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  • 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…

  • What’s the difference between academia and politics?

    In his wonderful memoir, Adults In The Room, Yanis Varoufakis reflects on the frustrations of politics and how they compare to academia. From loc 5504: Possibly because of my academic background, this was the Brussels experience I least expected and found most frustrating. In academia one gets used to having one’s thesis torn apart, sometimes with little decorum;…

  • Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy

    What does it mean for policy to be insulated from politics? That’s the question we ultimately confront when investigating the putative depoliticisation of the economy. Matters which should be publicly resolved, through organised processes of contestation, instead get decided privately. We can cite examples of such transitions, consider whether they embody a broader tendency and…

  • What will Macron be like in government?

    I happened to be reading this page of Yanis Varoufakis’ political memoir a few moments before Macron’s near certain victory was announced. From loc 3398: Emmanuel Macron listened actively and engaged directly, his eyes radiant and ready to display his approval or disagreement. The fact that he had good English and a grasp of macroeconomics…

  • What does distraction mean for political theory and political philosophy?

    Soon after becoming Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis found himself surrounded by civil servants whose loyalties he could not assume and staff parachuted in by a political party with which he had little prior affiliation. In his political memoir, Adults In The Room, he recounts his impulse to find “a minder whose loyalties would not be…

  • The technocratic oath

    In his political memoir, Adults In The Room, Yanis Varoufakis recounts a meeting with Larry Summer which took place in April 2015. Only months into his tenure as Finance Minister, he looked to this architect of the neoliberal world order for support as hostilities with European leaders over Greece’s fiscal future rapidly intensified. Coming straight…

  • How can Arendt and Heidegger help us think about distraction?

    In his Debating Humanity, Daniel Chernilo compares the approaches taken by Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt to the question of thinking. Both began with the philosophical tradition’s opposition between thinking and action: in this sense it implies withdrawal in some sense, relative to a world of activity. However Heidegger saw this thinking as an activity for the chosen few.…

  • The Politics of Agency

    Ever since I was a philosophy student, I’ve been interested in how we conceptualise individuals and groups. The two are connected in my mind because, if groups are composed of individuals, our concept of individuals is going to condition our concept of groups and vice versa. However discussion at this level of abstraction can seem…

  • Anticipatory Urgency

    Earlier this morning, I found myself impatiently waiting in my local petrol station to purchase a drink before I went swimming. The woman in front me in the queue was rather slow. Initially seeming surprised that money would be required for the transaction, she proceeded to initiate an entirely different process to locate her coins after handing over the…

  • The transformation of academic writing and the challenge of ephemera

    What does social media mean for academic writing? Most answers to this question focus on how such platforms might constrain or enable the expression of complex ideas. For instance, we might encounter scepticism that one could express conceptual nuance in 140 characters or an enthusiasm for blogging as offering new ways to explore theoretical questions beyond the confines of the…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #34

    Making Sociology Public by Lambros Fatsis Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Filling The Void by Marcus Gilroy-Ware What is the Future? By John Urry The Existentialist Moment by Patrick Baert Slowness by Milan Kundera The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson The Making of the Indebted Man by Maurizio Lazzarato Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart…

  • Anthem for a Planet’s Children

    Though we are all related through common ancestry Still, some of us are fated by where or what we be. We could not choose our birthplace, our gender, race, or creed We’re praiséd, loved, or hated for every word or deed. Because we all are sisters or brothers, through and through; No one should try…

  • The Jeremy Hunt Rhyming Song

  • The ennui of the academic celebrity

    In Solar, by Ian McEwan, we encounter the weary figure of Michael Beard, the nobel laureate and serial womaniser who has long lived off his early contribution to theoretical physics. By the time he approaches his 60s, he is a chaotic and directionless man, nonetheless ubiquitously affirmed within the academy and beyond: He held an honorary…

  • What is a research technologist?

    I described myself as an ‘academic technologist’ for a number of years. During my part-time PhD, I’d drifted into a number of roles which felt connected but which were difficult to summarise: training people to use NVIVO, writing digital scholarship resources, advising on CAQDAS strategy for research projects, running workshops about social media and maintaining social media feeds.…

  • Marshall Berman on Jaytalking

    Marshall was a jaytalker and jaywriter, which, for him, meant “to talk back; to talk against the lights; to talk outside the designated lines; to talk like our great American Blue Jays, small birds who emit loud and raucous cries that no one can ignore.” http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3184-andy-merrifield-living-for-the-city

  • Will social media lead to the return of the general intellectual?

    In his detailed study of Sartre’s rise to prominence as an authoritative public intellectual, Patrick Baert argues that the general intellectualism embodied by Sartre depended upon social conditions which no longer obtain. Such intellectuals “address a wide range of subjects without being experts as such” and speak “at, rather than with, their audience” (pg. 185).…

  • The Conspiracy of Cars

    From What is the Future? by John Urry, loc 2554-2570: This car-based suburbanization is neither natural nor inevitable, and in the US partly stems from a ‘conspiracy’. Between 1927 and 1955, General Motors, Mack Manufacturing (trucks), Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, Firestone Tire & Rubber and Greyhound Lines conspired to share information, investments and ‘activities’…

  • What is a wonk?

