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  • What Happened? The end of modernisation

    In the last few days, I’ve been reading Hilary Clinton’s What Happened and reflecting on it as an expression of a political centrism which I suspect is coming to an end. These self-defined ‘modernisers’ sought to adapt their respective political parties to what they saw as a new reality, necessitating that they be ‘change-makers’ while…

  • Mechanisms of normative change 

    Why is it that some social norms are unexpectedly stable up to a tipping point, like homophobia in football, but change rapidly once they start to do so? And what stabilizes revenge norms even after effective legal orders have been established? Apparently, social and legal norms are not made for eternity. At any point in…

  • Call for Abstracts – Lives of Data v2.0: Computing, Money, Media Workshop

    We are excited to announce the *‘Lives of Data v2.0: Computing, Money, Media’ Workshop, on 05-06 January 2018*. *Call for Abstracts* The first ‘Lives of Data’ Workshop <http://sarai.net/lives-of-data-workshop-january-5-7-2017/>, in January 2017, initiated engaging, cross-disciplinary conversations <http://sarai.net/lives-of-data-workshop-report-recordings/> on the historical, cultural, political, and technological conditions of data-driven knowledge production and circulation in India and South Asia.…

  • Hilary Clinton: The oddly fascinating confessions of a political centrist

    Yesterday morning I bought a copy of Hilary Clinton’s new book What Happened and was surprised to find myself gripped by it. I’d expected a turgid and unlikeable text which I’d skim through in order to supplement my understanding of the last Presidential election with the authorised account of the losing candidate. To my surprise, I’m…

  • Daniel Bell, Transgression and the Alt-Right

    The important argument I took from Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies is that the ‘alt-right’ reflect transgression detaching from progressivism. The idea that an act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct is inherently progressive ceases to be tenable when progressive movements have institutionalised laws, rules and codes that serve progressive ends. Under these circumstances, transgressing against…

  • CFP: Platform Urbanism

    Association of American Geographers Conference 2018 New Orleans, USA, 10-14 April 2018 Organizers Susan Moore (University College London) Scott Rodgers (Birkbeck, University of London) Sponsors Digital Geographies Specialty Group Media and Communication Geography Specialty Group Urban Geography Speciality Group Outline Talk about ‘platforms’ is today all-pervasive: platform architecture, platform design, platform ecosystem, platform governance, platform…

  • An attempt to define my research interests

    The relationship between personal change and social change: in what senses can we speak of social change? What does it mean for who people are and who they could become? As C. Wright Mills once put it, how are people “selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted” and what does this mean…

  • Defensive Elites

    In the last couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I term defensive elites. This line of thought began with curiosity about the much-reported hyperbole with which some influential figures within the financial elite of the United States greeted what would barely count as mildly redistributive measures by the then Obama…

  • The rise of the ‘higher education professional’

    Does anyone know of literature addressing the rise of this professional identity? From WONKHE’s Wonk Fest conference advertising: Wonkfest is for UK higher education professionals: from the policy wonks and planners to comms, marketing and public affairs professionals plus everyone else with an interest in the future (and present) of UK HE. Joining them will…

  • The Digital Monad

    From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner, presents the fascinating history through which avowed cultural radicals of the 1960s came to generate the present day dogmas of working culture under digital capitalism. In the last week, I’ve written about this in terms of the digital nomad and the digital hipster. These cultural forms are, as…

  • CFP: Storing and Sharing Special Issue of New Media & Society

    CALL FOR PROPOSALS ‘Storing and sharing: Everyday relationships with digital material’ Special Issue of New Media & Society Edited by Heather A. Horst (The University of Sydney, Australia), Jolynna Sinanan (RMIT University, Australia) and Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Australia) Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 November 2017 Proposal Selection Notification: 10 December 2017 Initial Article Submission Deadline:…

  • An obscenity on the district line

    Another drabble, based on a scene I witnessed on public transport this weekend: He couldn’t avert his gaze, nor could he stand to watch. The obscenity gripped him, drew him forward and out of himself. Sliding forward on the edge of his seat, he forced his feet flatly onto the floor of the tube. With…

  • The digital hipster: when cultural modernism meets accelerated work

    I spent the second half of this week thinking about the ideal of the digital nomad, he who takes advantage of the affordances of digital media to live a life of constant movement, working with a laptop from a different place each day. We can see this expressed in extreme form in contemporary lifestyle minimalism, defined…

