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  • The foundational lie of digital capitalism

    From Alan Jacobs (Via Audrey Watters): The megatech companies’ ability to convince us that they are not Big Business but rather just open-minded, open-hearted, exploratory technological creators is perhaps the most powerful and influential — and radically misleading — sales jobs of the past 25 years. The Californian ideology has become our ideology. Which means…

  • The Bechdel test for tech conferences

    The Bechdel test for tech conferences: 1) two women speaking 2) on the same panel 3) not about women in tech. — Monica Rogati (@mrogati) November 15, 2015

  • ‘Economic Science Fictions’ – call for essays

    This looks fantastic. Considering whether to submit a proposal: The newly established Goldsmiths Press will be publishing a collection of essays on the topic of ‘economic science fictions’. The volume will be edited by Will Davies, Co-Director of PERC, and encompass various disciplinary perspectives, writing styles, including fiction and non-fiction. This builds on PERC’s launch…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #21

    This Town by Mark Leibovich Wasted Lives by Zygmunt Bauman The Refusal of Work by David Frayne The Deep State by Mike Lofgren American Politics in an Age of Ignorance by David Schultz Broken Promise by Lindwood Barclay Graphic Novels Outcast: A Darkness Surrounds Him by Robert Kirkman Outcast: A Vast and Unending Ruin by…

  • “Please, sir, may I go home?”

    An interesting snippet from Losing The Signal, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, concerning the lengths to which overzealous mangers would go during the early days of Research In Motion. From pg 39: One RIM manager became so obsessed with deadlines he issued an edict requiring engineers to ask permission before leaving at night. Lazaridis…

  • Rant-driven journalism 

    An interesting insight from This Town, by Mark Leibovich, pg 278-279. It would presumably be near impossible for a website like Politico to maintain its level of output without resorting to processes like this: Sure enough, a few days later, Politico’s founding editor, John Harris, went on a new enterprise called “Politico TV” and revealed…

  • The emergence of the ‘informal advisor’ in Washington politics 

    From This Town, by Mark Leibovich, pg 284. This is another example of a key theme of the book, albeit one explored in an exclusively gossipy way: the money to be made through working at the boundaries between institutional  spheres, occasionally crossing them strategically and playing off this connection. It’s a nice arrangement, though, the…

  • Post-democracy’s no-nonsense purveyors of hard political truths

    I thought this was an interesting suggestion, from This Town by Mark Leibovich, concerning the tendency of a mendacious and stage-managed political culture to give rise to ‘straight talkers’. From pg 324-325: The unquestioned Big Man on Campus in Tampa, at least for the first part of GOP-looza, was Chris Christie, the rotund Republican governor…

  • Children’s and Young People’s Rights in the Digital Age

    A topic I want to learn more about:  Registration is now open for our conference in July on children’s and young people’s rights in the digital age at LSE, a central London-based IAMCR pre-conference. Please register here: http://eshop.lse.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=327 (Early bird fees run until 20 May). See http://iamcr.org/leicester2016/preconf/youth-digital-rights for the outline programme. The draft full programme…

  • Sustaining your focus throughout the working day

    An extract from Social Media for Academics In recent years we’ve seen the notion of ‘internet addiction’ enter the popular consciousness. As a self-description it’s sometimes invoked facetiously, some­times desperately and occasionally in a way which combines the two. It would be silly for me to try and take a stance on such a complex…

  • Pace Science: Data, Acceleration, Duration (cc @filvos)

    I was just sent a link to this fascinating workshop. Shared for those interested in the accelerated academy: Workshop: Pace Science: Data, Acceleration, Duration. University of Exeter – Byrne House. 16th-17th of May 2016. Co-Convened by Spaces of Evidence and Beyond the Digital Divide Research Team including: Lou Bezuidenhout, Ann H. Kelly, Sabina Leonelli, Linsey…

  • A symposium on the digital subject

    Another fascinating event in London I can’t get to: *Digital Subjects* *12 May 2016, Senate House, London* *Organiser:* Olga Goriunova, Royal Holloway University of London Digital subjects can be many things: a nested set of abstractions assembled by algorithms; a dynamic data aggregate feeding upon the movement of bodies in space and time; an experiential,…

  • Help support @DiscoverSoc

    Dear Colleague, I hope that you have come across Discover Society the online magazine which publishes pieces based on social science research for a wide audience – you may even have written for us – but if not do check it out at discoversociety.org As Editors we are committed ensuring that the magazine continues to…

  • The value of university managed online spaces

    A superb article by Sierra Williams, editor of the LSE Impact Blog, building on a talk she did at an event in Sheffield last week:

