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  • CfP: Digital Inequalities and Discrimination in the Big Data Era

    *DIGITAL INEQUALITIES AND DISCRIMINATION IN THE BIG DATA ERA* *Preconference of the International Communication Association ’17* May 25, 2017, San Diego Hilton Bayfront, San Diego, California (USA) Co-sponsored by the Pacific ICTD Collaborative, the School of Communications (University of Hawaii at Manoa), and the Institute for Information Policy (Penn State University) *Abstracts due: February 10,…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #31

    Books I’ve read recently: Men Explain Things To Me And Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips The Monsters of Educational Technology by Audrey Watters Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek Working The Phones by Jamie Woodcock Conflict In The Academy by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert…

  • Epochal theorising and business bullshit

    I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of late modernity. It was the work of Bauman, Beck and Giddens which drew me into Sociology, presenting a till then cynical philosophy student with the possibility that one could meaningfully engage with the world and diagnose the times in a philosophical register. But coming to recognise the…

  • The marketing case for radical university leadership, or at least the pretence thereof

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 4896: Asserting that mankind had entered a new era in which the value of brands mattered far more than any material factors, Dru argued that successful brands would have to invent some high-profile scheme for identifying themselves with liberation; they would have to identify and attack…

  • Cultural representations of finance 

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 2230: For all the revulsion expressed by books like Liar’s Poker and Barbarians at the Gate, the dominant note was starstruck wonderment at these “masters of the universe,” at their millions and their manses, at their Gulfstream jets and Mercedes cars, at the high quality of…

  • Cartoons about the impact agenda 

    Source: http://www.europeanmovement.ie/ymip-conference-on-responsible-research-and-innovation/ Source: New Scientist

  • What does it mean to be an intellectual in an age of social media?

    In Zygmunt Bauman’s Legislators and Interpreters, he identifies two different contexts in which the role of the ‘intellectual’ is performed and two different strategies which develop in response to them: The legislator makes “authoritative statements” which “arbitrate in controversies of opinions and which selects those opinions which, having been selected, become correct and binding”. The…

  • “Open, good. Closed, bad. Tattoo it on your forehead”: Placing the technology sector in social and economic history

    I’m currently reading Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, a remarkably prescient book published in 2000 which has a lot of insight into contemporary cultures of technological evangelism. The book is concerned with what Frank sees as a transition in American life from a form of populism predicated on cultural reaction to one grounded in…

  • On Social Acceleration

    Earlier on this month, Hartmut Rosa gave a fascinating lecture at the LSE, marking the launch of this new book on the Sociology of Speed. It’s a great overview of his theory of acceleration, but it also included some things I hadn’t encountered before: His intellectual trajectory was shaped by encountering Charles Taylor’s work while…

  • The Importance of Business Culture

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 1787: It is worth examining the way business talk about itself, the fantasies it spins, the role it writes for itself in our lives. It is important to pay attention when CEOs tell the world they would rather surf than pray, show up at work in…

  • The Banal Bullshit of Thomas Friedman

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 1395: Friedman was in some ways the very embodiment of market populism at flood tide. As the intellectual life of the decade came to resemble a race among popular financial commentators to win for themselves, through a sort of cosmic optimism about all things dotcom, the…

  • Denial and the Antinomies of (Post)Truth

    Rarely can a film have been as timely as Denial. It tells the story of the libel action the holocaust denying historian David Irving took against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, alleging that she had damaged his professional reputation as a historian by claiming he had wilfully distorted evidence. The film recounts the events leading up to the trial,…

  • The Sociology of Predatory Publishing

    In a recent article on Derivace, Luděk Brož, Tereza Stöckelová and Filip Vostal reflect on the case of Wadim Strielkowski, whose over-enthusiastic game playing was the subject of extensive debate within the Czech academy. There are many factors which have, as a whole, led his prolific rate of publication to be regarded with deep suspicion, such as…

  • CfP: Public sociology and the role of the researcher

    Very pleased to be keynoting this fantastic BSA PhD conference in a couple of months: What is the role of the researcher outside the academy? This event invites Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers to innovate and critically reflect on three related areas of public sociology: academic activism, public engagement, and participation and co-production. It encourages researchers…

