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  • 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…

  • What function do learned societies serve in a digital age?

    What are learned societies for? This is how Jennifer Platt answers this question on loc 119 of her history of the British Sociological Association: Learned societies such as the BSA are a vital part of the social structure of academic life; not every eligible person belongs to one, but nonetheless all are affected by them.…

  • The missing history of the practical intellectuals

    One of my pet hates is the legacy of the ‘intellectual’, with its connotations of heroic figures speaking truth to power. This is recognised even by those who seek to retain the notion, as was the case with Foucault’s project “to break with the totalizing ambition of what he called the ‘universal intellectual’” as Bourdieu…

  • The global fourth estate

    In his recently released book Collusion, Luke Harding briefly discusses the media cooperation taking place behind the scenes, as media organisations grappled with a rapidly changing landscape. On loc 898 he writes: At the Guardian we were pursuing leads from both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, how UK spy agencies had first picked up suspicious…

  • Towards a cultural sociology of the toaster 

    How does what we eat shape how we are seen? Cultural sociologists have long accepted the role which culinary consumption plays in reproducing status hierarchies. However the meal of breakfast and the role of devices have been conspicuously absent from these debates, leaving us with a misleading view of how people eat and the social…

  • Margaret Archer as neo-classical British social theorist

    While Margaret Archer’s theoretical work is widely respected, it is often categorised as little more than an elaboration of Roy Bhaskar and a critique of Anthony Giddens. This framing leaves it secondary to Critical Realism and Structuration Theory, understandable (though limiting) in the former case and deeply inaccurate in the latter case. Reading Envisioning Sociology…

  • Three discursive predicaments I wish there were terms for

    These are points I feel I reach relatively frequently, as identifiable discursive predicaments lead discussions between people who might otherwise agree to instead break down: Agreement with an argument in principle but concern about the practical implications of that agreement. For example if a particular issue has suddenly become prominent in public debate, it will inevitably…

  • Trump as a tactician of post-truth

    This observation by the journalist David Cay Johnston in the recent channel 4 documentary Trump: An American Dream stood out to me: Donald understands that most reporters accurately quote what they’re told but they really don’t know what they’re writing about. Once his story is out there then anything else is just a counter story.…

  • Narrative as interface between the subjective and the objective 

    We often think of self-narrative as something self-grounding, reflecting the truth of a person even if that truth might change over the life course. If we take issue with this, we turn to the bare objective facts of someone’s life as a counterpoint to the unreliably subjective stories they tell. This oscillation misses the important…

  • Social media and the half dozen grasshoppers 

    Earlier today at the British Academy’s Social Listening event, Paul Crayston used this extract from Edmund Burke to illustrate a point about the tendency of social media users to mistake the noise they make within their own milieux for the activity taking place on the platform as a whole. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under…

  • CfP: Overcoming Inequalities in Internet Governance: framing digital policy capacity building strategies

    GIG-ARTS 2018 – The Second European Multidisciplinary Conference on Global Internet Governance Actors, Regulations, Transactions and Strategies 26-27 April 2018, Cardiff Overcoming Inequalities in Internet Governance: framing digital policy capacity building strategies Organised by: Centre for Internet and Global Politics / School of Law and Politics / Cardiff University In partnership with: DiploFoundation, The ECPR…

  • Against university marketing

    There’s a gently scathing inditement of university marketing in today’s WonkHE newsletter. I’ve been interested in university marketing for years, without ever having written properly on the topic. I find it fascinating to see how universities choose to position themselves to (imagined) publics, as well as what this positioning says about them and the context within…

  • Some thoughts on the bullet journal, omnifocus and getting things done

    I’ve been curious for a while about the Bullet Journal system. As an obsessive practitioner of Getting Things Done, I can’t see myself starting a Bullet Journal but its framing as ‘the analogue system for a digital age’ has intrigued me since I first encountered it. The video below provides an overview of how to…

  • CfP: What is universe? Communication, complexity, coherence

    WHAT IS UNIVERSE? COMMUNICATION • COMPLEXITY • COHERENCE April 19-21, 2018 * University of Oregon in Portland, USA The _WHAT IS UNIVERSE?_ [1] (2018) conference-experience examines communication, complexity/simplicity, coherence/incoherence and, how they may or may not contribute to “a pluralistic universe.” This conference marks the third collaboration among scholars from the natural and social sciences,…