  • How to use social media for academic purposes

    A really useful overview from Sage of some of the online material on my site: Read a free chapter from Mark’s book on using social media to publicise your work Watch a series of videocasts from Mark, including one on whether academics should blog Listen to a collection of podcasts from Mark, including one discussing…

  • Defensive Elites: understanding the 0.1%

    A really interesting overview of the changing composition of the 1%, including the over-stated but nonetheless interesting claim that we are seeing the beginning of a new age in which the 0.1% are coming out from “their behind-the-scenes positions and stepping right onto the political stage”: All told, the 0.1 percent now owns about as much wealth…

  • The Dual-Edged Character of Digital Freedom

    From Mediated Memories, by Jose van Dijck, pg 119. The immediate discussion is about digital photography but the point can be extended much more widely: In many ways, digital tools and connective systems expand control over an individual’s image exposure, granting more power to present and shape oneself in public. However, the flipside of this…

  • The normalisation of the revolving door in U.S. Politics

    From This Town, by Mark Leibovich, pg 163: Calculations vary on how many former members of Congress have joined the influence-peddling set. By the middle of 2011, at least 160 former lawmakers were working as lobbyists in Washington, according to First Street, a website that tracks lobbying trends in D.C., in April 2013. The Center…

  • The entrepreneurial journalist

    From This Town, by Mark Leibovich, pg 116. They’re talking about the journalist who runs the Playbook gossip column but I think the discussion of him as an exemplar of a new journalistic type is very interesting: If such qualities can coexist, Mikey can be perceived as both a decent and solid friend, and also…

  • The Self-Understandings of Technocratic Elites

    From This Town, by Mark Leibovich, pg 137: Clever locals refer to the Correspondents’ Association dinner as “Nerd Prom.” This is one of those self-congratulatory Beltway terms masked as self-deprecation. “Nerd” implies that everyone would of course much rather be immersed in the deep wiring of some issue, something of weight and substance—they are “nerds,”…

  • Death Online Research: Last minute CFA 

    Call For Abstracts DORS3:3rd International Death Online Research Symposium Abstract deadline: April 20 Time and place: October 11.-13. 2016 (symposium) October 14. (PhD course) at Aarhus University, Denmark Schedule Symposium: Tuesday, Oct. 11. Starting with lunch around 12 – Thursday Oct. 13. ending around 15. for everyone to get their flights. PhD course: Friday, October…

  • Steve Fuller on information overload

    An interesting talk by Steve Fuller on information overload. He starts with the academic context in which much of what’s published is not read, much of what’s read is not cited and yet academics are pressured to continually publish more. For whom is this a pathological condition? He argues that the implicit standpoint here is that of a decision…

  • Are you coming to @thesocreview’s Annual 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…

  • 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…

  • Are you studying the internal conversation? Get in touch soon for a free workshop

    We still have one place left for this workshop. Get in touch very soon if you’d like to take part: Reflexivity Forum 10am-5pm, May 24th 2016 R1.04, University of Warwick Following from a successful initial meeting last year, this event will be the first of a hopefully ongoing series of events aimed at those investigating…

  • Do we need to reorientate Sociological thought? Or are perpetual calls to do this part of the problem?

    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…

  • How will social media transform #highered?

    I asked this question on Twitter, offering a free copy of Social Media for Academics to the person who wrote the most interesting answer in two tweets or less. Here were the responses: @mark_carrigan @Soc_Imagination Homogenize, sanitize, try to monetize & brand evthing in sight, driving free expression further underground. — 🌴tp🌒🦉 (@3DogCouch) April 16,…

  • The Politics of Time and the Possibility of Democracy

    From David Frayne’s Refusal of Work pg 222. My first paper on this topic is coming out soon. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons why democratic debate is currently in such a moribund state is that our busy lives leave us with so little time to study policies, collectively organise, or find out what is…

  • The Pains of Work and the Relief of the Refrain

    Another concept I was unfamiliar with introduced in David Frayne’s superb Refusal of Work. From pg 210: For most of us, and for good reason, giving up work seems like an extreme solution, and working less is not always a practical option. When the periodic sense of dissatisfaction swells within, most of us resort to a…

  • “What do you do?”

    From The Refusal of Work, by David Frayne, pg 199: What do you do? After ‘What is your name?’ and possibly ‘Where are you from?’ this is one of the first questions that strangers usually pose to one another, with convention dictating that this question is almost always an enquiry into our employment situation. ‘What…

  • The Temporal Constraints of Consumption

    Really intriguing argument by David Frayne on page 176-177 of his Refusal of Work:  Overstuffing leisure time with toys is a fruitless way of trying to increase enjoyment, since the more lux   ury goods one buys, the less satisfaction one is able to derive from each object in the finite time available.

