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  • What does it mean to be a public sociologist in an age of Donald Trump?

    My keynote from Public sociology and the role of the researcher: engagement, communication and academic activism postgraduate conference a couple of weeks ago:

  • Do academics write badly because they’re rushing?

    I saw the science journalist Simon Makin give an excellent talk yesterday on how social and natural scientists can make their writing clearer. He offered some excellent tips to this end, including assuming your reader is exactly as intelligent as you are, but has absolutely none of your knowledge. For this reason, clarity isn’t about being simplistic: aim to clarify without…

  • Creative Methods for Research and Community Engagement Summer School

    Creative Methods for Research and Community Engagement Summer School 6-8 July 2017, Keele University PhD students and Early Career Researchers are welcome at this event organised by the Community Animation and Social Innovation Centre (CASIC) at Keele University. The Summer School will be held in central England at the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme (6-7 July)…

  • Miniconference on post-truth and digital media in Reading UK coming up

    Call for Proposals BAAL Language and New Media Sig Annual Meeting MINI-CONFERENCE Language, New Media and Alt.Realities April 21, 2017 University of Reading Proposals are invited for 20 minute paper presentations as well as posters/web-based presentations addressing the theme of ‘language, new media and alt.realties’. Possible areas of interest include: ·       New media…

  • Social Imaginaries: The re-invention of social research

    Social Imaginaries: The re-invention of social research Panel discussion and book launch of Digital Sociology by Noortje Marres   Date and Time: 9 May, 5-7pm Location: Central Saint Martins, Granary Building, Granary Square, London N1C 4AA Hosted by: – Innovation Insights Hub, University of the Arts London – Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick – Warwick…

  • Why it’s fine to ‘broadcast’ on Twitter

    Foremost amongst the guidance offered about Twitter is the claim that it is fundamentally a conversational platform. One shouldn’t simply ‘broadcast’. It’s for discussion and engagement. There’s an element of truth in this but it’s one which can be lost through repetition, as the status of received wisdom stops us from thinking critically about why everyone agreed with…

  • The Sociological Review Annual Public Lecture 2017: Cities and the Political Imagination

    The Sociological Review Annual Lecture 2017 Friday 28th April, 2017 Time: 5:45pm – 8:00pm, followed by wine reception Location: Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL Cities and the Political Imagination Keynote Speaker: Professor Rivke Jaffe Responses by Professor Claire Alexander Dr. Emma Jackson How can we recognize the political in the city? How might…

  • The Ontology of Fake News

    What we are seeing with the growth of ‘fake news’ is perhaps the weaponisation of epistemology. In other words, ‘fake news’ as a construct is becoming a discursive component of our repertoire of contention. Far from entering a post-truth era, we are seeing truth becoming a mobilising device in a new way, encouraging ‘us’ to defend…

  • Youth employment in the ‘gig’ economy, isolation and @youthloneliness

    Isolation at the beginning of working lives  As part of the @YouthLoneliness project (Twitter/Tumblr), we are interested to find out more about young people’s working lives, their casual employment, their experience of self-employment and their involvement in the ‘gig economy.’ The Co-op Movement (like the Trade Union movement) was a movement that brought people facing…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #33

    Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom At The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell Insane Clown President by Matt Taibbi The Academic Caesar by Steve Fuller Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

  • CfP: Queer Studies Conference

    Looking Back, Looking Forward Friday 30th June 2017, University of Surrey, Guildford BSA Early Career Forum Regional Event Contemporary queer studies increasingly focus on broad areas of sociological concern. It is therefore common to find early career researchers working on issues relating to sexuality across the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinarity leads to exciting…

  • The Porous University – A critical exploration of openness, space and place in Higher Education

    Call for participation Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th May 2017 University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness Campus This two-day symposium arose out of a series of conversations and reflections on the nature of openness within Higher Education. It started with the observation that openness is increasingly seen as a technical question, whose solution lies…

  • The Impact of Social Theory

    The Sociological Review has just published a thought-provoking review of Doug Porpora’s Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. It gives a lucid, though brief, overview of the book’s core arguments: seven myths which afflict American sociology and seven philosophical counter-points. But what caught my attention was the account of how theoretical work can increase the discipline’s…

  • Defensive Elites

    This New Yorker feature on Robert Mercer is a fascinating insight into what I’m come to think of as defensive elites: self-congratulatory yet paranoid billionaires who are prepared to use their wealth to stave off what they see as unwarranted social attack. The analysis offered by David Magerman, formerly a senior manager at Mercer’s hedge fund, seems particularly…