  • Job Opportunity: Digital Engagement Officer

    A really interesting job opportunity at the Social Research Association, where I’ve been working as a trustee for the last year. It’s an exciting role that combines social media, community building and intellectual engagement: The Social Research Assocation (SRA) is seeking a self-motivated, creative and experienced Digital Engagement Officer to develop and lead an expanding…

  • The Ideal of the Digital Nomad

    In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner analyses how digital technology came to be seen as capable of liberating the individual, freeing them from the shackles of petty attachments to organisations and places. This is a complex story but it’s one in which cultural entrepreneurs figure prominently, carving out modes of living which later percolated…

  • Accounting for the distinctiveness of the contemporary age

    My relationship with the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Richard Sennett and Ulrich Beck has been a complicated one. Discovering their work as an intellectually frustrated philosophy student led me to move sideways into a sociology department rather than starting a PhD in political philosophy. Their approach excited me, opening up the possibility that…

  • The aestheticised mode of social theorising

    One of the targets in Kieran Healy’s Fuck Nuance paper is connoisseurship in social theory, the tendency to “call for the contemplation of complexity almost for its own sake” and “remind everyone that things are more subtle than they seem”. As he astutely observes, this tendency sits uneasily with abstraction as a practice: “throwing away detail for…

  • Sociological micro-fiction

    I encountered the notion of the drabble through reading Rob Kitchin’s fiction blog. These short stories of exactly 100 words can have a strange power to them, as little shards of reality that can be thrown out into the world. This is how Wikipedia describes the origins of the drabble: The concept is said to…

  • The fetishisation of interiority

    From pg 27 of Peter Sloterdijk’s The Art of Philosophy.  Witnesses report that Socrates had the habit of “sinking” into thought, as if thinking involved a kind of trance or obsessive daydream. According to Xenophon, Socrates saw this as “concentrating the mind on itself” by breaking off contact with his environment and becoming “deaf to the…

  • Conduits for variety

    In his superb From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner vividly describes The Whole Earth Catalog and the horizon it opened up for many of its readers. From loc 1212: For many, the Catalog provided a first, and sometimes overwhelming, glimpse of the New Communalists’ intellectual world. Gareth Branwyn, for instance, a journalist who later wrote for Wired magazine,…

  • The lost lure of abundance

    There’s an interesting extract on pg 52-53 of Infinite Distraction, by Dominic Pettman, discussing the seductions of abundance under conditions of scarcity: Those readers old enough to remember what it was like to live before the Internet will recall the strange phenomenon where the general noosphere seduced us by its sheer beckoning presence. Thus, we…

  • CFP: Slow computing: A workshop on resistance in the algorithmic age

    Call for Papers One-day workshop, Maynooth University, Ireland, December 14th, 2017  Hosted by the Programmable City project at Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and the Department of Geography In line with the parallel concepts of slow food (e.g. Miele & Murdoch 2002) or slow scholarship (Mountz et al 2015), ‘slow computing’ (Fraser 2017) is a provocation to resist. In…

  • Five thoughts on abstraction

    Abstraction is active. It is something one does, in a fully embodied way, within a context. It is undertaken for reasons and structured by dispositions which are inevitably prior to the situation in which one is abstracting. Abstraction is relational. One always abstracts from an object, stepping back from its particularity in order to foreground specific attributes and background others.…

  • Extracting oneself from the great twittering machine

    What is social media for? This is the question I’ve found myself asking after spending the morning responding to this, as I contemplate calling it a day on the blog I’ve been editing for over seven years. I obviously have a stock answer to the question: social media is for all the things scholars did…

  • The revolving door between Google and government

    The notion of the ‘revolving door’ is something I’ve spent much time pondering when campaigning against the arms trade. I’ve talked to Andrew Feinstein, former South African MP and long-standing critic of the arms trade, for two podcasts which explored this issue. Here’s the most recent one I recorded. This is how Campaign Against the…

  • The uncoupling of transgression from progress

    For a book of only 126 pages, Kill All Normies covers a remarkable amount of ground. Inevitably, the argument is underdeveloped at points and it perhaps offers less empirical detail about the alt-right than it promises, largely restricting its analysis to the study of (relatively) high profile cases and the inferences that can be made…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #37

