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  • Zizek on the impossibility of anarchism 

    My commitment to anarchism is something which ended with sociology, more specifically when I realised that I understood anarchism to entail the overcoming of social structure. Seeing that as a conceptual impossibility, I came to see anarchism as untenable. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, not least of all because it’s become clear…

  • How to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe

    A really interesting section from Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, analysing the challenging facing populist movements who have mobilised successfully around an imagined national unity. From pg 144: At a more directly political level, US foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of how to exert damage-control by way of re-channelling a popular uprising into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist…

  • Social Media and Academic Labour, June 27th in Leeds

    Speaker: Dr Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick & The Sociological Review With Response from Dr Darren Nixon, Sociology at Leeds Beckett University In recent years, we’ve begun to see social media move from the periphery to the mainstream of academic practice. But what does this mean for academic labour? While much of the discussion concerns…

  • Sublime imagined unity as a political factor

    I wish I’d read Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise before writing my fragile movement’s paper, because this is exactly what I was trying to explore: how does this ‘imaginary unity at its most sublime’ inform popular perceptions of the mobilising potential of social media? From pg 97: The ongoing events in Egypt provide yet another example…

  • Super-ego individualization

    The ideas are pretty familiar but I nonetheless really like this section from Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 86. I’m trying to use the notion of cognitive triage to explore how obsessive self examination subtracts from time and energy actionable for working with others to address social issues. A series of situations that characterize today’s…

  • Debt as an instrument of post-democratic control

    From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 46. A mechanism which operates at every level, from the individual to the international: A decade or so ago, Argentina decided to repay its debt to the IMF ahead of time (with financial help from Venezuela). The IMF’s reaction was on the face of it surprising: instead of being…

  • The Psychoanalytics of Temporising

    In my recent work, I’ve been writing a lot about ‘temporising’, a concept I borrowed from Margaret Archer’s work in the hope of developing it further. In the reflexivity sense, temporising involves trying to find a solution to a present dilemma through the exercise of temporal agency. I spoke earlier did this week at a…

  • The paradox of personalisation 

    From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 57. This isn’t necessarily the case but it’s a claim that holds true in the absence of personal tech skills and a disposition to  exercise then: The paradox is that, the more the small item (smartphone or iPod) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use, ‘transparent’…

  • Freeing those who govern from the constraints of democracy

    From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 35. As he goes on to say on pg 107, “the ‘eternal’ marriage between democracy and capitalism is nearing divorce.” These elites, the main culprits for the 2008 financial meltdown, now impose themselves as experts, the only ones who can lead us on the painful path of financial recovery,…

  • Reclaiming ‘aspiration’ for the left 

    This is powerful stuff from Corbyn in his recent LSE lecture: I am not talking here about the aspiration of the delusional Del Boys – “This time next year Rodney, we’ll be millionaires” – not the importation of the individualist American Dream. (As an aside, the US comedian George Carlin once said “They call it…

  • The lonely monads of digital capitalism

    From an essay by Franco Berardi quoted in Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise: These lonely monad walks in the urban space in tender continuous interaction with the pictures, tweets, games coming out of their small screens, perfectly insulated and perfectly wired into the smooth interface of the flow http://th-rough.eu/writers/bifo-eng/journey-seoul-1

  • The EU: a flawed democracy whose failures are fuelling the rise of fascism?

    A powerful polemic by Paul Mason in the Guardian arguing that the post-democratic character of the EU is intimately connection to the reemergence of fascism across Europe: All this suggests that those of us who want Brexit in order to reimpose democracy, promote social justice and subordinate companies to the rule of law should bide…

  • The price fixing conspiracies of the platform economy 

    A great analysis of a hugely important case being heard in the near future: The immediate threat takes the form of an antitrust class action lawsuit against its co-founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, which will be litigated in the Manhattan courtroom of Federal District Judge Jed Rakoff starting on November 1. At issue is Uber’s…

  • Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor

    Very keen to write something for this, perhaps engaging with the slow professor movement: Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor // Organizations, Occupations and Work Below is a call for papers for The Precariat and The Professor. Abstracts/proposals (limited to 200 words) are due 7/1. Submissions, inquiries and questions should be directed to…