  • The Uberfication of the University: the Digital Studienbuch and the 21st Century Privatdozent

    In my copy of The Vocation Lectures, edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, the editors helpfully annotate Weber’s description of the occupational realities of the German academic. From pg 2: German students used to have a Studienbuch, a notebook in which they registered the coruses they were taking in their field. They then had…

  • Keeping the conversation going in an age of scholarly abundance

    In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with the notion of ‘the literature’ and how it is invoked by scholars. I’m now rather sceptical of the way in which many people talk about ‘the literature’ and the role it plays in scholarship. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important to identify, engage with and…

  • Marketing the Digital University

    In the excellent Lower Ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom reflects on the market-orientation of for-profit colleges, tending to seek a continual growth in student numbers. This growth imperative can manifest itself in marketing and recruitment outstripping teaching in institutional spending. From pg 20: If budgets are moral documents, the fact that some financialized for-profit colleges reportedly spent…

  • The Cesspool of YouTube

    Via Philip Moriarty:

  • On Irritation, Or, How Social Networks Tend To Make Us Slightly More Assholic

    In the last couple of months, I’ve found myself reflecting on irritation. What is it? It’s one of our most recognisable reactions to the world, yet it’s hard to be precise about what it is. Is it an emotion? Is it a state of mind? Is it a reaction to the world? This is the definition which Wikipedia…

  • What is compound distraction?

    I’m not a fan of The End of Absence by Michael Harris but I love this term. From pg 216: The experience of one person’s distraction compounding another’s. Julie kept texting while I was talking about my cat, so I started texting, too. Existing in two varietals: “limited compound distraction” refers to a moment of positive…

  • The Social Challenge of Platform Proliferation

  • Cities and the Political Imagination

    The Sociological Review Annual Lecture 2017 How can we recognize the political in the city? How might social scientists engage with forms of politics outside of established sites of research such as those associated with representative democracy or collective mobilizations? This presentation suggests that new perspectives on urban politics might be enabled by revisiting the…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #32

    The End of Absence by Michael Harris The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin One Market Under God by Thomas Frank Uberworked and Underpaid by Trebor Scholz The Curse of the Monsters of Educational Technology by Audrey Watters The Revenge of the Monsters of Educational Technology by Audrey Watters The Upstarts by Brad…

  • The Technology of Intellectual Work

    In 1988 Pierre Bourdieu chaired a commission reviewing the curriculum at the behest of the minister of national education. The scope of the review was broad, encompassing a revision of subjects taught in order to strengthen the coherence and unity of the curriculum as a whole. In order to inform this work, the commission early…

  • Collateral consequences 

    It’s a commonplace to recognise that the power of corporate actors is often invoked as a justification for their lenient treatment. After all, if the government takes action against them then everyone will suffer. But I didn’t realise this had been formally expressed, in the notion of collateral consequences put forward by Eric Holder, during…

  • The Ontology of Fateful Moments

    In his On the Ontological Mystery, Gabriel Marcel describes the experience of “an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set”. He is talking of a chance meeting with a stranger, but the image is a powerful one which characterises many…

  • Bloggers and their role in the dissemination of scholarly information

    Notes from this Webinar. I had to leave after the second speaker so they’re not complete. Alt metrics are a complement to existing metrics, addressing some of the key issues posed by metrics: the lag time of citations, the limitations of impact factor, the time to publication and their focus on a niche audience. The intention of…

  • Margaret Archer and Bernard Lahire as post-Bourdieusian social theorists

    In an interesting chapter Frederic Vandenberghe explores the role of the individual in Bourdieu’s Sociology, as well as the critiques which Margaret Archer and Bernard Lahire make of it. His intention is to respond to a sociology he sees as hegemonic by developing a post-Bourdieusian theory of the social world that is not anti-Bourdieusian. His project, as…

  • Some really interesting theory reading lists

    Looking at Omar Lizardo’s website, I found links to the reading lists for the courses he is teaching. I’d really like to work through these in future, particularly the one of Cognitive Sociology. http://www3.nd.edu/~olizardo/courses.html

  • Perfecting the work/life blend

    HT Justin Cruickshank Perfecting the work/life blend from Samsung at Work

  • Dealing with online harassment: guidance for academics

    These are some useful links I’ve stumbled across or had suggested to me. Any suggestions of other reading on this topic would be very welcome: Scholars under attack On dealing with online criticism and trolls for academics Best Practices for Conducting Risky Research and Protecting Yourself from Online Harassment

  • If uber are acting like this now, how would they act if they had a monopoly?