    The Politics of Bitcoin by David Golumbia Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle Big Capital by Anna Minton Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin The Gospel of Self by Terry Heaton The Baltimore Boys by Joel Ducker

  • Some thoughts on the ontology of games 

    What is a game? A standard definition is “a form of competitive activity or sport played according to rules” and this has been the working conception when I’ve encountered theoretical engagements with the notion of a game. But a recent symposium on eSports left me reflecting on how much more complex the ontology of games…

  • The ascent of the spiralists

    I wrote recently about a short article by Michael Burawoy in which he bemoaned the ascendancy of the spiralists within universities. These relentlessly ambitious new entrants to the university system see it as a theatre within which they can make themselves known, spiralling into the university before once more spiralling out of it to bigger and better…

  • From a cult of youth to a cult of age

    In his memoir Hinterland, the former Labour Minister and acclaimed diarist Chris Mullin reflects on the cult of youth in British politics. This was manifested in the bright young things, lacking experience outside of politics and with little non-instrumental participation within it, coming to dominate the parties. But it was most striking in the leadership itself, with…

  • Critical Realism and Object-Orientated Philosophy on the Status of Objects

    One of the key points of disagreement between Object-Orientated Philosophy (OOP) and Critical Realism (CR) rests on the epistemic status of the object. While OOP and CR are in agreement that, as Harman puts it on pg 2-3 of his Immaterialism, objects should be treated as a “surplus exceeding its relations, quality, and actions”, CR…

  • Archer and Harman on modes of reduction

    Reading Immaterialism by Graham Harman, I’m struck by the overlap between his account of ‘duomining’ and Margaret Archer’s critique of conflation. As he writes on pg 27-28, “If we reduce an object downward to its pieces, we cannot explain emergence; if we reduce it upwards to its effects, we cannot explain change.” While Archer’s argument…

  • Call for Participation: Sociology and Social Media, Problems and Prospects

    A Sociological Review Foundation Workshop Goldsmiths, University of London Saturday 2nd December 2017 09.30-18.00, followed by wine reception The Sociological Review is delighted to announce the opportunity to take part in a one-day workshop on Sociology and social media. This workshop will be taking place exactly a year after the Value & Values event. It will allow issues to be raised by…

  • Elites preparing for disaster

    There’s a disturbing snippet in Naomi Klein’s latest book, No Is Not Enough, discussing the growing market for disaster-preparation amongst well-heeled elites. While it’s possible there’s a large element of conspicuous consumption at work here, amongst people who have more disposable income than things they can buy with it, it nonetheless makes for disturbing reading.…

  • Online armies at your command

    Towards the end of Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle discusses the chilling effect liable to ensue from the online harassment which journalists critical of the alt-right often now find themselves subject to. From pg 118: Multiple journalists and citizens have described in horrifying detail the attacks and threats against those who criticize Trump or figures of…

  • The populist right are demotic, rather than democratic

    In an important essay earlier this year, Jan-Werner Müller identifies a dangerous tendency for leftist critics to take the claims of right-populist demagogues at face value. Suddenly vindicated in their struggle with the ‘third way’ that has dominated the centre-left, the claims of nascent populists to speak for a ‘left behind’ majority, created by the…

  • The Surplus of Objects

    In Immaterialism, Graham Harman offers a provocative critique of Latour’s social theory, praising Actor-Network Theory as “the most important philosophical method to emerge since phenomenology in 1900” (pg. 1) while also regarding its account of objects as philosophically deficient. While he accepts the ANT thesis that objects mediate human relations, something which chips away at…

  • How widespread is shadow mobilisation?

    In the last few years, I’ve become interested in what I think of as shadow mobilisation: assembling people under false pretences and/or in a way intended to create a misleading impressions of the mobilisation. This is often framed in terms of astroturfing – fake grass roots – however it appears to me to extend beyond…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #36

    No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neill The Courage of Love by Alain de Botton Democracy In Chains by Nancy MacLean How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers

  • To Blog or Not to Blog: Research Projects, Centres and Networks

    October 27th 2017, 1:30pm to 5:00pm, Manchester UK In only a matter of years, blogging has become a mainstream part of academic practice. Research projects, networks and centres regularly maintain blogs, with the intention of promoting their work and building their connections. However it can be difficult to ensure this activity is worthwhile, rather than…