  • pirate philosophy in (and for) the digital university

    Some notes on Gary Hall’s Pirate Philosophy, a book I found more thought-provoking than any I’d read in some time. The podcast above is an interview I recorded with him a couple of months ago.  The forgetfulness of technology which critics like Stiegler argue afflicts contemporary thought also applies to the narrower world in which such…

  • Out trolling the trolls

    I’ve just finished reading the excellent This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips. It offers fascinating insights into the evolution of ‘trolling’ as a practice, leading from its original form of sub-cultural self-identification to the diffusion of the label across the entire spectrum of online activities deemed to be anti-social. Her…

  • The Launch of the Digital Geographies Group

    I’m very excited that the Digital Geographies working group of the Royal Geographical Society is now up and running. Find out more on their website here. Our aims are to: Provide a platform and intellectual community for geographers to engage in discussions of the digital and geography Help stimulate and deepen critical engagement and conceptualisation…

  • trying to write when you’re triaging

    In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started blogging again at a rate I haven’t in a number of years. The reason for this is to try and abate a growing problem with my writing. In the last year or so, I’ve found myself feeling increasingly overloaded and lacking mental bandwidth to a degree I…

  • Eric Schmidt’s Predictions for the Next Decade

  • some thoughts on the poetics of impact

    In the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the poetics of impact. I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about the impact agenda, initially suspecting that it might open up opportunities for valuable activity to be recognised within the increasingly restrictive confines of the accelerated academy. I wasn’t alone in this. This is how…

  • Pascalian Meditations on the Digital University

    Does the situation of skholḗ still obtain in the accelerated academy? This is what Bourdieu described as “the free time, freed from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world” (p. 1). This condition was always unevenly distributed, its ubiquity apparent only relative to one’s own elite status…

  • Social media for academics and the increasing toxicity of the online ecology

    In the last few months, I’ve begun to seriously plan a much more sophisticated follow-up to Social Media for Academics, investigating the implications of social media for academic labour. A crucial aspect of this, which seems likely to become much more so with each passing year, concerns the toxicity of many of the online environments in…

  • “Scholar? Nah, I’m a grants factory…”

    From The Research Impact Handbook, by Mark Reed, loc 1575: Andrew Derrington, in The Research Funding Toolkit , tries to help by conceiving of research as a “grants factory”, in which researchers churn out proposals dispassionately on a production line, starting work on the next proposal as soon as the last one is submitted, and…

  • Writing prompts for a PhD journal

    I’m a big advocate of the research journal as a key part of doing a PhD. I think blogs are wonderful for this but I realise this might not be for everyone. The important thing is uniting reflection and engagement as an habitual part of the research process. Patter has some great ideas here about topics…

  • The MOOC as a trojan horse

    I’ve long had an ambivalent relationship to MOOCs. In principle, I don’t see anything wrong with the idea of distance learning of this sort and they are something that I’ve personally enjoyed in the past. This is far from a ringing endorsement, in fact MOOCs leave me lukewarm in many respects, but I think it’s important…

  • Social Media For Academics: Things To Try

    https://twitter.com/i/moments/823131942279331840

  • The epistemology of democracy’s death

    In the last few weeks, I’ve written a few times about the epistemological questions posed by post-democracy. This notion put forward by Colin Crouch sees transitions within mature democracies as involving a hollowing out of democratic  structures rather than a dramatic shift to non-democracy. As he described it in a recent interview I did with…

  • Online Harassment

    In the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about online harassment. Even writing that sentence, I come face-to-face with my own privilege, as ‘online harassment’ is something I’m able to elect to think about rather than an unavoidable feature of my use of the internet. But the evidence is clear that online harassment…

  • Moral Responsibility in an Age of Distraction

    What’s the moral status of ‘thoughtlessness’? It can be invoked as a defence, used to claim that an action was less morally problematic because it expressed a lack of consideration rather than a deliberate intention. But as the wise Jim Gordon once pointed out, such actions can actually be worse in a way, reflecting a wilful…

  • Against ‘openness’

    From The Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 1530: We act at our peril as if “open” is politically neutral, let alone politically good or progressive. Indeed, we sometimes use the word to stand in place of a politics of participatory democracy. We presume that, because something is “open” that it necessarily contains…