  • Call for papers: everyday analysis 

    I’m tempted to try and write something for this, though not sure what yet: Call-for-Papers Deadline: June 20th 2016. This summer Everyday Analysis will publish an online collection of articles on the subject of Politics in attempt to expand the conversations in our forthcoming book Politactics, out later in the year with Zero Books. If…

  • The Scale of Data Brokerage

    I knew data brokerage was big but I didn’t realise it was this big. From The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin, loc 1039: Epsilon is reputed to own data on 300 million company loyalty card members worldwide, with a databank holding data related to 250 million consumers in the United States alone (Edwards 2013). Acxiom…

  • Escaping the digital cage

    A lovely passage from Lisa Gitelman at Loc 78 of her edited collection “Raw Data” Is An Oxymoron about the difficulty of going ‘off grid’ when the utilities of daily life leave us bound into the digital cage: Try to spend a day “off the grid” and you’d better leave your credit and debit cards, transit…

  • Overlapping categories and the problem of abundance

    An interesting snippet from Digital Methods, by Richard Rogers, loc 1883: To an “Internet cataloger” writing a well-known essay in 1998, Yahoo! was making a significant contribution to newfangled online library science, not only by its classification scheme but also by the means of content “navigation” it developed. Yahoo!’s system differed from that of a…

  • Coping with acceleration: triaging strategies and the new empiricism

    Notes for a talk next week My concern in this short talk is not to diagnose the underlying conditions which generate an acceleration of social life, or indeed the various experiences which differently placed actors have of such acceleration. Instead, I’m interested in the novel and deeply reflexive cultural forms arising under these conditions, as what…

  • Workshop: Using the Morphogenetic Approach

    June 21st, 10am to 5pm The University of Warwick This one day workshop is intended for those currently using or planning to use the morphogenetic approach in their research. In the first half of the workshop, Margaret Archer will give an overview of the morphogenetic approach and its development, as well as address conceptual and…

  • The death of cyberspace

    Another really interesting idea from Digital Methods by Richard Rogers. He dates the ‘death of cyberspace’ as symbolically taking place with the first legal assertion of geography over virtuality. From loc 833: The symbolic end of cyberspace may be located in the lawsuit against Yahoo! in May 2000, brought before the Tribunal de Grande Instance…

  • The myth of user generated content

    From Digital Methods, by Richard Rogers, loc 769: research has found that there is only a tiny ratio of editors to users in Web 2.0 platforms, including Wikipedia, illustrating what is known as the myth of user-generated content. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has often remarked that the dedicated community is indeed relatively small, at just…

  • The misleading concept of ‘the blogosphere’

    From Digital Methods, by Richard Rogers, loc 671-688: The “sphere” in “blogosphere” refers in spirit to the public sphere; it also may suggest the geometrical form, in which all points on the surface are the same distance from the center or core. One could think of such an equidistance as an egalitarian ideal, in which…

  • Challenging Citizenship: Social Media and Big Data

    A special issue I’m really looking forward to reading: The Journal for Computer Supported Cooperative Work has a special issue on the impact of social media and big data on citizenship.  It appears evident that the emergence of social media platforms and data practices challenges our traditional understanding of citizenship. This special issue investigates telling…

  • 2016 Challenging Media Landscapes conference, November 2016

    This looks like an excellent conference: 2016 Challenging Media Landscapes Conference Access, Participation and the Mediatised World CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS: SUBMISSION DEADLINE WED 22 JUNE SUBMIT PROPOSALS TO: artdes-cmlabstracts@salford.ac.uk http://blogs.salford.ac.uk/research/2016/04/19/2016-challenging-media-landscapes-conference/ Conference date: Monday 14 November 2016 Venue:  MediacityUK, Salford, Manchester. This conference is hosted and organized by the University of Salford and is…

  • The Utopian Promise of Cyberspace

    From Code 2.0 by Larry Lessig, loc 159: Born in a research project in the Defense Department, 1cyberspace too arose from the unplanned displacement of a certain architecture of control. The tolled, single-purpose network of telephones was displaced by the untolled and multipurpose network of packet-switched data. And thus the old one-to-many architectures of publishing…