  • Social Media and Social Order

    Keynote speakers: Chris Bail (Duke University), Nick Couldry (LSE), Jessie Daniels (City University of New York), and Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam) https://social-media-and-social-order.neocities.org This international conference will investigate how social media re-inscribe social order-asserting established ways in which social groups are assigned their proper place in the city or the nation. Social media are frequently…

  • The rhetoric and reality of user generated content 

    On pg 102 of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, he highlights email exchanges between YouTube’s founders, released in a court case, which suggest the invocation of ‘user generated content’ might be a matter of branding rather than a meaningful growth strategy for social media platforms: In another email exchange from 2005, when full-length…

  • The content density of a cultural producer 

    An interesting snippet on pg 164 of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things suggests a metric of content density which could be extremely interesting to explore: Digiday looked at the race for what some are calling peak content. What it found was that in 2010 the New York Times, with 1,100 people employed in…

  • Denaturalising digital capitalism

    One of the most pressing issues we confront when analysing the digital economy is a pronounced tendency towards oligopoly which makes a lie of an earlier generation’s utopian embrace of the Internet as a sphere of free competition and a driver of disintermediation. There are important lessons we can learn from platform studies about the…

  • “So you thought about it one day and started the next morning?”

    This is a question which Zeynep Tufekci recalls in her Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, posed to a group of young Turkish activists about 140journos, a crowdsourced citizen journalism project which they started. As she writes on pg 37: In Turkey, like much of the Mediterranean, there is a tradition…

  • The question of the human in philosophy of technology 

    Over the next few years, I’ll be working on a collaborative project on trans- and post-humanism, building on the Centre for Social Ontology’s previous Social Morphogenesis series. My main contribution to this will be co-editing a volume, Strangers in a Familiar Land, with Doug Porpora and Colin Wight as well as exploring digital technology and…

  • The notion of a ‘playbook’

    In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself using the term ‘playbook’ in a number of contexts. It’s typically defined as “a book containing a sports team’s strategies and plays, especially in American football” but I’m not quite sure where I picked up the phrase from as someone who hasn’t had much interest in sport…

  • The fortress city and what it may portend

    A couple of months ago, I shared a disturbing extract from John Urry’s final book about what he termed the ‘fortress city scenario‘. There’s a powerful section in Naomi Klein’s recent book, No Is Not Enough, which illustrates the basis of this scenario in actually existing conditions & the manner in which contemporary warfare can…

  • Politico-environmental crisis

    In Naomi Klein’s new book No Is Not Enough, there’s a lucid overview of the intersection between political and environmental crisis. The role of drought in fermenting the conditions for the Syrian civil war was something which Marc Hudson first explained to me last year. From pg 182-183: The irony is particularly acute because many of the…

  • Public Intellectuals and the Shock Doctrine

    In the last year, I’ve been preoccupied by the relationship between periods of political flux and public intellectualism. These aren’t longer term processes, in which the coordinates of an established consensus begin to disintegrate, but rather short term periods of intense public confusion e.g. the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote or the shock Labour result in…

  • Brand Corbyn and Brand Trump

    What do Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump have in common? On the face of it, two people could not be more dissimilar but I’m curious about what might be their analogous position in relation to mainstream political culture. After all, in a sense Corbyn came from outside party politics, albeit not in the way Trump did, being…

  • A playbook for merchandising doubt

    I’m currently reading Merchants of Doubt, a fascinating study of the tobacco industry’s deployment of academic experts to cast doubt on the harm caused by cigarettes. Being in the mood to read the book in an ultra-cynical way, here’s my playbook for merchandising doubt, derived from reading these cases through the lens of critical realism: Exploit…

  • The disruptive presidency of Donald Trump

    One of the more irritating framings of Donald Trump’s rise to power has been to stress his ‘disruptive’ credentials*. Such accounts often focus on the role of Jared Kushner, who has been granted a dizzying array of responsibilities in the Trump Whitehouse, prompting Gary Sernovitz to observe the overlap with recent events in Saudi Arabia: When…

  • What does public sociology have to say about sociologists who are ‘merchants of doubt’?