    The New York Times reveals the lengths Uber will go to in order to evade regulatory scrutiny and intervention: Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, Ore., tried to hail an Uber car downtown in a sting operation against the company. At…

  • The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

    Earlier today I saw a fascinating demonstration at Manchester Science Museum of a replica Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (nicked named ‘Baby’). This was the first computer with electronic memory: The facilitator of the demonstration gave a wonderfully clear explanation of how the physical mechanisms of the machine operated. I’d understood the principle of how memory worked (encoding sequences of information…

  • Pierre Bourdieu, liberal thought and the ontology of collectives

    Well over a decade ago, I was due to start a PhD in Political Philosophy looking at ideas of the individual within liberal thought. There are many reasons why I ultimately moved into a Sociology department instead, though my lack of regrets about this choice hasn’t stopped me occasionally wondering what might this thesis might…

  • Pierre Bourdieu, post-war Algeria and the existential conditions for collective action

    In an early essay on post-war Algeria, Pierre Bourdieu reflected on the existential experience of the urban sub-proletariat and its political significance. This is reproduced on pg 16 of Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action: Habituation to prolonged unemployment and the most casual and poorly paid work, along with the lack of any regular employment,…

  • The new frontiers of monitoring your students

    I doubt I was the only person who was surprised to encounter this initiative from University of Buckingham. Driven by their vice-chancellor Anthony Seldon, an educationalist who grew up surrounded by the neoliberal revolution, it invites students to opt-in to the monitoring of their social media profiles in order to track the efficacy of the university’s positive…

  • Digital labour and the epistemic fallacy 

    One of the arguments which pervades Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, concerns the materiality of digital labour. As someone whose back and neck start to ache if I spend too much time at a computer, I’ve always found the tendency to assume there is something mysteriously immaterial about using computers to be rather absurd.…

  • The cultural significance of blogging

    In his Uberworked and Underpaid, Trebor Scholz offers an important reflection on the cultural significance of blogging. While its uptake has been exaggerated, dependent upon questionable assumptions concerning the relationship between users and blogs, it nonetheless represents a transformation of and expansion of cultural agency which needs to be taken seriously. From loc 3825: Web…

  • To understand social media for academics, we have to kill the idea of social media for academics 

    In the 30+ talks I have done about social media in the last year, I have discussed many things. But the one theme that has been most prominent is the extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, complexity of the subject matter. There is nothing inherently challenging about how to use social media. Any practical or technical difficulties…

  • Speculative thoughts about the phenomenology of digitalisation

    A few weeks ago, I found myself on a late night train to Manchester from London. After a long day, I was longing to arrive home, a prospect that seemed imminent as the train approached Stockport. Then it stopped. Eventually, we were told that there was someone on the tracks ahead and that the police…

  • CFP: Alternative Facts: Constructing Truth in Civil Societies

    As the workings of civil society are being disrupted by the challenges of ‘alternative facts’, ‘fake news’ and notions of post-truth, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal has decided to devote a special issue to this topic. Our approach is broad; the flow of information is fundamental to civil society and that flow and its interactions with…

  • The ambivalent promise of higher education

    In the latest collection of talks from Audrey Watters, The Curse of the Monsters of Educational Technology, she addresses an uncomfortable issue in higher education: the unrealistic claims made about the transformative aspect of university attendance. From loc 397-413: These questions get at what is an uncomfortable and largely unspoken truth about education. That is,…

  • A conversation between myself and @benjamingeer about a Bourdieusian approach to understanding alt-academia

    I thought others might find this interesting. I’d certainly be interested in hearing people’s perspectives on what we were discussing. I’m in bold, Benjamin is in italics.  Does the situation of skholè still obtain in the accelerated academy? This is a great question. Maybe an answer could go something like this, focusing on the distinction…

  • Donald Trump: Everyday Tactics of Post-Truth

    In The Making of Donald Trump, David Johnston identifies the tactics used by Trump to deflect inquiries into his many shady dealings and questionable decisions. Sometimes this is a matter of outright threats, with an enthusiasm for litigation (1,900 suits as plaintiffs)  coupled with an explicitly articulated philosophy of vengeance proving a dangerous combination for any who…

  • A Domain of One’s Own

  • The Future of ‘Impact’ in the UK

    I’m reading through the Stern review in preparation for various impact related things I’m doing in the next few weeks. It takes the view that the 6,975 impact case studies produced and £55 million estimated to have been spent on the impact element of the last REF has clearly contributed to “an evolving culture of wider engagement,…