  • Places Still Available: The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture

    There are a few places left for The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture.  The lecture will be followed by a wine reception.  It is free to attend, but places must be reserved in advance by emailing [events@thesociologicalreview.com] The Great Divide: Sociology, Anthropology, and Race in France since Lévi-Strauss Professor Éric Fassin (Université Paris-8) Discussants: Professor…

  • Conceptualising ‘distraction’

    Notes for my talk for the Reflexivity Forum at Warwick on May 24th What does it mean to be distracted? For the last year, I’ve been telling people that I’m working on a new project about digital distraction and everyone seems to immediately grasp what I mean by this. But conceptualising precisely what we should…

  • Interested in the internal conversation? Come to this symposium @SocioWarwick on May 24th

    Following on from a succesful event this time last year, we’re organising another reflexivity forum. We potentially have one more speaking slot available but we’re still keen for others to come along for the discussion. Here’s the programme for the day: E-mail me: mark@markcarrigan.net if you’d like to register – please do so ASAP though as I’ll be…

  • The Great Divide: Sociology, Anthropology, and Race in France since Lévi-Strauss

    The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture  Friday May 20th 2016, 17.45-21.00 SOAS, University of London This event is free but it is essential to register. To reserve a place, please email Jenny Thatcher [events@thesociologicalreview.com]. Keynote: Professor Éric Fassin (Université Paris-8)  Discussants: Professor Gurminder K Bhambra (University of Warwick, UK and Linnaeus University, Sweden) and Dr…

  • 19 interesting ways to communicate knowledge

    hrough Design Fiction (e.g. Zero Hours) Through Social Fiction (e.g. Low Fat Love) Through Visual Journalism (e.g. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt) Through Visual Biography (e.g. Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City) Through Graphic Novels (I lack examples of this – I’m also aware the distinction between ‘graphic novels’ and ‘visual…

  • “They were stalking the corridors, the lecture rooms, the offices…”: open research, ethics and impact

    The Last Seminar by Stan Cohen must surely merit consideration as the strangest paper ever to appear in a Sociology journal. It tells the story of a gradual invasion of the university campus by those who are neither expected nor welcome: research participants. Encountering  strangely familiar figures in their everyday working lives, befuddled sociologists suddenly begin to…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #22

    The Quantified Self by Deborah Lupton Losing The Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff Creepiness by Adam Kotsko The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss Shadow Work by Craig Lambert Graphic Novels: Sex: Broken Toys by Joe Casey Sex: Daisy Chain by Joe Casey Super Crooks by Mark Millar Pride & Joy by Garth Ennis Velvet by…

  • Open research projects

    I’m really interested in this concept of ‘open research projects’ which I just encountered on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list.  We recently launched our survey <http://digitallyliterate.net/announcement/tltsurvey/&gt; to collect participant data. Click here to go directly to the survey. <https://cofc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_d08stZ0o2NwWLWd&gt; We will follow-up with interviews of participants using survey data and snowball sampling. This…

  • What’s it like to be a corporate executive receiving an order to cooperate with an authoritarian government?

    An interesting, albeit brief, answer to this question in Losing the Signal, pg 210-211: A senior official from Egypt’s telecommunications regulator had just called to deliver an ultimatum, she said. State-owned Telecom Egypt had yanked the plug on BlackBerry service in the country, and it would stay off-line until RIM handed over encryption keys for…

  • Interested in the internal conversation? Come to this symposium @SocioWarwick on May 24th

    Following on from a succesful event this time last year, we’re organising another reflexivity forum. We potentially have one more speaking slot available but we’re still keen for others to come along for the discussion. Here’s the programme for the day: E-mail me: mark@markcarrigan.net if you’d let to register – please do so ASAP though as I’ll…

  • 28,100 journals publishing 2.5 million articles a year

    Thanks to @irenehames for pointing out there’s a new version of this annual report I’ve drawn from in the past. There were about 28,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals in late 2014 (plus a further 6450 non-English-language journals), collectively publishing about 2.5 million articles a year. http://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf

  • Before WhatsApp there was BBM

    From Losing the Signal, pg 203: The most compelling feature driving BlackBerry sales in the developing world wasn’t wireless e-mail but another application that had been included with devices since the mid-2000s: BlackBerry Messenger. While BlackBerry was losing the app race in North America, BBM was establishing itself as BlackBerry’s first “killer app” since wireless…

  • The King of Kong: a documentary about celebrity gamers

    And another documentary, via @Carwyn:

  • My highlights from #RPten (and the most interesting stuff I missed)

    There’s quite a bit of stuff I did see (e.g. my good friend @NotRightRuth‘s excellent talk) and one specific session I wish I had seen (on BitCoin) which hasn’t been uploaded yet. Stuff I missed and want to watch: 

  • How life coaching spreads in corporate cultures

    From Losing the Signal, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s history of Research In Motion, pg 179: Bruised by the Storm experience and confused by the apparent rift between Balsillie and Lazaridis, executives feuded more frequently over turf and for the attention of their CEOs. Some turned to Don Morrison, the company’s kindly Father Time, who…

  • Predictive analytics and the intensification of work

    Yesterday I blogged about the impossible demands placed upon staff as a management strategy. What happens if you fail to meet these demands? This is an important question but it’s one which becomes even more crucial if, as seems likely, predictive analytics hits human resources departments: Candidate Pre-screening – One of HR’s Best “Predictive Analytics…

  • The Accelerative Ethos of Steve Jobs

    From the Commencement address Steve Jobs gave on June 12, 2005: When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have…

  • A cautionary tale for independent researchers

    A terrifically honest post from Frances Coppola about the difficulties she has faced as an independent researcher. As I embark in a roughly similar direction, I’m worried this is what the future has in store for me, particularly when working within an organisational culture that is disturbingly ill-attuned to the idea of paying people for their…

  • The size of social networks and the size of nation states

    A really interesting way of looking at this:

  • What happens in an internet minute?

    HT @simonlindgren

  • Call for Applications: The Inaugural CUHK Research Summit: Digital Methods & Social Development

    This looks really interesting: Call for Applications: The Inaugural CUHK Research Summit: Digital Methods & Social Development Time: 21 – 27 August 2016 Place: C-Centre (Centre for Chinese Media & Comparative Communication Research), School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong Map of Location: http://ow.ly/4nj3Wu <http://ow.ly/4nj3Wu> Event flyer:…

  • What would techno-fascist punishment look like?

    Perhaps something rather like this. From a disturbing but important article: The scary thing about VR as a torture device is its versatility. “It’s difficult to conceive of the upper limits of distress. The human mind’s capacity for suffering is tremendously vast,” the people at BeAnotherLab told me, “as is human ingenuity to cause suffering…

  • Call for Papers: Communities of Practice: Toward a Local and Global Digital Humanities

    CALL FOR PAPERS Communities of Practice: Toward a Local and Global Digital Humanities This special collection will explore the potential impact of information technology and digital media on humanities research communities. The editors encourage a wide range of novel and interdisciplinary approaches to this theme. We seek submissions dedicated to describing community formation and collaboration…

  • The Second Accelerated Academy

    Good news! This week it was learnt that CWTS will play host to the second annual conference ‘The Accelerated Academy: Evaluation, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life’. Generously sponsored by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, the event will take place from 30th November to 2nd December 2016 in the beautiful city-centre of…

  • Music to catch up on work to #1

  • Imposing impossible demands as a management strategy

    There’s a great story in Losing the Signal, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s history of Research In Motion, relating how the management responded to the threat of the iPhone: promise an ever more amazing phone to wireless carriers and then simply demand that the engineering team produce it on a minimal timescale. From pg 142: RIM…

  • When phones became computers

    A really important bit of history recounted in Losing the Signal, pg 139-140, a really excellent book about the history of Research In Motion: In the summer of 2007, however, Lazaridis cracked open a phone that gave him pause. “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,” he marveled after peering inside one of the new…

  • Using social media to map scholarly literatures

    At a time when there are more than 28,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed journals publishing around 1.8-1.9 million articles per year, finding ways to navigate scholarly literatures are more important than ever. This is one of the most exciting ways in which social media can be used to directly enhance scholarly practice. There are many forms this can…