  • The forward-facing ideology of technology: erasing history and context 

    From The Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 611: I think that’s something for you to keep in mind as you work your way through this course. It’s something to think about when we start to imagine and to build “education at scale.” What happens to context? What happens to local, regional education…

  • How universities shape the technology developed for them

    From The Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 563: Why are we building learning management systems? Why are we building computer-assisted instructional tech? Current computing technologies demand neither. Open practices don’t either. Rather, it’s a certain institutional culture and a certain set of business interests that do. What alternatives can we build? What…

  • Social media for academics and the dangers of a “content delivery” mindset

    In her superb The Monsters of Educational Technology, Audrey Watters makes a convincing case that innovation in educational technology has been dominated by the trope of ‘content delivery’. New technologies are seen to improve content delivery in a variety of ways: scale, speed, cost etc. But this is a limited and limiting conception of education,…

  • The Banal Reality of Democracy’s Death

    There are two issues which have long fascinated me that seem more salient with each passing day. Our struggle to conceptualise long term social change from within (particularly the possibility of civilisational collapse) and the transition away from democratic government. Cinematic spectacle dominates the imaginary through we conceive of either, whether this is our imagery of what a collapsed…

  • Deadline soon! @TheSocReview ECR Essay Competition

    We invite essays exploring the future of sociology in its relationships with other cognate disciplines such as anthropology and geography. Echoing The Sociological Review’s Manifesto, we seek to encourage reflections on ‘what could be thought differently, and how that creates possibilities for what could and should be done next’. We are particularly interested in contributions…

  • ‘Disruption’ as the last refuge of the Third Way

    A couple of months ago, The New Statesman carried an interview with Tony Blair for the first time in a long time. Leaving aside how haunted the man looked in the portrait accompanying it, what stood out to me about it was how readily he had incorporated techno-speak into the language of the third way. Here are some…

  • Quit social media

    A provocative argument put forward by someone who’s built a high-profile secondary career through blogging:

  • Some recent videos of Harmut Rosa talking about social acceleration

  • Two Visions of our Automated Retail Future

    In the last month, I’ve seen two scenes of automated retail which I wish I could have taken a photograph of. In the first scene, people were queuing up for the automated checkouts at Marks & Spencer in Euston station while multiple cashiers were left redundant at their station. It’s a shop I use a lot and I…

  • Notes on Platform Capitalism

    In Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek seeks to address what he sees as a profound oversight in the existing literature on digital capitalism. One set of contributions focuses on emerging technologies and their implications for privacy and surveillance but ignores the economic analysis of ownership and profitability. Another set critically analyses the values embodied in corporate behaviour but…

  • The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?

    The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation? This international conference aims at exploring the digital everyday, understood as the transformation of everyday life practices brought about by digital technology. From how we buy, walk around, get a cab, love, break up, go to bed, meet new people and sexual partners to the way we rate services,…

  • CfP: The Future Between Progress and Regression

    By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become “second nature” of sorts for social theorists to be reluctant to address explicitly the future of western societies, capitalism, modern democracy, and human civilization. After postmodernist critics in the social sciences and the humanities, had highlighted the affinity between utopianism and forms of totalitarianism, social…

  • The (un)productive chaos of disciplines

    An interesting extract from Conflict In The Academy, by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert. From loc 556-569: As Wyn Grant has noted in reference to the history of the discipline of Political Science in the United Kingdom, ‘intellectual openness and tolerance of eclecticism has its merits, but if it is allowed to become too uncontrolled…

  • Some thoughts on platform capitalism, cash hoarding, innovation and ideology

    There’s an excellent discussion in Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism of the immense cash reserves that technology companies have built up in recent years. As he notes, the headline figures don’t tell the whole story because these reserves don’t take into account the other debts and liabilities of these corporations. But the broader financial context is one in…

  • South Park’s theory of trolling: Trevor’s Axiom

  • The Distraction of the Networked Writer

  • Discipline and innovate 

    I really like this overview in Conflict in the Academy, by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert, concerning the conflicting pressures towards discipline and innovation which afflict all disciplines. From loc 408-421: We would like to suggest that the story of the MacCabe controversy ought to be placed within a broader account of disciplinary professionalisation, one…