  • The chronopolitics of consumer anxiety

    From David Frayne’s Refusal of Work, pg 173-174: When today’s affluent workers come home after a hard day’s work, they find themselves in their homes, surrounded by objects that all represent invitations for action. In my own home I find a Netflix account bursting with viewing choices, a set of shelves crammed with CDs, a…

  • Gorz’s concept of hygiene 

    A great introduction to this concept I was previously unfamiliar with, from David Frayne’s Refusal of Work, pg 149: As Bruce described his self-care habits, I was reminded of Gorz’s definition of ‘hygiene’, which for Gorz means something much more than the mundane rituals of preening and cleanliness. For Gorz, hygiene consists in a more…

  • The Work Dogma and Contraction of the Existential Imagination

    I found this argument, in David Frayne’s excellent Refusal of Work, deeply persuasive. From pg 110: Employment itself can be held partly responsible for the negative experiences of joblessness because, in allowing people only a limited space in which to cultivate other interests, skills and social ties, full-time jobs can often leave people with few personal…

  • 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…

  • Re-orienting Sociological Thought: May 11th at @CardiffSOCSI

    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…

  • The Fracturing of Free Time

    From Refusal of Work by David Frayne, pg 70: Consider the extent to which the standard eight-hour working day fractures free-time into shards. The full-time worker experiences time as a rapid series of discrete pockets: a constantly rotating cycle of work periods and free periods, in which free-time is restricted to evenings, weekends and holidays.…

  • I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

  • all the world is green

    I fell into the ocean When you became my wife I risked it all aganist the sea To have a better life Marie you’re the wild blue sky And men do foolish things You turn kings into beggars And beggars into kings Pretend that you owe me nothing And all the world is green We…

  • Against the ‘slow professor’

    A letter Filip Vostal and I have written to University Affairs in response to this interview: We read your recent interview with the authors of the recent book Slow Professor with interest. While we welcome the continued expansion of critical debate concerning academic labour, we nonetheless found much to be concerned with in the interview.…

  • The intensification of work and the death of imagination

    I’m enjoying The Refusal of Work by David Frayne at the moment. He asks some fundamental questions about the meaning of work in contemporary society. From pg 12: What is so great about work that sees society constantly trying to create more of it? Why, at the pinnacle of society’s productive development, is there still thought…

  • Reducing structural problems to lifestyle issues 

    In his Refusal of Work David Frayne uses a great phrase to describe a tendency to reduce structural problems to lifestyle issues. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently but have struggled to articulate so clearly and concisely. From pg 7: This is definitely not another one of those sugary books that…

  • Historicizing the Digital: language practices in new and old media

    How interesting does this look? Historicizing the Digital: language practices in new and old media Mon 27th – Tues 28th June 2016 University of Leicester, UK CALL FOR PAPERS: deadline 18th April 2016 REGISTRATION: opening soon Language and new media is a rapidly emerging area of applied linguistics which considers how the affordances of digital…

  • The Power of Digital Media to Shape False Narratives

    There’s an interesting summary in Mediated Memories, by Jose van Dijck, pg 100-101 detailing research into the power of doctored media to shape false narratives: In the early 1990s, researchers from America and New Zealand persuaded experimental subjects into believing false narratives about their childhoods, written or told by family members and substantiated by “true”…

  • Is there a point of no return with entrenched elites?

    I realise this is a question I’ve been trying to articulate for ages. This is how Paul Mason articulates it in the Guardian (my emphasis): To the mature democracies of the world, the Panama Papers – as with the Lux Leaks, Swiss Leaks and numerous other data dumps before them – are a warning. If…

  • Sociology and fiction: a round up of the @thesocreview project so far

    Imagining Futures: From Sociology of the Future to Future Fictions The Future Perfect Writing Fiction and Writing Social Science Life Chances: Co-written re-imagined welfare utopias through a fictional novel Patricia Leavy on Social Fictions Showing, not telling: some thoughts on social science and (science) fiction Liars, Damn Liars, and Sociologists You wake up and suddenly,…

  • Why do you find social media useful as an academic?