  • The Sociology of Patent Trolling

    In their interesting history of the rise and fall of Research In Motion, Losing the Signal, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff describe how close a patent troll came to taking down what was at the time becoming the dominant player in the nascent market for smart phones. A patent was salvaged from a failed company and…

  • It’s not you, it’s capitalism

    This essay on Medium has reminded me of my idea to write a short satirical self-help book, addressing individual problems as social and economic issues:   If I am struggling financially it is because the financial system is morally corrupt. This truth is a mantric elixir — repeat it to yourself every time the habits of your mind…

  • The London Radical Book Fair at Goldsmiths, this Saturday 7th May

    Radical booksellers, publishers, artists and activists of all stripes are setting up in the Great Hall at Goldsmiths University to host the 4th London Radical Bookfair.  With over 130 exhibitors and 20 guest speakers, this will be a unique gathering of progressive readers, thinkers and doers, in a celebration of radical publishing and politics.  The…

  • Symposium: Reorientating Sociological Thought

    Re-orienting Sociological Thought?                                Glamorgan Council Chamber, Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences Cardiff University 2pm to 4pm, Wednesday, May 11th 2016 In recent years, we’ve seen the proliferation of calls to reorientate sociological thought around new concerns, methodologies and approaches that can ground the discipline in changing times. This symposium brings together advocates of…

  • Workshop: Using the Morphogenetic Approach

    June 21st, 10am to 5pm The University of Warwick This one day workshop is intended for those currently using or planning to use the morphogenetic approach in their research. In the first half of the workshop, Margaret Archer will give an overview of the morphogenetic approach and its development, as well as address conceptual and…

  • Lucy Powell on Conservative anti-Semitism in the last election

    Something to remember as the Tory-led condemnation of Labour’s alleged anti-Semitism reaches fever pitch: Shadow education minister Lucy Powell ran day-to-day operations for Labour’s 2015 general election campaign. That year’s dog-whistle consisted of telling the electorate, again and again, that Labour had never apologised for destroying the economy, and that Ed Miliband stabbed his brother…

  • The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture

    The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture  Friday May 20th 2016, 17.45-21.00 SOAS, University of London This event is free but it is essential to register. To reserve a place, please email Jenny Thatcher [events@thesociologicalreview.com]. Keynote: Professor Éric Fassin (Université Paris-8)  Discussants: Professor Gurminder K Bhambra (University of Warwick, UK and Linnaeus University, Sweden) and Dr…

  • The Social Life of Theory: Partiality, Conflict and Innovation

    Clearing out my stock of library books, some of which I’ve had for a number of years, I’ve inevitably been drawn into looking through books I was once excited about before subsequently forgetting. Jeff Alexander’s Twenty Lecture in Social Theory is foremost among these, as a book I’d skim read but on second reading is…

  • Symposium: Reorientating Sociological Thought

    Re-orienting Sociological Thought?                                Glamorgan Council Chamber, Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences Cardiff University 2pm to 4pm, Wednesday, May 11th 2016 In recent years, we’ve seen the proliferation of calls to reorientate sociological thought around new concerns, methodologies and approaches that can ground the discipline in changing times. This symposium brings together advocates of…

  • Breathe for me: interesting performance event in collaboration with @sociowarwick

    Breathe For Meby Martin O’Brien Thu 5 May 2016 – 7.45pm Martin O’Brien’s practice focuses on physical endurance and disgust in relation to the fact he suffers from cystic fibrosis. Breathe for Me considers the nature of the regulated chronically ill body. Martin O’Brien re-embodies and takes pleasure in the excessive performance of an already…

  • Obama’s Best Comebacks and Rebuttals

    And on a similar(ish) note:

  • The Entlastung of the Quantified Self

    I’m very interested in this concept, which I was introduced to through the work of Pierpaolo Donati and Andrea Maccarini earlier this year. It emerged from the work of Arnold Gehlen and refers to the role of human institutions in unburdening us from existential demands. This is quoted from his Human Beings and Institutions on pg 257…

  • A Lockean case for the ownership of personal data 

    An interesting idea from Craig Lambert’s Shadow Work loc 3116 which deserves to be explored in greater depth: As noted earlier, philosopher John Locke argued that labor creates property; taking his view, if your shadow work made some information, it is your possession. In fact, who owns your data—your informational body—may some day be as…

  • The multiplication of communication channels

    This is a really nice description from Craig Lambert’s Shadow Work of a problem I describe in a forthcoming paper as the multiplication of communication channels. From loc 3038-3054: The mushrooming number of communication channels spins off another type of shadow work. At one time, to reach a friend, you could send a letter or…

  • Crowd sourcing technical support: why do user helps corporations?