  • The Sociological Review Early Career Researcher Event: Senior Seminar with Rivke Jaffe

    The Sociological Review Early Career Researcher Event: Senior Seminar with Rivke Jaffe The Manchester Museum Friday 28th April 2017 10.00-17.00 The Sociological Review Foundation invite applicants to take part in a workshop with Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam) taking place in advance of our Annual Lecture. If your research involves thinking and dealing with ethical,…

  • The Silicon Valley Narrative

    Another extract from Audrey Watters, this time from The Curse of the Monsters of Educational Technology, who analysis of the rhetoric of disruption has fast become one of my favourite examples of digital cultural critique. From loc 184: “The Silicon Valley Narrative,” as I call it, is the story that the technology industry tells about…

  • Call for AoIR Tartu panel participants on Algorithmic Agency

    This looks like a very interesting panel: We are looking for a few additional people who might be interested in contributing to an AoIR panel exploring critical questions and issues surrounding algorithmic agency, power and publics. Researchers and media commentators alike are seemingly fascinated with the magic-like and opaque properties of algorithms. Algorithms are touted…

  • Abundance and austerity 

    From The Revenge of the Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 1187: Many of us in education technology talk about this being a moment of great abundance—information abundance—thanks to digital technologies. But I think we are actually/ also at a moment of great austerity. And when we talk about the future of education,…

  • The myths of academic life

    This great post by Martin Weller takes issue with the recent click bait published by the Guardian Higher Education’s anonymous academics series. He argues that they perpetuate an outdated stereotype of academic labour which has no relationship to the reality: There are undoubtedly more, but when you piece these three together, what you get is…

  • The Good Intentions of Engineers

    This important contrast is outlined powerfully by danah boyd: From the outside, companies like Facebook and Google seem pretty evil to many people. They’re situated in a capitalist logic that many advocates and progressives despise. They’re opaque and they don’t engage the public in their decision-making processes, even when those decisions have huge implications for…

  • An STS approach to ‘post-truth’

    This 4S panel looks fascinating: I’d like to invite you to consider submitting a paper abstract to the panel I’m co-convening for 4S in Boston this year. Abstracts are due March 1. It would be great to have critical internet/digital media studies folks working with STS to speak to the themes of this panel. Rich,…

  • Managing ‘us’ to preserve the myth

    In his Uberworked and Underpaid, Trebor Scholz draws out an important parallel between the platform capitalism of YouTube and the near universally praised Wikipedia: Unsurprisingly, YouTube hires countless consultants to better understand how to trigger the participation of the crowd. They wonder how they can get unpaid producers to create value. But equally, on the…

  • Platform capitalism or sharing economy?

    From Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, loc 1290: I am using the term “platform capitalism,” introduced by Sascha Lobo77 and Martin Kenney, to bypass the fraudulent togetherness of terms like “peer,” “sharing,” and “economy.” How can we talk about genuine sharing or innovation when a third party immediately monetizes your every interaction for the…

  • Platform capitalism or sharing economy?

    From Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, loc 1290: I am using the term “platform capitalism,” introduced by Sascha Lobo77 and Martin Kenney, to bypass the fraudulent togetherness of terms like “peer,” “sharing,” and “economy.” How can we talk about genuine sharing or innovation when a third party immediately monetizes your every interaction for the…

  • The embedded digital economy 

    One of the things that I liked about Platform Capitalism, by Nick Srineck, was its concern to avoid analysing the tech sector as sui generis. By situating it in social and economic history, we are left with a much richer account of where it came from, why it is the way it is and where…

  • The Politics of #MeetUp

    This is interesting. I’m instinctively sceptical of it for a number of reasons but I’m very interested to see how it unfolds: Meetup has always served as an organizing platform for a wide range of political views, welcoming everyone from the Howard Deaniacs to the Tea Party. Meetup will always welcome people with different beliefs. But after the…

  • The duality of the platform: users and workers

    There’s an interesting passage in Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, in which he discusses the contrasting experience of Amazon Mechanical Turk by users and workers. From loc 719: While AMT is profiting robustly, 11 it has –following the observations of several workers –not made significant updates to its user interfaces since its inception, and…