  • The digital academic as autobiographical actor

    There’s a wonderful discussion by Ann Oakley on loc 562-567 of her Father and Daughter, taking the production of the academic c.v. seriously as an autobiographical act: A c.v. is an autobiographical act, a life composed and presented according to certain conventions, a story designed to hide, exaggerate, downplay or boast about aspects selected from…

  • A renewed engagement with the past could be a powerful means through which the critical tradition in British sociology could fortify itself for a difficult future

    In his magisterial A Secular Age, Charles Taylor introduces the notion of ‘subtraction stories’ to describe our dominant narratives of secularisation. This narrative structure is crucial to teleological thought, explaining our current situation in terms which preclude any backwards movement. As he explains on pg 22, Concisely put, I mean by this stories of modernity in…

  • In defence of the individual

    The individual is an unpopular category within contemporary social thought. To be concerned with the individual is taken to imply individualism, something which falls outside the range of acceptability for the cultural politics prevalent within British sociology. This is amplified by an intellectual impulse to transcend the individual as a unit of analysis, bound up…

  • Helen Margetts: How social media (and other platforms) can promote equality in 2027

    Thu 16 November 2017, 18:30 – 20:00 GMT Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge Professor Helen Margetts, director of the prestigious Oxford Internet Institute, presents her personal, positive vision – and then leads discussion – on how the UK’s social media can be a force for greater equality in the year 2027. Register online here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/helen-margetts-how-social-media-and-other-platforms-can-promote-equality-in-2027-tickets-34398362428

  • The (slow) private life of homo academicus

    In his Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu is concerned with “the free time, freed from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. There are presuppositions to enjoying this condition which shape the dispositions of the scholar, necessitating reflexivity for epistemic and ethical reasons if there…

  • Google’s next billion users

    I thought this was really interesting, particularly the focus on HCI for this strategy: *HCI/UX researchers at Google’s Next Billion Users teamThe Google Next Billion Users team is looking for HCI interns, post-docs, and researchers-on-contract to work on exploratory research and product initiatives. The team builds global products from the ground-up with new Internet users,…

  • The outrage of billionaires about invoking the existence of billionaires

  • Call for speakers: Answering social science questions with social media data

    Thursday 8th March 2018, The Wellcome Collection, London, NW1 2BE After several successful events, we’re pleased to say that the NSMNSS network (http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/) and Social Research Association (www.the-sra.org.uk) are again teaming up to deliver a one-day conference on ‘Answering social science questions with social media data’. As social media research matures as a discipline, and methodological…

  • Craft and exploitation in the digital university

  • Social acceleration and the possibility of the sacred 

    I just returned from a Remembrance Day service, pondering the relationship between acceleration and the profane after finding the array of people walking past and through the service deeply irritating. It occurred to me that what marks out such a space as sacred, distinguished from the normal flow on everyday life, rests as much on…

  • Things I learned from trying and failing at #NaNoWriMo

    I admitted defeat this evening, ten days into NaNoWriMo. I fell well behind my target this week, leaving me in a position where I’d have to write 2000 words a day to finish the book. The fact I failed to write anything today means that number has only increased. The last two weeks of this month will…

  • The coming of neoliberal populism: comparing Trump and Macron

    One of the most obvious ways to read Donald Trump’s rise to power in the United States is as the emergence of a neoliberal populism. The popular backlash against a socio-economic system unable to provide an acceptable quality of life for the majority of its citizens is harnessed by entrenched elites, with the intention of leveraging…

  • Are some political tactics more adaptable to intensified social change than others? 

    The first of what seems likely to be many books about the June 2017 general election was released earlier this week. Betting the House, by Tim Ross and Tom McTague, tells the story of the election through contrasting accounts of the Conservative and Labour campaigns. There’s much more detail about the former, seemingly reflecting both the…

  • CFP: Alternative Social Media special issue of Social Media + Society

    After Social Media: Alternatives, New Beginnings, and Socialized Media ***Call for Proposals*** Editors: Fenwick McKelvey, Sean Lawson, and Robert W. Gehl The editors seeks 500 word abstracts for proposed articles for a special issue of Social Media + Society on “alternative social media.” The editors welcome proposals from scholars, practitioners, and activists from across disciplinary…

  • The Public Sociology of Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford

    In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading about the foundations of British sociology and the motivations of its main figures. One of the most striking things about their work was how explicitly committed it was to a moral vision and sociology’s role in realising that vision. Whereas contemporary public sociology is driven by…

  • There once was a ‘sociology movement’: could there be one again?