    What is a wonk? It’s a deceptively simple question which it’s worth us attending to. This is the answer given in an excellent Baffler essay by Emmett Rensin: What, after all, is a wonk? It is not the same thing as an expert, although those are tedious as well. In a 2011 interview with Newsweek,…

  • “We are already in a position where we have to engage with digital media”

  • Call for Papers: The Journal of Repressive Social Theory

    In recent years, calls for a reconsideration of critique, its place and value, have multiplied. The proposition that critique has run out of steam took on a new urgency with the vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. The doxa of progressive academia has found itself repudiated by these events, as conceptions of…

  • Too busy to care for your cat?

  • Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens

    This is the fifth of Walter Benjamin’s thirteen rules for writing. I would love to know more about what this meant in practice to him. How often did he record his ideas? Where did he record them? How did their quantity and quality wax and wane in different circumstances? My conviction that blogging constitutes a…

  • Sociological Fiction Zine

    Such a great project. Going to try and think of something to contribute to this: All sociologists write stories – Game & Metcalfe, Passionate Sociology The relationship between fiction and sociology is as old as the discipline itself. Sociological fiction is receiving increasing attention of late – see The Sociological Review’s blog series on sociology…

  • “I was being a complete asshole to people for nothing more than scoring points to look good inside an echo chamber”

    A really fascinating discussion between Kristi Winters and The Wooly Bumblebee (HT Philip Moriarty). The latter’s experience could be seen as a model for de-radicalisation in the more toxic spaces within social media. An important reminder that platform incentives might encourage this behaviour but they don’t necessitate it. Furthermore, just because someone has come to act a given way…

  • Social Morphogenesis: Five Years of Inquiring Into Social Change

    Postmodernity. Second modernity. Network Society. Late modernity. Liquid modernity. Such concepts have dominated social thought in recent decades, with a bewildering array of claims about social change and its implications. But what do we mean by ‘social change’? How do we establish that such change is taking place? What does it mean to say that…

  • In defence of ‘curation’

    The term ‘curation’ has got a bad press in recent years. Or rather the use of the term beyond the art world has. To a certain extent I understand this but I nonetheless always feel the need to defend the term. There are a few reasons for this: In a context of cultural abundance, selection…

  • Using graphic novels to communicate your research

    Manchester Digital Laboratory Thursday 8th June 2017 09.00-17.00 The Sociological Review Foundation is delighted to announce our forthcoming workshop using graphic novel methods to present social research. We invite applications to take part in a Graphic Novel Workshop with Tony Lee. If your research involves incorporating graphic methods or you are simply interested in doing…

  • How to attribute authorship on @soc_imagination?

    I just came across this student essay in which a blog post written by Les Back was attributed to me. This isn’t the first time it’s happened and I’m unsure how to respond to it. The backlist of posts on Sociological Imagination is sprawling by this point, numbering in the low thousands. Most of these…

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#25)

  • “A new kind of intellectual”: Pierre Bourdieu’s tribute to Michel Foucault

    After Michel Foucault died in 1984 at the age of fifty-seven, Pierre Bourdieu wrote a tribute in Le Monde, reflecting on his life and what could be learned from it. Bourdieu attributed to his former colleague at the Collège de France a great consistency in his intellectual work, much more than is often assumed: The consistency of an…

  • The Polysemic University

    From Making Sociology Public, by Lambros Fatsis, pg 240: Having already introduced Cardinal Newman’s ivory tower conception of the university, and Minister Humboldt’s equally idealistic depiction of it as a hub of culture and academic freedom, Barnett’s (2013) anthology of epithets, each of which furnishes 240 a different vision of and for the university, is…

  • Persistance, Searchability and Incivility

    This essay on ‘the cult of cruelty’ has some interesting points to make about the role of what danah boyd calls persistence and searchability in facilitating incivility online. It makes it possible to trawl through someone’s activity, enabling a degree of engagement with choices and representations that would not otherwise be possible: I’ve been thinking…

  • Fuck virality, I want my ideas to be radioactive

    There’s a fascinating footnote in Radio Benjamin, loc 395-410, discussing Adorno’s description of Benjamin’s ideas as ‘radioactive’: The full sentence reads, “Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive,” … Although Adorno’s metaphor uses a different register of boundary crossing, the German radioaktiv, like the English…

  • Social Media Training Workshop

    Social Media Training Workshop Led by Holly Powell Jones City University, London EC1V 0HB   Monday 8 May 2017, 12.30 – 4.00 pm This workshop will be of interest and assistance if you wish to use social media to disseminate your work, identify and share relevant opportunities, communicate a cause, or promote an organisation, charity,…

  • My new chapter on the digitalisation of the archive

    Some cyber-optimists see the digitalisation of the archive as offering an endless abundance of cultural goods available to all. However this chapter takes a more gloomy view, arguing that the digitalised archive can in fact contribute in many ways to the disorientation and distraction of contemporary persons, rendering the process of ‘shaping a life’ more…