    From Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert, loc 2301. Does anyone know of ethnographies exploring the motivations of those who do this work and the meanings they attach to it?  Apple online “communities” at discussions.apple.com, for example, include forums for users of most kinds of Apple software, like iTunes and Apple Pay, as well as Apple…

  • A podcast about Social Media for Academics

    Thanks to Dave O’Brien for recording this podcast with me about my book for New Books In Sociology. 

  • the challenge of cultural abundance

    This passage from Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert, conveys what I’ve written about in two recent papers as the challenge of cultural abundance. From loc 1395: To be sure, posting creations does not guarantee them an audience. Far from it. Take the songs that anyone can now publish online and sell as downloads. In 2011,…

  • The Temporal Cost of the Commute

    From Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert, loc 198: Commuting—the job of getting to the job—is an unpaid task done to serve the employer. It has become so woven into American life that we scarcely recognize it for what it is. Yet commuting is very expensive, time-consuming shadow work. The commuter must either brave crowded public…

  • 40 reasons why you should blog about your research

    It helps you become more clear about your ideas. It gives you practice at presenting your ideas for a non-specialist audience. It increases your visibility within academia. It increases your visibility outside academia and makes it much easier for journalists, campaigners and practitioners to find you. It increases your visibility more than a static site and allows…

  • Has there ever been a Presidential hopeful who has appeared in so many tacky TV adverts?

  • The creepiness of ‘networking’ discourse and the WikiHow-ification of academic career advice

    I’m tempted to start keeping a file of advice like this. Am I missing something obvious, or is it not incredibly creepy to identify people in advance, research their life history, write a script for an encounter and then practice it? Research and assess Research the guest professionals, their job descriptions and their current and past affiliations before…

  • The Liberal Imagination of Barack Obama

    What messages can we take from this speech? It’s Obama at his most self-consciously inspirational, addressing ‘young people’ pursuing social change. I think it can also be taken as an attempt to outline a worldview in the broadest terms. Here’s some suggestion about the content of what I’ve come to think of as the ‘liberal…

  • What does Economic Sociology have to say about declining productivity?

    What does Economic Sociology have to say about declining productivity? This is a question I find myself wondering about ever more frequently and I’d really appreciate any recommendations about where to start reading. The knee-jerk vulgar Marxism I slip into when I’ve not thought through an issue has led me to assume that the issue…

  • Understanding the Features of Different Social Media Platforms

    A really useful graphic tweeted by The Sociological Cinema:

  • Creating an ‘idea index’

    In an interview from 2014 Maria Popova, curator of the wonderful Brain Pickings blog, explained how she reads books. Cal Newport summarises on his blog: Around thirty-one minutes into the interview, Popova explains how she takes notes on books: As she reads, she creates an index at the front of the book that lists its…

  • Convenience rather than urgency as a driver of constant connectivity

    An interesting insight from Losing the Signal, a nicely written book about the rise and fall of Research In Motion. On pg 59, the authors describe how the company found little interest in constant connectivity on grounds of urgency, because phone calls would suffice for anything truly urgent. On the other hand, the prospect of…

  • Capitalism will eat democracy – unless we speak up

  • #YesWeCode Initiative

    This is really interesting on a number of levels. I don’t want to cast doubt on the value of the project or the motivations underlying it, but I think there are important questions to be asked about the increasing weight placed on the diffusion of coding skills as a way to ameliorate inequality: >#YesWeCode (http://www.yeswecode.org)…

  • neo-progressive cat contemplates own existence

    https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723794999201157120 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723795667911581696 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723805417697083392 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723806394886008832 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723807289333944320 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723808996122091520 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723809707652190209 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723810668588240897 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/723929003489419264