this e-mail arrives outside…

  • Can we have platform capitalism without computational politics? 

    Notes for week 2 of the CPGJ Platform Capitalism reading group  Both readings for this week treat utopian hopes of the internet bolstering democracy as anachronistic relics, looking in different ways to the murky reality of the politics which platform capitalism is giving rise to. Tufekci accepts some of the claims made about the affordances…

  • Exercising control over representations of yourself

    On pg 57 of George Packer’s Unwinding, he describes how Oprah Winfrey’s rhetoric of authenticity and openness co-exist with a pronounced tendency to exercise control over representations of herself: She exalted openness and authenticity, but she could afford them on her own terms. Anyone allowed into her presence had to sign away freedom of speech…

  • Preparing to think in order to prepare to speak: from routine to challenge

    In the last couple of years, I’ve done around eighty talks on a variety of topics across a whole range of different settings. The biographical, professional and intellectual reasons why I’ve done so many are a topic for another post. What concerns me at the moment is how I prepare for them. To talk in…

  • The quiet revolution of deindustrialization

    One of the prevailing motifs of the Trumpist era has been the recognition on all sides of the social and political costs of deindustrialization, even if this recognition is typically subsumed into a prior political stance. There’a really powerful account on pg 52 of George Packer’s Unwinding which conveys the scale of this change and the curious…

  • How do politicians understand their own status?

    How do politicians understand their own status? It’s a question I’ve often wondered about without being sufficiently motivated to explore what I’m certain must be a significant literature investigating this question. I was made to ponder the question again by a lovely extract in Unwinding, by George Packer, describing the meritocratic self-regard of politicians and how…

  • Who owns Digital Capitalism? Notes for the Platform Capitalism reading group

    Notes for week 1 of the CPGJ Platform Capitalism reading group. The notes below relate to Evgeny Morozov’s lecture below:  The question of ‘who owns digital capitalism?’ was posed for the conference but it was one which Morozov felt uncomfortable with because it implied a separation between ‘digital capitalism’ and financialised capitalism. To illustrate the…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #41

    Troublemakers by Leslie Berlin How To Turn Down a Billion Dollars by Billie Gallagher Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday Out of the Wreckage by George Monbiot The Know It Alls by Noam Cohen Troll by D.B. Thorne Saturday by Ian McEwan Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye by David…

  • From homo economicus to homo digitalis

    In a recent paper, I’ve argued we find a cultural project underpinning ‘big data’: a commitment to reducing human being, in all its embodied affective complexity, stripping it of any reality beyond the behavioural traces which register through digital infrastructure. Underlying method, methodology and theory there is a vision of how human beings are constituted,…

  • Who are we if we can’t protect them?

    The title of this post comes from A Quiet Place, a civilisational collapse horror thriller currently winning critical acclaim for its deployment of silence to produce a film which is genuinely terrifying in a way few others are. It tells the story of a family struggling to survive, amidst the social collapse which has ensued…

  • ALW2: 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online

    ALW2: 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online EMNLP 2018 (Brussels, Belgium), October 31st or November 1st, 2018 Submission deadline: July 20th, 2018 Website: https://sites.google.com/view/alw2018 <https://sites.google.com/view/alw2018> Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/ <https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/> Overview Interaction amongst users on social networking platforms can enable constructive and insightful conversations and civic participation; however, on many sites that encourage user interaction, verbal…

  • If you’re in or near Cambridge over the next couple of months

    There’s a pretty brilliant programme of events we are running at Culture, Politics and Global Justice. I’m organising the platform capitalism reading group and the social media workshops. If you’re not already, follow us at @CPGJCam. We’ve got some really important stuff upcoming about both platform capitalism and social media for academics. Digital Engagement in…

  • What does it mean to claim people were ‘doing sociology’?

    What does it mean to claim a historical figure as a (proto)sociologist? What does it mean to claim people were ‘doing sociology’ under any rubric? Keneth MacDonald began this conference on the history of sociology in Britain by directing these questions towards Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, kicking off with consideration of recent papers from…

  • What does it mean to have a professional identity in an age of social media?

    Notes for an upcoming talk: not yet proof read! By the time I sat down to write this talk, I began to regret the title which I’d given it. To speak of an ‘academic identity’ makes it sounds as if this is a singular thing undergoing change in a unified way, while the notion of…

  • Why would senior managers feel contemptuous of their expert staff?

    At various points in the last few months, I’ve seen the claim made that the senior management of universities hold their staff in contempt. A claim like this can’t help but be polemic and I’m not sure how helpful it would be to examine the particular cases if we’re interested in addressing the broader question:…

  • Platform Capitalism Reading Group at the University of Cambridge

    In recent discussions of capitalist transformation, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are many criticisms which can be raised of the platform metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to make sense of how…

  • CfP AAA2018 San Jose: Panel Digital Infrastructures

    Digital Infrastructures: Poetics, Politics and Personhood – AAA San Jose 14-18 November 2018 Lorraine Weekes (Stanford University) Gertjan Plets (Utrecht University) Government databases, digital archives, online voting systems, and e-portals enabling the submission of everything from insurance claims to income tax returns increasingly define mundane engagements between citizen-users and a suite of public and private…