  • It looks like you’re trying to write a digital detox piece

    Fabulous chart from @ordinal:

  • The self-importance of researchers

    This interesting aside in Jamie Woodcock’s superb Working The Phones is worthy of further discussion. From loc 2698: Researchers often attribute a level of importance to their own research that is not shared by others, assuming that because they spend so much time on it others will want to know all about it too. How does…

  • Academic exceptionalism and the black-boxing of academic labour

    This introduction to Conflict in the Academy, by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert, nicely captures something I’ve been preoccupied by recently. From loc 63: we would like to suggest that tired clichés of ‘ivory towers’ and ‘dreaming spires’, or even more self-complementary myths of universities as platonic institutions directed towards disinterested enlightenment lead to an…

  • What did I do in 2016?

    Spurred on by this post from Mark Johnson, who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time this year and co-authoring a paper with, here’s a round up of what I did in 2016: Wrote a paper for the Centre for Social Ontology book series about the digitalisation of the archive. Co-wrote a…

  • The Elite Roots of the Alt-Right

    A fascinating Jacob article about the roots of contemporary alt-right racism in mainstream elite discourse in Conservative America: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-dallas-texas/

  • Why Academics Must Use Social Media

    An interesting conversation between Eric Stoller and David Webster:  

  • What are ‘recognition triggers’ in scholarly publishing?

    An interesting concept from John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture which I think has important implications for scholarly publishing. From pg 276-277: Oprah and Richard and Judy are prime examples of what I shall call ‘recognition triggers’. I use the term ‘recognition trigger’ to refer to those drivers of sales that have three characteristics. First, they…

  • Was Sloterdijk an early originator of contemporary right populism?

    Reading the excellent Selected Exaggerations, a book of interviews with Peter Sloterdijk, I was struck by his remarks about taxation and the state in an interview from 2001. He bemoans the punitive taxation he claims exists in Germany, arguing that it reflects a broader domination of society by the state. German citizens are “punished for success” and the…

  • On Teaching Theory

    This short exchange with Michael Burawoy offers some thought-provoking reflections on teaching social theory. He identifies the major traditions of teaching theory within American sociology, before outlining his own ethnographic approach: The Survey: surveying extracts from a comprehensive range of social theorists, each one treated as an instance of a broader category. Essentially disconnected and decontextualised. Teaching theory in an…

  • The Happy Unemployment of Horses

    From Peter Sloterdick’s Selected Exaggerations, loc 1411-1416 Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn’t it an odd comment on today’s society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans…

  • The challenge of writing in the accelerated academy, part 3

    At the end of his Learning To Write Badly, Michael Billig offers an evocative analogy to describe the predicament he faces in writing a call to rethink our writing practices. From pg 208: Perhaps a better analogy would be that I am stuck by the side of a large highway, as the trucks go pounding…

  • The challenge of writing in the accelerated academy, part 2

    The upwards trajectory of publication poses an obvious problem for the aspiring academic. It is one familiar from other fields of cultural production. How to be heard above the din? If ever more publications are being produced each year, commanding ever less attention from a peer group increasingly consumed by the imperative to publish, vast rewards…

  • My 20 favourite graphic novels of 2016

    DMZ by Brian Wood Outcast by Robert Kirkman Fatale by Ed Brubaker Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan Roche Limit by Michael Moreci Criminal by Ed Brubaker The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker Super Crooks by Mark Millar The Fuse by Shari Chankhamma They’re Not Like Us by Eric Stephenson Postal by Matt Hawkins Trees by Warren Ellis Injection by Warren Ellis Moon…

  • My 20 favourite books of 2016

    Depth by Lev Ac Rosen Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet by Finn Brunton Rethinking Interdisciplinarity by Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald Accelerating Academia by Filip Vostal The Refusal of Work by David Frayne Intern Nation: How To Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy by Ross Perlin Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of…

  • The proliferation of books

    From Merchants of Culture, by John Thompson, pg 238. In the United States: The number of new books published in the US each year prior to 1980 was probably under 50,000. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of new books published greatly increased, reaching nearly 200,000 by 1998. By 2004 the number had risen…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #30