    What does public sociology have to say about sociologists who are ‘merchants of doubt’? This is the question I’m slightly obsessing over after discovering that Peter Berger, famous for his work on social construction and the sociology of religion, worked as a consultant for the tobacco industry. As Source Watch details, he was tasked with establishing…

  • Two modes for becoming who we are 

    The self as painting: we become who we are through repetition and representation. Encumbered only by our imagination and the culture in which we find ourselves, we craft ourselves through iterated projects of self-representation. We might find the materials available to us limiting, in which case we might seek out a more diverse palette of…

  • The data warriors and the electoral wars they wage

    One of the most interesting issues raised by the rise of data science in party politics is how to untangle corporate rhetoric from social reality. I have much time for the argument that we risk taking the claims of a company like Cambridge Analytica too seriously, accepting at face value what are simply marketing exercises.…

  • The revenge practices of plutocrats

    What do we think of when we imagine elites exercising their power? There are many ways we can approach such a question, with varying degrees of abstraction. But reading The Divide: American Injustice In The Age Of The Wealth Gap, by Matt Taibbi, has left me preoccupied by how they practice revenge. It’s easy to imagine…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #35

    The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbably Path to Power by Alex Nunns How Trump Thinks: His Tweets and the Birth of a New Political Language by Peter Oborne and Tom Roberts Shattered: Inside Hilary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes The Mediated Construction of Reality by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp Adults In…

  • The dark future of mediatization

    In the last year, Facebook Live has been plagued by occasional headlines reporting on shocking instances of violence being streamed through the platform. The sporadic quality of these reports easily creates an impression that this is exception. There have always been violent crimes, right? Therefore it stands to reason that the spread of the platform…

  • The relative value of journalism and social philosophy

    Practitioners of social philosophy regard what they do as valuable, imbuing it with a sense of importance which is reflected in the often scholastic way in which readers cite and engage with such work. How seriously should we take this judgement? Does social philosophy have intrinsic worth? Or could it be considered a peculiar form…

  • From a politics of speed to a political sociology of speed

    In the last few years, I’ve become a little obsessed with speed. It seems this often leaves me coming across like an accelerationist. I occasionally flirt with the idea that I’m a slightly peculiar form of left-accelerationist, but it’s more for rhetorical amusement than genuine conviction. In fact I find much of what’s written about the…

  • Against the ‘political rulebook’

    Much of the reaction to Labour’s election success last week has been framed in terms of their ‘rewriting the rules’. One particularly explicit example of this can be seen in an article by Jonathan Freedland, an enthusiastic critic of Corbyn, pontificating that Corbyn took “the traditional political rulebook” and “put it through the shedder”. What…

  • The abuse Corbyn was subject to from Labour MPs

    If this is an accurate account, it’s remarkable that he seemingly remains devoid of bitterness about this treatment. From The Candidate, by Alex Nunns, loc 6251: “You are not fit to be prime minister,” the widely unknown Bridget Phillipson tells Corbyn. “It’s time to be honest with yourself. You’re not a leader. You need to…

  • How Corbyn hacked the media

    It’s conventional wisdom that Corbyn’s leadership campaign was the target of brutal coverage by the media. I was interested to learn in The Candidate, by Alex Nunns, that this wasn’t quite how the campaign itself saw the situation. Understanding why can help elucidate the surprise that was #Election2017. From loc 4591-4556: Ask some of Corbyn’s…

  • When Tweets Turn Sour: Avoiding Legal Pitfalls on Social Media

    When Tweets Turn Sour: Avoiding Legal Pitfalls on Social Media 2 hour masterclass, £12-13 per person When:6-8pm, Wednesday 28th June 2017 Where: NUJ,Headland House, 72 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NB Who for: Anyone using Twitter for PR, media/journalism or any kind of professional work Book your place via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/when-tweets-turn- sour-tickets-34619598150?aff=erelpanelorg When Tweets Turn Sour…

  • “Help! Help! Here comes everybody!”: Social Media and Corbynism

    How has social media contributed to the growing success of Corbynism? In asking this question, we risk falling into the trap of determinism by constructing ‘social media’ as an independent force bringing about effects in an otherwise unchanged world. This often goes hand-in-hand with what Nick Couldry calls ‘the myth of us’, framing social media in…

  • Public intellectuals as guides to the political flux, Or, “who can tell us what the fuck is going on?”