    I asked this question on Twitter earlier today. Here are some of the answers I got: @mark_carrigan helps me join a multitude of intellectual dots and weave global threads of thinking and connection — Trish McCluskey (@trilia) April 12, 2016 @mark_carrigan @readywriting Connections with others, link btwn academic & field outside academia, exchange new work……

  • Pity those ‘trapped by their wealth’

    I wonder how widespread this sentiment is? Obviously there are particular aspects of the Cameron case that this analysis applies to, but it’s hard not to suspect that it reveals a broader world view in which wealth is seen as a constraint due to residual class antagonism: You often hear of people being “trapped in…

  • Digital Capitalism and the Platform Wars

    Reluctantly cut from my paper on the Sociology of the Digital Archive: any thoughts appreciated. This is a tentative first sketch at where my current project will be leading after the ‘distraction’ and the ‘fragile movements’ phase:  It has been frequently suggested that this digitalization represents a removal of constraint: on production, on organization, on…

  • The Fatalism of the Multitude

    This is an idea put forward by James Bryce, a British observer of the United States, in 1889: This tendency to acquiescence and submission, this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured…

  • The capacity of elites to combine voice and exit

    A really interesting idea offered by Aditya Chakrabortty in yesterday’s Guardian: To flesh out the corrosion of democracy that is happening, you need to go to a Berlin-born economist called Albert Hirschman, a giant in modern economic thinking. Hirschman died in 2012 at the age of 97, but it’s his concepts that really set in…

  • The Ambivilance of the Abject

    There’s an interesting observation made by David Schultz in his American Politics In An Age of Ignorance concerning the stock character of ‘the welfare queen’ which I think applies to other such abject characters. From loc 975: This image of the welfare queen as a shrewd, calculating, yet lazy individual seemed odd. She was smart enough…

  • ‘The people who own the country should rule it’

    To what extent can we see this same idea expressed today, through the discourse of ‘wealth creators’? What action does it license in the minds of those who hold it? What action might it license?  

  • Declining political literacy as a vector of post-democratisation

    This is a difficult issue to know how to treat, but I think it’s an important one. Declining political literacy of the sort described here by David Shultz in American Politics In An Age of Ignorance, loc 143-157 is a unnecessary but  sufficient condition for ‘shadow mobilisations’ of the kind which are the most worrying…

  • Photos from protests in Reykjavik

    My parents are in Reykjavik at the moment and sent me some interesting pictures of events there:

  • Crafting an online identity

    The powerful thing about telling a story is that it gets beyond the level of sim­ply listing facts about yourself. Not that there’s anything wrong with this; in a way it’s like a story because you choose which facts you present and the order in which you present them. But telling a story places them…

  • So what is ‘networking’?

    This is an extract from Social Media for Academics  To talk of ‘networking’ raises the inevitable question of what your ‘network’ is and why it matters. This is a theme which cuts through the book given that the network is so crucial to social media: without a certain critical mass of users, it’s difficult for…

  • Why should academics blog about their research? An answer in pictures

    Thanks to Jacqueline Bartram who drew these great cartoons as I was talking at a Hull event last yearabout academic blogging. Why should academics blog about their research? It provides a home for things you reluctantly cut from your publications: It allows you to get early feedback on ideas and try them out for the…

  • The Fictional Conference

    Interesting call for papers via Joe Lindley:  We are inviting real submissions that describe fictional papers and workshops. Practically speaking, we would like you to submit a title of a fictional paper or workshop, along with a list of authors (authors may be real or fictional), and a set of up to 4 keywords. We…

  • Two free workshops at the Centre for Social Ontology @SocioWarwick

    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…

  • The Absent Horizon of Mortality

    From Wasted Lives, by Zygmunt Bauman, pg 99: No longer a part of human destiny that needs to be faced up to in all its majesty and duly respected, death has been demoted to the status of a deplorable catastrophe, like a pistol shot or a brick falling from a roof. With the horizon of…

  • Zygmunt Bauman’s Chronopolitics

    From Wasted Lives pg 104. Power is expressed chronopolitically through the capacity to electively withdraw from temporal regimes (or evade them all together) while influencing the way others are subject to them: The drama of power hierarchy is daily restaged (with the secretaries and personal assistants, but ever more often the security guards, cast in…

  • Mood – Aesthetic, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives

    A really interesting looking event at  Warwick I wish I could make: Registration is now open for Mood – Aesthetic, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, a two-day conference taking place at the University of Warwick on 6th and 7th May 2016. This interdisciplinary event explores the concept of mood from a variety of disciplines including philosophy,…

  • Academic Social Media in the Research Economy

    Notes for a talk I’m doing on Friday – will neaten up and correct typos before writing into a proper post at a later date.  It is increasingly hard to move without encountering the idea that social media is something of value for academics. The reasons offered are probably quite familiar by now. It helps…

  • Why digitalisation gives rise to ‘memory wars’