    Books I’ve read recently: SS-GB by Len Deighton The Elephant in the Room by Jon Ronson Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance How To Write Badly by Michael Billig Graphic novels I’ve read recently:  Catwoman: When In Rome by Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale Sons of Anarchy: Volume 6 by Ryan Ferrier, Matias Bergara and Paul Little…

  • Academic Celebrities and the Transformation of Publishing

    In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he makes a number of observations about the importance of brand-name writers which could easily be applied to the growth of academic celebrities within scholarly publishing. From pg 212-214 Brand-name authors are important for two reasons: first, their sales are predictable, and second, they are repeaters. Their sales are…

  • Carrying the weight of the world

    I love this expression from Peter Sloterdijk’s Selected Exaggerations loc 944: Carrying the weight of the world is an art that can be practised in many different ways. I think it is right to say that it is fundamentally the same art. It consists of answers to the burdensome nature of life … This is…

  • Metrics and the death of imagination

    In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, there’s an interesting remark about the structural position of first time authors which I think has wider purchase. From pg 200: Ironically, in a world preoccupied by numbers, the author with no track is in some ways in a strong position, considerably stronger than the author who has published…

  • The challenge of writing in the accelerated academy

    In the nine years since I first entered a Sociology department, I’ve had a deep interest in academic writing that has only increased with time. In my past life as a philosophy student, writing had never occurred to me as a topic of intellectual interest. Despite having once aspired to be a writer before concluding…

  • A collection of definitions of ‘Impact’

    A compilation from Colin Chandler on pg 7-8 of Achieving Impact in Research: To have impact is to have a strong effect, to make a difference. By impact we mean the ‘influence’ of research or its ‘effect on’ an individual, a community, the development of policy, or the creation of a new product or service. It…

  • Bounded autonomy in the workplace

    In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he describes what might be termed the bounded autonomy enjoyed by some editorial teams within publishing houses. From pg 128: the devolution of editorial decision-making to small editorial teams operating with a high degree of autonomy within certain financial parameters is the best way to maximize your chances of…

  • Next week in Oxford: Digital Sociology v STS

    Wednesday 7th December 2016, 13:00 The Oxford Internet Institute 1st Giles Oxford, OX1 3JS The concept of Digital Sociology has been in circulation for around five years now. But if the British Sociological Association’s annual conference is anything to go by, ‘the digital’ is still on the periphery of British Sociology. Perhaps problematically, Digital Sociology shares…

  • Communism for the few

    From Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, by Peter Frase, loc 1370-1383: Ironically, the life enjoyed within Elysium’s bubble appears not too different from the Communist scenario sketched out several chapters earlier. The difference, of course, is that it is communism for the few. And indeed, we can already see tendencies in this direction in our…

  • Digital Capitalism and Guard Labour

    An interesting thread I’m following up from Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. This is Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev on ‘guard labour‘: Another dubious first for America: We now employ as many private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in 1980. And that’s just…

  • The Climate Agenda of Elites

    From Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, loc 234-246: the key question surrounding climate change is not whether climate change is occurring, but rather who will survive the change. Even in the worst-case scenarios, scientists are not arguing that the Earth will become totally uninhabitable. What will happen—and is happening—is that struggles over space and resources…

  • Living with theoretical pluralism

    How do we live with theoretical pluralism? It’s too often a matter of ‘peace treaties’, avoiding fights by moving disagreements off-stage. But if we do this then are we really occupying the same argumentative space? I don’t think we are and the intellectual value of theoretical pluralism is lost if we find ourselves in such…

  • The Political Economy of the American South

    From Paul Theroux’s Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, pg 48: I was to hear this story all over the rural South, in the ruined towns that had been manufacturing centers, sustained by the making of furniture, or appliances, or roofing materials, or plastic products, the labor-intensive jobs that kept a town ticking over.…

  • This week: the second Accelerated Academy

    30 November-2 December 2016, Leiden (Scheltema, Marktsteeg 1) Conference organisers Sarah de Rijcke, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University Björn Hammarfelt, University of Borås, Sweden | Leiden University Alex Rushforth, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University Scientific committee Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick Tereza Stöckelová, Czech Academy of Sciences Filip Vostal,…

  • Why are there 3 philosophy magazines but no sociology one?