    In the last couple of days, I’ve been reading The Candidate by Alex Nunns. It’s a detailed and insightful account of Corbyn’s ascent to the leadership of the Labour party and the conditions which made this possible. After the election, it can also be read as as an analysis of broader conditions which might facilitate…

  • CfP: Japan in the Digital Age

    Japan in the Digital Age Call for Papers for a one-day Symposium Saturday 28th October, 2017 The Shed, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester Keynote Speakers Prof. Ian Condry, Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mr. Kazuhito Gen-I (?? ??), award-winning media practitioner, working on 2.5 Dimension project (theatre adaptation of anime, manga and…

  • Political speeches, relational authoriality and fetishising ‘strong leadership’

    The notion of relational authoriality, which consistency demands I acknowledge emerged in conversations with Jana Bacevic, conveys a relational realist perspective on the question of authorship. It rejects the notion of the liberal individual as the origin of a text while continuing to insist that there is a definite causal story to be told about…

  • How do we explain the election of Donald Trump?

    How do we explain the election of Donald Trump? Far too much of the media’s response to this question has been to take Trump’s account of his own powers at face value. This scion of the elite, who never felt at home amongst the elite into which he was born, imagines himself as able to…

  • The precursors to curation

    While many see the term ‘curation’ as modish and vague, I see it as an important concept to make sense of how we can orientate ourselves within a changing cultural landscape. However I can sympathise with the thrust of these objections, in so far as they take issue with a sense of curation tied in…

  • Social morphogenesis and the limitations of political modelling 

    Reading Shattered, an account of Hilary Clinton’s failed election campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, I’ve been struck by how limited political modelling has proved in recent elections. This had been in the case in the 2008 primary contest with Obama, in which the unprecedented character of his candidacy (as well as the candidate…

  • On the Spiralists

    In a recent editorial in Current Sociology, Michael Burawoy warns about what he describes as the ascent of the spiralists. He finds these figures throughout the UC Berekely administration, accusing them of being “people who spiral in from outside, develop signature projects and then hope to spiral upward and onward, leaving the university behind to spiral…

  • The meaning of @realdonaldtrump

    How significant can a tweet can be? We can point to isolated cases of individual tweets going viral, creating controversy and producing material outcomes in the world. But isolated tweets rarely have such significance. Instead, we need to look at a Twitter feed as a unit of analysis, taking someone’s entire output on the platform as…

  • CfP – “Youtubers” Conference – deadline June 15

    A multidisciplinary conference on “Youtubers & Youtubeuses” will be held at the University of Tours, France, next November (9-10th). Suggested topics include: – Youtubers as public figures/media icons/celebrities – Youtubers’ aesthetics/languages/video subgenres – Youtubers and learning/knowledge sharing – Youtubers as counterpowers. A full call for papers (in French) is available here: http://calenda.org/400423  <http://calenda.org/400423> Proposals (3,000…

  • CfP: ‘Social Research in a Sceptical Age’

    The current climate of scepticism towards ‘experts’ has put many research practitioners and users on the defensive.  Is it enough simply to assert the value of rigorous methods, or should we be checking, sharpening and improving our tools?  If ‘post-truth’ carries real meaning then the pressure is on researchers to find a positive response –…

  • Call for Participants: The Practice of Social Theory

    First Cambridge summer school in social theory University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology, 4-6 September 2017 Conveners: Jana Bacevic (University of Cambridge) and Mark Carrigan (The Sociological Review) Passionate about social theory? Want to learn more about how it is created? Interested in seeing theory being made, rather than just read or applied? Apply to…

  • Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web

    Call for Papers – Edited Collection Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web Editors: Dr Karen Lumsden (Loughborough University) and Dr Emily Harmer (University of Liverpool) The Internet plays a vital role in many aspects of our social, political and cultural lives and in the early days of its expansion there was much…

  • The Political Economy of Student Housing

    In the last few years, I’ve been intrigued by how changes in student housing track a broader transformation of higher education. The obvious change in the UK has been in student numbers, with major implications for the demographics of cities with major universities: Between 1994 and 2012 the number of undergraduates in Britain grew by…

  • Digital media and ontological security 

    There’s an intriguing argument in The Mediated Construction of Social Reality, by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, concerning our dependence upon digital media and how we respond to its failure. From loc 5527: We feel the costs viscerally: when ‘our’ media break down –we lose internet connection, our password stops working, we are unable to…

  • Why do I write?