  • Minitrack: Collective Intelligence and Crowds

    Minitrack: Collective Intelligence and Crowds HICSS 52 http://hicss.hawaii.edu/ Track: Digital and Social Media January 8-11, 2019, Maui, Hawaii, USA This minitrack is open to analysis of collective intelligence, knowledge creation, and crowdsourcing. We think that assemblages of people and machines are making new forms of organization possible, and we are interested in research that explores these new…

  • CfP HICSS-52 (2019) minitrack: Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Technologies

    CALL FOR PAPERS: 52nd HICSS 2019, Maui, Hawaii January 8-11, 2019 – Maui, Hawaii SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, COLLECTIVE ACTION AND SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES MINITRACK in the Digital and Social Media Track URL: http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-52/digital-and-social-media/ Submission Deadline: June 15, 2018 | 11:59 pm HST Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: August 17, 2018 ****************************************************** CfP HICSS-52 (2019) minitrack: This minitrack focuses on three…

  • The Intellectual Self-Defence of #USSStrikes: Social Media, Critique and Collective Intellectuals

    Towards the end of his life, Pierre Bourdieu underwent an activist turn and offered a public sociology which I’ve long thought we can learn much from. In his Firing Back, he offers important ideas about how academics and social movements can work together. He maintains that “the work of academic researchers is indispensable to disclose…

  • ‘Student Experience’ and the social ontology of the student

    What is a ‘student’? To many outside higher education, such a question would seem absurd. A student is “a person who is studying at a university or other place of higher education”. But what this means has undergone profound change in recent years, such that ‘the student’ as a category, as well as a material factor…

  • Social media, #USSStrikes and Digital Sociology

    It was perhaps inevitable that I would find myself obsessing over the role of social media in the current strikes. In my academic life, I’m a sociologist studying how social media is used within universities and how this is changing the academy. In my non-academic life, I’m a digital engagement specialist at a charity and…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #40

    Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon Kill It To Save It by Corey Dolgon Envisioning Sociology by John Scott and Ray Bromley Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari Factories For Learning by Christy Kulz Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggars The AirBnB Story by Leigh Gallagher The Know-It-Alls by Noam Cohen King Rat by China Mieville…

  • Collective action and the realisation of your own smallness

    After nine days of strike action, I’ve begun to realise how formative I have found this experience and how frequently I will think back to it in coming months and years. In part, this is a reflection of the novelty of the action itself for me but also the novelty of the context in which…

  • The intellectual adventure of slaying the neoliberal beast

    Social media reassures me I’m not alone in my fascination with Sussex VC Adam Tickell’s role in the current university crisis. As Tom Slater put it, it’s disturbing to realise that “someone who is capable of such excellent critical analysis, expressed with such elegance, has now become an appalling neoliberal VC, who is apparently treating…

  • The Sociology of Trolling

    What is a troll? The term is encountered with ever greater frequency yet its meaning has changed with the years, moving from a definition in terms of motivation (deliberately producing discord for amusement) to a definition in terms of behaviour (the fact of having produced discord in an online community). My fear is this change…

  • Social media strategy and #USSStrikes

    In the last week, I’ve found myself obsessing about the use of social media in #USSStrikes. This was probably inevitable, helping with two social media campaigns related to the strike while also being someone who studies social media. In preparation for a teach out later today and to feed into the social media strategy for…

  • Are you interested in the political sociology of Corbynism?

  • Are you interested in Graphic Social Science?

  • Social Media and The Demotic Imaginary

    One of the most prominent tropes of social media is the crowd. As the cyber-utopian Clay Shirky put it: here comes everybody. This endlessly repeated motif sees social media in terms of the people. Where once there were a few commentators who dominated the airwaves, now everybody has their say online. Where once there were a few…

  • Answering social science questions with social media data

    March 8th, 2018 9:30am to 5:00pm Wellcome Collection, London After last year’s successful ‘Introduction to tools for social media research’, the SRA and #NSMNSS are teaming up again to deliver this one-day conference. As social media research matures as a discipline, and methodological and ethical concerns are being addressed, focus is increasingly shifting on to…

  • CfP Changing Political Economy of Research & Innovation Workshop 2018

    Very excited to be one of the keynotes for this: 6th Annual CPERI Workshop, 29-30 July 2018 Institute for Social Futures, Lancaster University, UK We cordially invite submissions to the 6th workshop on the Changing Political Economy of Research & Innovation (CPERI), following previous events at Lancaster (2012), Toronto (2013), San Diego (2015), Liège (2016) and…

  • A call for sociological micro-fiction!

    I’m once again editing a section on sociological micro-fiction for Ashleigh Watson’s wonderful So Fi zine. See here for full details about how to submit. There’s lots of inspiration to be found in the last issue, collecting a wonderful selection of sociological fiction of 100 words or less.

  • CfP: Understanding the political economy of digital technology

    A BSA Digital Sociology Study Group event hosted by the Web Science conference at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam May 27th 2018 In more optimistic times we thought of ourselves as masters of digital technology: we told ourselves it was empowering, liberating, and democratising. Today, there is growing concern that we have ceded control of digital technology…

  • The epistemic privilege of platforms

    What is the relationship between platforms and their users? I’ve been thinking about this all morning while reading The Know‑It‑Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, by Noam Cohen. On loc 277 he writes: In fact, tech companies believe that through artificial intelligence tools they understand their users’ state of…