    Within contemporary British Sociology, it can seem like a strange question to ask if the discipline has a moral vision. There are moral commitments which animate much of the activity which takes place within it, manifested in a range of motives including revealing vested interests through critique of ideology, describing inequalities in order to facilitate their amelioration, giving…

  • CFP: The Digital Dissertation: History, Theory, Practice (an eBook & Database Project)

    Call for Participation The Digital Dissertation: History, Theory, Practice A Database and eBook Project Virginia Kuhn, Kathie Gossett (eds.) Abstract submission: 12 January 2018 Humanities scholars recognize the growing importance of digital media in knowledge production and distribution. However, recognition does not imply acceptance. How does one negotiate digital scholarship in an academy that remains…

  • The fox’s way of being-in-the-world

    A line amongst fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus says ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing‘. This was the inspiration for Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on the hedgehog and the fox. Berlin takes these words figuratively to illustrate a divide between two styles of thinker: For there exists a…

  • The Simpsons on Social Justice Warriors

  • Alt-america and the epistemic confusion of liberalism

    In the conclusion to Alt-America, David Neiwert indites liberalism for its contribution to the circumstances within which Trumpism has emerged. These are circumstances within which, as he puts it on loc 5859, Trump “is simultaneously responding to and creating the conditions that could easily lead to the genuine growth of fascism”. From loc 5981-6001, he takes aim…

  • Call for Papers: Journalism in the Age of Partisan Politics, Political Protests, and President Trump

    Special Issue: Electronic Journal of Communication Journalism in The Age of Partisan Politics, Political Protests, and President Trump The current news environment is saturated with political tension and divisive issues.   Legacy news media and contemporary news outlets race to publish compelling content as they struggle to maintain their audiences.   Political leaks have become a staple…

  • How to trash the political rulebook

    A fascinating insight from Steve Howell, deputy to Seumas Milne, concerning how to kick back against the ‘political rulebook’ beloved of the centrists: In his interview, Howell, who is writing a book called How the Lights Get In – Inside Corbyn’s Election machine, also described how the team around the leader faced scepticism from other parts of…

  • Some thoughts on intellectual self-archiving

    Anyone who has read my blog for a while will be aware that I use it to self-archive. As Cory Doctorow explains in this wonderful piece, it’s a mode of information storage suitable for those whose working lives revolve around the identification, evaluation and retrieval of information: I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living.…

  • The Social Ontology of ‘Free’ and ‘Open’

    I enjoyed the Japan in a Digital Age conference today, keynoted by the cultural anthropologist Ian Condry. He took an ethnographic approach to the decline of the recording industry, drawing on fieldwork in Tokyo, Boston, and Berlin to illustrate how musicians are adapting to the steady unwinding of the familiar commodity form for the production,…

  • How can Sociology be inspired by its own archive?

    What can sociology learn from its archive? In asking this question, I mean archive in the broadest sense, far beyond the formal outputs of the discipline. I spent much of yesterday in the Foundations of British Sociology archive at Keele University, gifted to the university by the Institute of Sociology when it dissolved in 1955. This…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #38

    The French Exception: Emmanuel Macron by Adam Plowright Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement by Carl Cederström and André Spicer Down The Rabbit Hole by Holly Maddison The BBC: Myth of a Public Service by Tom Mills The Assassination Complex by Jeremy Scahill and the Intercept Team What Happened? By Hilary Clinton The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank…

  • The sociology of quantitative methods in the U.K. 

    Some tweets about this blog post worry me because it appears as if people think this is my analysis. It’s not. These are my notes on the excellent paper below which I’d strongly recommend reading in full.  This thought-provoking article by Malcolm Williams, Luke Sloan and Charlotte Brookfield offers a new spin on the familiar problem…

  • The coming big data revolution within higher education

    It seems passé to talk about the ‘big data revolution’ in 2017. Much of the initial hype has subsided, leaving us in a different situation to the one in which big data was expected to sweep away all that had come before. Instead, we have the emergence of data science as well as the institutionalisation…

  • Erving Goffman: the rag-and-bone man of Sociology

    There’s a wonderful essay by the playwright Alan Bennet in the London Review of Books, written 35+ years ago, reflecting on his fascination with Erving Goffman’s micro-sociology. His preoccupation was with the minutiae of everyday conduct, identified and described so astutely in Goffman’s work. Sociological observations in this register highlight our commonality, helping us see that individual experiences…