    An exercise in free-writing, undertaken at a writing workshop at the Becoming Academic conference at the University of Sussex. I write to eliminate the clutter in my head, the accumulated debris which emerges within me as I make my way through the world, trying to understand my experiences as I go. If I am free…

  • What would a materialist phenomenology of ‘post-truth’ look like?

    That’s the question I’ve been asking myself when reading through two books by Nick Couldry in which he develops a materialist phenomenological approach to understanding social reality. The first is The Mediated Construction of Social Reality (with Andreas Hepp) and the second is Media, Society, World. It’s in the latter book that he considers the…

  • #SocMedHE17: Making an impact

    #SocMedHE17: Making an impact Tuesday 19th December 2017 at Sheffield Hallam University The third social media for learning in HE conference: #SocMedHE17: Making an impact,  considers the role that social media – when used in formal and informal learning contexts – can play in addressing the major challenges currently being faced by Higher Education. This conference is…

  • Do you want your research to produce more impact?

    Do you want your research to produce more impact? Many researchers are excited about the potential social media offers for generating impact but with 500 million tweets per day, 3 million blog posts per day and over a billion websites they face an obvious challenge: how do you ensure you are heard above the din?…

  • Help us forge UK applied sociology

    by Nick Fox and Marguerite Regan For the past 18 months, the British Sociological Association (BSA) group Sociologists outside Academia (SOA) has been focusing on the potential for careers working as applied or practical sociologists, beyond the traditional remits of academia.  Sociology is essential not only for understanding the big problems that face society, but…

  • The Personal Morphogenesis of Francis Begbie

    Which character from the Irvine Welsh novels has the most depth? While Francis Begbie might have counted as the most vivid, particularly as he was brought to life in Robert Carlyle’s unforgettable performance, I’d be surprised if anyone thought of him as the deepest. Yet that’s the impression one is left with after reading Irvine Welsh’s…

  • Time-packing and space-packing

    From The Mediated Construction of Reality, by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, loc 2896-2912: While there are only so many bodies of a certain size that can fit into a finite space –there are certain natural limits to spatial packing, beyond which the attempt to pack just has to stop (otherwise, bodies get crushed) –the…

  • CfP Special Issue: The Platformization of Chinese Society

    Special Issue of Chinese Journal of Communication: The Platformization of Chinese Society Extended Abstract Submission Deadline: July 1, 2017 Full Paper Submission deadline: February 28, 2018 Guest Editors: Jeroen de Kloet, Thomas Poell, Zeng Guohua Full text: http://jeroendekloet.nl/the-platformization-of-chinese-society/ We are currently witnessing a fast process of platformization of Chinese society. Social media, as well as…

  • The causal powers of media

    In The Mediated Construction of Social Reality, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp take issue with the primacy of face-to-face interaction that has so often been assumed within social thought. Our embodied interaction is taken to be primary, often assumed to be unmediated, with the mediation of interaction through technology seen as additional to it. From loc…

  • Special Issue on Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data

    How exciting does this look? Call for Papers: Special Issue on Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data We welcome manuscripts from scholars across the social and computer sciences, and are particularly interested in research from teams of authors from both domains of inquiry. Please submit your papers online to our web-based manuscript submission and peer-review…

  • Social Media and the Impact Agenda: making an impact with your research 

    Many researchers are excited about the potential social media offers for making an impact with their work. However 500 million tweets per day, 3 million blog posts per day and over a billion websites poses an obvious challenge: how can you ensure you are heard above the din? How can social media be used by…

  • The fortress city scenario 

    A disturbing scenario from John Urry’s What is the Future? From loc 2996-3045: The final scenario involves the development of the Fortress City. Rich societies break away from the poorer into fortified enclaves. Those able to live in gated and armed encampments would do so, with much privatizing of what were, in many societies, public…

  • The Technolibertarian King 

    From I Hate The Internet: A Novel pg 189-190: Like Ray Kurzweil, who Christine identified with Dolos, the Greek spirit of trickery and guile. Ray Kurzweil was the king of technological liberation theology. Or, in other words, he was king of the most intolerable of all intolerable bullshit. He believed in a future where computers…

  • The Sociology of Platforms

    Reluctantly cut from my digital sociology paper Indeed, as Srnicek (2016) argues, this dynamics is integral to the nature of the platform itself, as a business model premised upon maximising opportunities for data extraction through situating itself as an intermediary between the interactions of existing actors. Each platform has an epistemic privilege in relation to…