  • From the crowd-as-threat to crowd-as-resource 

    From Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, loc 685-704: “Users happily do for free what companies would otherwise have to pay employees to do,” says former Wired editor turned drone manufacturer, Chris Anderson. It’s a capitalist’s dream come true. “It’s not outsourcing, it’s crowdsourcing. Collectively, customers have virtually unlimited time and energy; only peer production…

  • The knowledge economy and imagined freedom from material constraint 

    A speech by Ronald Reagan at Moscow State University on May 31st 1988. Reprinted in One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, Loc 7341-7365: “Like a chrysalis, we’re emerging from the economy of the Industrail Revolution—an economy confined to and limited by the Earth’s physical resources—into, as one economist titled his book, The Economy in…

  • Social media and populism 

    This excellent essay by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books raises an important issue about the forms of political mobilisation facilitated by social media: Trump has called himself the Hemingway of the 140 characters. He has ‘the best words’. He loves Twitter, he says, because it’s like having one’s own newspaper, but without…

  • An Introduction to the Accelerated Academy: by me and @Filvos

    Our opening talk at the second Accelerated Academy conference in Leiden in December: Some two years ago the two of us started discussing Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration and how it manifests in the present condition. Though we found his theory fascinating and provocative we also noted important conceptual and empirical problems with his…

  • Fighting for ‘political correctness’ in an age of Trump

    I’ve recently found myself thinking back to an argument which Jeff Weeks makes in The World We Have Won. From pg 7: The real achievement is that inequality has lost all its moral justification, and this has profoundly shifted the debate. Inequality now has to be justified in ways it never had to be before.…

  • CfP: Digital Netizens at the crossroads of sharing and privatising

    I’ve helped organise this session at IS4S 2017, see here for full application details: DIGITAL NETIZENS AT THE CROSSROADS OF SHARING AND PRIVATISING Organizers SIG Emergent Systems, Information and Society (supported by the Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin and the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science) and the Institut für Design Science München…

  • What is platform cooperativism?

    An admirably concise definition by Trebor Scholz on loc 432 of Uberworked and Underpaid: This term can be briefly described as follows: First, it is about cloning the technological heart of Uber, Task Rabbit, Airbnb, or UpWork. Platform cooperativism creatively embraces, adapts, or reshapes technologies of the sharing economy, putting them to work with different…

  • Mobilising a sharing economy revolution

    One of the most interesting things about so-called sharing economy companies is their mobilisation of users in defence of their political objectives. This is something which can prove uniquely urgent because of the sheer number of municipalities in which they operate, leaving them exposed to regulatory backlash particularly given their tendency to self-righteously disregard laws…

  • Charles Taylor: Ways Democracy Can Slip Away

    https://livestream.com/accounts/565635/events/6452335/videos/139152910/player?width=640&height=360&enableInfo=true&defaultDrawer=&autoPlay=true&mute=false

  • God View

    All the biggest platforms have it, only Uber is honest enough (or careless) enough to name it accurately. From loc 3962-3979 of Brad Stone’s The Upstarts: God View was an internal service that Uber made available to all of its employees, and it was one reason the company had grown so quickly. All of the…

  • The Political Economy of Attention

    I love this concise formulation by Trebor Scholz in Uberworked and Underpaid. From loc 338: Every day, one billion people in advanced economies have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them. 13 Capturing and monetizing those hours is the goal of platform capitalism.

  • Building the cult of airbnb

    From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 3490: In January 2013, Chesky hired a new head of community who shared his devotion to the cause —Douglas Atkin, a former advertising agency executive who had written a 2005 book, The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers, that drew business lessons from devotional sects…

  • Performing your faith in the great disruptive project

    I liked this snippet in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, describing how Belinda Jones went from consultant to being airbnb’s first in-house attorney. From loc 3212: She then won Chesky’s trust, in part by enthusiastically embracing the company’s sense of its own virtue, its near religious certainty of its position in the vanguard of a…

  • Airbnb and the Myth of ‘Us’

    Reading this section in Brad Stone’s The Upstarts, it occurred to me this faith* displayed by the airbnb founders is an interesting example of what Nick Couldry describes as ‘the myth of us’. From loc 2171: EJ had also raised fundamental questions about the safety of users on its site and Airbnb’s role as an…

  • Uber’s first experiment in mobilising their users

    This was back in 2012. There have been many more since and will be many more in future. From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 2871-2887: But Uber was going to need more than Tweets to sway the DC city council. First, colleagues remember, Kalanick sought the backing of the DC tech community and tried…

  • Technology, regulation and disruption

    One recurring theme in Brad Stone’s excellent The Upstarts is how technological assumptions encoded into legislation become focal points for conflicts with ‘disruptive’ companies. For instance, as loc 2348 illustrates, the novel dispatch system used by Uber complicated the distinction between taxis and livery cars: Stressing that Uber cars were not hailed or even electronically hailed…

  • What does techno-fascism look like?

