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  • 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…

  • Using social media as a social theorist

    A video of my talk is available here, starting at 2 hours in.

  • Social media fosters egotism rather than individualism

    What is the relationship between social media and individualism? It is often claimed that these platforms engender a preoccupation with the self, easily cast in terms of individualism. But it is a preoccupation which is just as often claimed to be profoundly social, in so far as that it involves a concern with how many…

  • The changing character of the academic game

    At a recent event, I heard an extremely distinguished professor make the argument that there was a certain sequence to career development which all academics who sought jobs in high status university ought to pursue. One ought to publish papers in well regarded journals before writing books. One ought to establish a reputation within a…

  • When sociologists meet organised politics

    Not for the first time when reading John Scott and Ray Bromley’s Envisioning Sociology, I was struck by the parallels between the strengths and weaknesses of the early ‘sociological movement’ and tendencies we can see within activist sociology today. From loc 4419: Until the 1920s, Branford and Geddes relied almost exclusively on Le Play House…

  • Answering social science questions with social media data, March 8th in London

    After last year’s successful ‘Introduction to tools for social media research’, the SRA and #NSMNSS network are teaming up again on 8 March to deliver a one-day conference in London on ‘Answering social science questions with social media data’. What role can social media research play in the social sciences? What are the questions it…

  • What the lost tradition of classical British social theory can teach us about the dangers of charismatic leadership

    In the conclusion to their Envisioning Sociology, John Scott and Ray Bromley reflect on how the project of Patrick Geddes and the sociologists around him came to be forgotten, in spite of the influence they exercised in their own time. This lost tradition of classical British social theory was an energetic and multifaceted engagement with the…

  • One of my favourite closing scenes to a film

    I tried to describe this recently and couldn’t remember the name of the film. Archived here to avoid me forgetting it again:

  • TOD Talks: The Future of Science Communication

  • The new old division at the heart of politics

    Earlier this week, a leading figure in Italy’s governing centre-left PD party explained how they were looking to Emmanuel Macron for inspiration in the pitch they were making to the electorate. Their prospects look rather bleak, as an internally divided party trails the populist Five Star Movement in an election most predict will lead to…

  • The Sociology of Ryan Air, or, when normativity fails to reproduce itself

    Last night I was sitting in the front row of a plane from Germany to the UK. The couple next to me opened a half bottle of wine, immediately attracting the attention of the cabin crew. The flight attendant came over and turned to them, observing somewhat apologetically that “you should know that it’s against…

  • Answering social science questions with social media data

    What role can social media research play in the social sciences? What are the questions it can help us to answer? Speakers from a range of backgrounds will talk about their experiences of using social media in their research, providing real examples of use to those interested in seeing how the promises of social media…

  • On intellectual craft 

    I’m currently reading On Intellectual Craftsmanship, in preparation for a talk I’m doing in Berlin next week. This famous appendix to The Sociological Imagination is something I’ve long been inspired by, finding in it a way of organising my own life that belies the text’s apparently humble ambition to merely guide the novice scholar through…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #39

    Pax by Sara Pennypacker Broadcast by Liam Brown Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff The New Poverty by Stephen Armstrong Collusion by Luke Harding Father and Daughter by Ann Oakley Alt-America by David Neiwert World Without Mind by Franklin Foer Unbelievable by Katy Tur Betting the House by Tim Ross and Tom McTague

  • The social struggle between collegiality and bureaucracy

    The network scientist Emmanuel Lazega studies collegiality and bureaucracy as ideal typical forms of social organisation which co-exist in a fluctuating balance within organisations. Collegiality involves actors recognising each other as autonomous, existing in relationship to each other and necessitating consensus as a preliminary for what will always be non-routine action. Bureaucracy merely requires interaction,…

  • The dangerous fantasies of defensive elites

    My fascination with the technological fantasies of billionaires might seem like a peculiarly nerdy version of a familiar preoccupation with the super rich. However as Yuval Noah Harari observes on loc 3304 of Homo Deus, the dreams of technological salvation which the rich and powerful invest themselves in have important consequences for the rest of…

  • The Alt-Right and the Reactionary Politics of Transgression

    One of the most interesting arguments in Kill All Normie by Angela Nagle was her claim that transgression has been decoupled from its contingent association with the left, being taken up by the alt-right in a profoundly reactionary way. I’ve been thinking back to this while reading Fire & Fury by Michael Wolff. Trump seems to…

  • Getting beyond pro and anti in our thinking about technology

    A few weeks ago, I saw a collaborator of mine give a talk in which he outlined a position on social media which was roundly cast as anti-technological by those in the room i.e. reflecting an unsustainable blanket judgment of social media as a category of technology. I could see where they were coming from…

  • Before the culture war on universities, there was a culture war on schools

    Reading Factories for Learning by Christy Kulz, I was fascinated to learn of the new right’s cultural war on the educational establishment in the 1980s which I had only been dimly aware of. I knew the central place of the local authorities in this but I hadn’t realised how central education was to these attacks.…

  • Trump and the ascent of the spiralists

    In a recent article, Michael Burawoy warned about what he termed the spiralists. These are “people who spiral in from outside, develop signature projects and then hope to spiral upward and onward, leaving the university behind to spiral down”. While he was concerned with university leaders, I observed at the time that the category clearly has…