  • Vested interests in ‘openness’

    To talk of ‘openness’ conveys a sense of lightness, gesturing towards a world without self-interested boundaries. In a world dichotomised in terms of open/closed, barriers are seen as obstacles to be surmounted in order that we might have free exchange. Overcoming these obstacles becomes a moral project, imbued with a sense of historical change: barriers…

  • An interview with Stand Up magazine about social media and fragile politics

    Social media is often accused of being an echo chamber, but has it played a role in empowering marginalised people and elevating their voices? It has and it’s important that we don’t lose sight of this when we focus on the problems which social media is creating for politics. In recent years, cyber-utopianism has been…

  • Debate on YouTube: a guest post by Fred McVittie

    Outline and Rationale The Youtube platform has, since its earliest inception, offered the opportunity for topics of interest to be ‘debated’.  Initially these debates were informal (i.e. not following any of the recognised structures of debates) and usually used the ‘video response’ function.  This functionality was removed from the site in 2014, and whilst response…

  • The screams of ‘post-truth’: the rise and fall of the political commentator

    The political shocks of the last two years, Brexit and Trump, find reflection in a newer and darker language in which politics is discussed within the mainstream media. We are said to have entered an era of ‘post-truth’, within which facts no longer matter as the electorate fragments into self-referential communities locked inside their filter…

  • CfP: The Social Lives of Digital Methods

    # CALL FOR PARTICIPATION # DIGITAL METHODS WINTER SCHOOL 2018 # JANUARY 8-12, 2018 # UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM # THE SOCIAL LIVES OF DIGITAL METHODS # ENCOUNTERS, EXPERIMENTS, INTERVENTIONS — ## DIGITAL METHODS WINTER SCHOOL, DATA SPRINT AND MINI-CONFERENCE The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on ‘the Social Lives…

  • The Mediatization of Time

    ZeMKI international conference „The Mediatization of Time“ December 6-8, 2017 Conference venue: Swissôtel Bremen Hillmannpl. 20, 28195 Bremen, Germany Organizer: University of Bremen, ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de Topic: Recent innovations in the digitalization and datafication of communication fundamentally affect how people conceptualize, perceive and evaluate time to create the kind…

  • Alastair Campbell vs Tony Blair

    The section at 18 mins about Iraq-related dreams is fascinating. They both seem rather haunted, in radically different ways:

  • The acceleration of social theory

    There’s a section in this 1997 chapter by Roger Burrows which my thoughts have been intermittently turning to since reading it last week. On pg 235 he writes: It is not just technology which appears to be accelerating towards meltdown, so are our cultural and sociological understandings of the world. The speed at which new…

  • The new new left meets the old new left

    This is a fascinating exchange between Owen Jones and Alastair Campbell, bringing to life many of the themes I’ve been preoccupied with in the last few months. I agree with Owen’s claim that Campbell’s world view is in crisis. The promise of the modernisers rested on a basic electoral proposition: triangulation was necessary to win power…

  • Why the left needs to reject the ideology of networked socialism

    In today’s Guardian, Neal Lawson offers a cautious reading of Corbyn’s Labour, accepting the ascendancy of the left within the party but urging it to look outwards. I’m sympathetic to many of the substantive points Lawson makes in the article but there’s a rich vein of problematic assumption running through their articulation which needs to…

  • Ubiquitous drone surveillance 

    I’ve been reflecting on a dark but plausible prediction by Edwards Snowden in his forward to The Assination Complex by Jeremy Scahill and the team from the intercept. On loc 195 he argues that the technological barriers to ubiquitous drone surveillance are now minimal: Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the…

  • CFP – Intersectionalities and Media Archaeologies

    communication +1 is seeking proposals for Volume 7, “Intersectionalities and Media Archaeologies” Edited by Zachary McDowell and Nathanael Bassett The emerging field of media archaeology has opened up new avenues of research across fields and provided a way to challenge accepted historical layers of social and technical arrangements. Drawing from a variety of entangled theories…

  • Social media and the devaluation of introspection

    Does social media lead to a devaluation of introspection? This is what Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp claim on loc 4098 of their The Mediated Construction of Reality: The selfie stamps the marker of ‘the self’ onto whatever things a person wants to record as a way of increasing its value. But why should that…

  • 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

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  • 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 

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