    The emerging ideology of the tech-lords: A subculture within the industry that brought you Angry Birds is forming: the techlord. Techlords are the special subset of the nouveau riche who see themselves above the petty restrictions that apply to lesser people. They might feel that they possess an identity which is singled out for hate crimes by virtue of existing,…

  • Educational technology in an age of Trump: a risk to students?

    I find this suggestion by Audrey Watters extremely plausible. Full interview here. I think that education data should be a top priority under the new Trump regime. Schools are wildly obsessed with collecting data. They have been for a very long time, but new digital technologies have compelled them to collect even more, all with…

  • Removing Statute 24 constitutes a seismic shift in job security for all Warwick university employees

    An e-mail from UCU which everyone at Warwick needs to read: Removing Statute 24 constitutes a seismic shift in job security for all university employees What is at stake? Job Security for All Employees Abolishing all but one paragraph of Statute 24 will make it much easier and quicker to dismiss/discipline academic staff. If they…

  • Liberating discretionary effort by robbing your staff of a personal life

    There’s an interesting extract in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, concerning discretionary effort: what could your employees do if they were properly motivated? I’m fascinated by this concept because of its open-ended character. Once one begins to think like this, it’s always possible to imagine your employees doing more. The full actualisation of discretionary effort is a vanishing point and this…

  • Uber as a moral project

    When the Uber co-founders recount the story of their project, they stress the importance of the consumer to it. This might seem like familiar rhetoric but I want to suggest it reflects a deep (and problematic) commitment. In The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, we see how the early idea for Uber came to Garrett Camp when he…

  • The Workation

    I just came across this term in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 1828: Enjoying a modicum of momentum, Kalanick leased a new office in San Francisco but had a month before he could move in. Instead of waiting, he took the whole company to Thailand, where they worked eighteen-hour days out of cafés and…

  • The Internet Beyond Numbers

    This looks like a great conference. I long for a travel budget: Conference website: http://internetbeyond.net/en/ Key questions – The history of the internet: the development of the networks, local cases of technology adoption – The alternative networks, intranet, Fidonet as well as local small networks – Anthropological and ethnographic studies of the internet: how to…

  • Micro-tasking political activism

    This is disturbing, though unsurprising. How widespread could it get? Normative pressure is enough to lead to a removal at present but that seems unlikely to be a viable long-term counter-strategy: Someone out there really wants President Donald Trump’s polarizing nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, to get the job — so much so…

  • The spammy origins of Airbnb 

    From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, Loc 1519-1533: In late 2009, a few months after it had graduated from YC, Airbnb appeared to create a mechanism that automatically sent an e-mail to anyone who posted a property for rent on Craigslist, even if that person had specified that he did not want to receive unsolicited…

  • The ‘injustice’ that motivated Uber

    From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 771-786: On a separate night in Paris, the group went for drinks on the Champs-Élysées and then to an elegant late-night dinner that included wine and foie gras. At 2: 00 a.m., somewhat intoxicated after a night of revelry, they hailed a cab on the street. Apparently they…

  • The cultural lure of Silicon Valley

    Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 337-353 describes Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky’s preoccupation with Silicon Valley as a dissatisfied recent graduate of design school:  At the time he was obsessively following the story of the fantastically successful founders of the video-sharing site YouTube; he was spending hours on the site as well as watching Steve Jobs’s…

  • The most absurd television adverts of the dot-com boom

    Any suggestions of ones I should add to this list?  

  • What does it mean to be a public sociologist in the era of @realDonaldTrump?

    Abstract for my keynote at Public sociology and the role of the researcher: engagement, communication and academic activism In the summer of 2011, David Cameron’s response to the English riots was to declare that “this is criminality pure and simple”.  In the summer of 2013, then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper proclaimed that “this is not a…

  • DIGITAL EXISTENCE II: Precarious Media Life – Call for contributions

    Call for contributions “DIGITAL EXISTENCE II: Precarious Media Life” Conference October 30-November 1, 2017, at the Sigtuna Foundation, Sweden Digital media have the power to transform our existence, raising particular questions and vulnerabilities as part of the experience of being human in the digital age. Big data and hyperconnectivity, tracking and trolling, digital life and…