  • 10 reasons you should publish on Medium

  • Post-Truth as Personal Incapacity

    The evidence would suggest I’m not alone in being somewhat gripped by Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury. One of the central themes of the book is how no one, including the candidate himself, expected Trump would win and what we have seen since then has been a rapid adaptation, self-serving and bewildered in…

  • CFP EASST2018: “Data Worlds? Public Imagination and Public Experimentation with Data Infrastructures”

    # Data Worlds? Public Imagination and Public Experimentation with Data Infrastructures ## Convenors – Jonathan Gray (King’s College London) – Noortje Marres (University of Warwick) – Carolin Gerlitz (University of Siegen) – Tommaso Venturini (École Normale Supérieure Lyon) ## Short abstract How do data infrastructures distribute participation across society and culture? Do they participate in…

  • Workshop: The Turn To AI in Content Moderation and Communication Governance

    Workshop: The turn to artificial intelligence in governing communication online 20.03.2018 | 9:00 – 18:00 ical | gcal Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Französische Straße 9, 10117 Berlin, Germany The technology underlying artificial intelligence research has increasingly found applications in the area of content moderation and communication governance on digital platforms. While the scale…

  • CfP: Social Theory in Information Systems Research

    Call for Papers: AMCIS 2018 Minitrack: Social Theory in Information Systems Research (STIR ’18) Track: Social Inclusion (SIGSI)24th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Aug. 16-18, 2018 New Orleans, LA, USA This minitrack solicits papers using social theory to critically examine ICTs and their roles in enabling and constraining social inclusion. What can be done…

  • CfP: Articulating Voice

    ICA Pre-Conference “ARTICULATING VOICE. THE EXPRESSIVITY AND PERFORMATIVITY OF MEDIA PRACTICES” Sponsored by the Philosophy, Theory and Critique (PTC) Division of the International Communication Association Event date: 24 May 2018, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Prague, Czech Republic Deadline for proposals: 10 January 2018 (300-500 words abstract) Location: Main Conference Hotel Organizers: Christian Pentzold (University…

  • Content Producers: Incentives, Motivations, and Value Creation18

    This conference looks brilliant! I wish it was slightly nearer: Independent content producers are squeezed between two extremes. On one side are platforms, some of which also create content (Youtube [Google], Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and others), as well as publishing and media firms (Reed-Elsevier, Thomsons, Time-Warner, News Corp and others) that offer content under paywalls,…

  • Ontological bias and social knowledge in a post-truth era

    In a thought-provoking essay, Jana Bacevic reflects on the problem of prediction and its relevance for social scientists in a post-truth era. This issue has become institutionally relevant, as opposed to being a philosophical consideration or a practical challenge, for two reasons: One is that, as reflected in the (by now overwrought and overdetermined) crisis of expertise…

  • Using social media as a social theorist

    In the new year, I’ll be giving a talk at the Arctic University of Norway on using social media as a social theorist. This post is an initial attempt to get my thoughts on paper before the break, in order to make it easier to get the talk written when I get back from holiday.…

  • On the Rat Race

    There’s a background to it here and a collection of his other work here.

  • The problem of abundance and the political economy of digital knowledge

    A conversation I had recently about the digitalisation of the archive left me thinking back to this section on pg 81-82 of World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: There have been various stabs at coining a term to capture the dominant role of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Mark Zuckerberg has called his company a “utility,” perhaps un…

  • The material interests of Big Tech

    In recent years, we have seen a renewed focus on the political ideologies which are currently emerging within Silicon Valley. Such considerations are not new and contemporary accounts are influenced, implicitly and explicitly, by earlier notions such as the Californian ideology. But the dominant approach appears to be a cultural one, treating these emerging political…

  • Proposal for a Concept Lab

    The Concept Lab would meet on a weekly basis, usually for an hour unless there was logistical business to be undertaken concerning the future of the lab. Each meeting would revolve around a presentation from one member, detailing either: A practical problem they have faced in their research, as well as a singular concept they…

  • Social ontology and the challenge of suitcase words

    This is a wonderful expression I just picked up from Machine, Platform, Crowd by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. As they describe on pg 112-113, suitcase words jumble together multiple meanings in a way which renders questions more obscure than they would otherwise be: Is generative-design software really “creative?” It’s a hard question because creativity is…

  • CfP: Accelerated Academy

    Accelerated Academy #4 Academic Timescapes: Perspectives, Reflections, ResponsibilitiesMay 24-25, Villa Lanna, Prague, Czech Academy of Sciences After meetings in Prague, Warwick and Leiden, the fourth Accelerated Academy conference calls for a more nuanced perspective in order to advance our understanding of academic temporalities as experienced, understood, controlled, managed, imagined and contested across different institutional contexts.…

  • CfP: Digital transformation of social theory

    Call for papers to a special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change [SSCI 3.226, Scopus, CNRS***, ABS***, VHB***]. Guest editors Steffen Roth, La Rochelle Business School and Yerevan State University Harry F. Dahms, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Frank Welz, University of Innsbruck Sandro Cattacin, University of Geneva There once was a time when leaders could both appreciate books and govern empires…

  • Towards Common Process Understanding in Collective Welfare

    Workshop at the S-BPM ONE 2018, the 10th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management on April 5-6, 2018 at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Wolfgang Hofkirchner Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, Vienna Austria
 Christian Stary JKU, Business Informatics – Communications Engineering, Linz Austria Towards Common Process Understanding in Collective Welfare…