    I just spotted New Philosopher for the first time, in an airport newsagents. I’ve occasionally bought or subscribed to Philosopher’s Magazine and Philosophy Now in the past. That makes three popular magazines about philosophy aimed at a general audience. Why such an abundance of philosophy magazines and yet no comparable sociology publications? Is it because the…

  • Five propositions about #publicsociology

    Some thoughts after yesterday’s public sociology day in Manchester: The meaning of ‘public sociology’ is not always self-evident and the enthusiasm of the impulse expressed through the term can cloud its meaning yet further. We need to be clear about what we are doing and why. This clarity can help us negotiate the ambivalent spaces…

  • What is ‘the literature’?

    My experience of watching the literature on asexuality spiral from a handful of papers ever through to new ones each month has left me fascinated by how quickly ‘the literature’ can become unmanageable. Within a relatively small and nascent field, it’s possible to grasp ‘the literature’ as a totality. But past a certain point, circumscribing…

  • The lineaments of techno-fascism

    A fascinating essay exploring the possible relationship between Nick Land’s right-accelerationism and possible future techno-reactionary movements: Nick Land, like Moldbug and many other neoreactionaries, typically shuns the term “fascist.” Admittedly, they have some good reasons to do so: despite NRx racism and authoritarianism, its political economy is closer to Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore than Hitler’s Reich.…

  • The substitute socialisation of the marine corp

    From J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, pg 173-174: The Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene, or personal finances. I took mandatory classes about balancing a checkbook, saving, and investing. When I came home from boot camp with my fifteen-hundred-dollar earnings…

  • Social Media and Public Sociology

    Notes for The Practice of Public Sociology It can seem obvious that there’s some relationship between social media and public sociology. After all, these are platforms which offer free, instantaneous and immediate access to audiences ranging from the tens of millions to the billions. However unpacking the relationship between social media and public sociology requires we…

  • The Affectivity of the Nascent Tyrant

    By far the best film I’ve seen this year was The Childhood of a Leader. It recounts a number of episodes in the life of a nascent tyrant, exploring the emergence of what is hinted to be a boundless rage that might one day transform the world: I’ve been thinking about this film since encountering Auden’s…

  • Towards a sociology of Pikettyville

    From this fascinating paper by Roger Burrows, Richard Webber and Rowland Atkinson: To talk of ‘Pikettyville’ is then to conjure up an image of an urban system that has become hardwired to adopting, channelling and inviting excesses of social and economic capital in search of a space in which the rich not only find safe haven…

  • No longer praying at the altar of virality

    An important idea offered by Mike Caulfield. The embrace of frictionless sharing and the relentless pursuit of engagement have created the problems which are now being naturalised by the emerging ‘did Facebook lead to Trump’ discourse: We have prayed at the altar of virality a long time, and I’m not sure it’s working out for us…

  • Chronosolidarity

    In Work’s Intimacy, Melissa Gregg pays much attention to the challenge faced by part-time workers in knowledge industries. Many of her participants within this category reported regularly finding themselves checking e-mail outside of their paid hours, something they saw as necessary to ensure they were ‘prepared’. In this way, ‘catch up days’ become an unpaid accompaniment…

  • A vicious circle of reprisals and hostility

    From this week’s Economist leader. I suspect they’re underestimating the extent to which Trump will largely enact the Ryan-ist mainstream in economic policy. However they’re surely correct about the underlying dynamic: Trump’s policies intensifying the conditions which gave rise to him, creating more anger and encouraging the ethno-nationalist channeling of that anger as a political…

  • The Practice of Public Sociology: Sociological Review Early Career Event

    We’ve recently had some cancellations for the forthcoming event, The Practice of Public Sociology: Sociological Review Early Career Event.  If you would like one of these places, please registered here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-practice-of-public-sociology-sociological-review-early-career-event-tickets-28652394082  The Practice of Public Sociology Manchester Digital Laboratory, November 24th, Manchester For over a decade public sociology has been a mainstream topic of discussion…