    It’s a common place to recognise that digitalisation makes it easier to encounter the views of others, particularly those who we might not find within our locality. However an important dimension of this is how it also encourages competition between views, as tensions which might not have previously been ‘activated’ become so. I thought ‘memory…

  • Isomorphic Inequalities

    One of the things I like about Bauman is his sensitivity to what I’ve come to think of as isomorphic inequalities. In Wasted Lives he contrasts the enforced ghetto with the voluntary ghettos of the super-rich. In Globalization he contrasts the enforced mobility of the migrant* with the elective mobility of the global elite. We…

  • Uber’s managed labor force

    A really fascinating read on Harvard Business Review: We found that through Uber’s app design and deployment, the company produces what many reasonable observers would define as a managed labor force. Drivers have the freedom to log in or log out of work at will, but once they’re online, their activities on the platform are…

  • Bauman’s weirdly illiquid conception of liquidity, or, what happens when you confuse ontology and epistemology

    From pg 67 of his Wasted Lives: With the passage of time, successive layers of emergent realities come into view, each calling for a deeper and more comprehensive revision of received beliefs and our conceptual net than was required by the one before in order for it to be scanned and its significance revealed. We…

  • The new cheapest place to order Social Media for Academics online

    I just came across the listing on Books Etc. It’s not much of a price difference but this is the cheapest I’ve seen the book online:

  • Would you like to recommend Social Media for Academics to your library?

    I’d be ever so grateful if you did 🙂 There’s an online form which you can use to recommend the book here. Get touch if you have any questions or I can help with anything.

  • What people who ordered Social Media for Academics also bought

    This is a really interesting thing to notice. I own all these books and I’ve read all but two of them:

  • Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

    Attributed to Aaron Swartz, but the editor of his collected writings suggests this is a contentious issue. Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful…

  • Like air, ideas are incapable of being locked up and hoarded

    An interesting summary of Thomas Jefferson’s views on intellectual property, written by a 17 year old Aaron Swartz, printed in The Boy Who Could Change The World, loc 370-380: No one seriously disputes that property is a good idea, but it’s bizarre to suggest that ideas should be property. Nature clearly wants ideas to be…

  • Rich nations as entropy hubs 

    From Pg 43 of Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives. Could any recommend an analysis of the ecological impact of digitalisation? I assume it intensifies the longstanding trend Bauman discusses here: Rich nations can afford a high density of population because they are ‘high entropy’ centres, drawing resources, most notably the sources of energy, from the rest…

  • CfP: 2016 Learning with MOOCs Conference, October 6-7, 2016 at the University of Pennsylvania

    This looks like an interesting event: We invite you to submit your papers to the third Learning with MOOCs conference, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, USA on October 6-7, 2016. You are invited to submit an abstract of work completed within MOOC settings for discussion at the conference. http://www.learningwithmoocs2016.org/…

  • Using Social Media to Manage Information

    See endorsements of the book here and there’s a chapter available online here. This is the cheapest place to buy it online.

  • CfP: Persistent Conversation

    The Persistent Conversation minitrack at HICSS is back. We invite you to submit your work to the upcoming 50th anniversary HICSS. The CFP is here: [1]http://www.hicss.org/#!persistent-conversation/c236g ABOUT THE MINITRACK: A significant consequence of communication technologies is that conversations are no longer ephemeral and volatile. Most conversations mediated by technology leave a persistent record and become…

  • The Growth of Political Consultancy

    From This Town, by Mark Leibovich, pg 98-99: The biggest shift in Washington over the last forty or so years has been the arrival of Big Money and politics as an industry. The old Washington was certainly saturated with politics, but it was smaller and more disjointed. There were small and self-contained political consultancies that…

  • The Aristocracy of the Digital Celebrities and the Magical Thinking That Props It Up

    This is possibly the most depressing blog post I’ve ever read. It’s the earnestness with which the author conveys the message that “influencers are rarely the people who move the needle in our life”, as if this was a genuine personal revelation that he now feels the need to convey in as gentle as tone…

  • How to ‘network’ without chipping away at your soul

    ‘Networking’ is a horrible term.  I’m sure I’m not the only person who hates it. It  nonetheless refers to something important, albeit perhaps pervasively misunderstood. The usual connotations of the term ‘networking’ are insincerity, instrumentalism and general creepiness. There have been a few occasions when I’ve been conscious of being ‘networked’ by someone else in a way…

  • Tweets about Social Media for Academics

    It’s brilliant to find so many people tweeting about my book. I’ve attached some of the tweets below. If they convince you that you should buy a copy, this is the cheapest place to buy it online. Social Media for Academics: https://t.co/CTWrg5wXaH @mark_carrigan This is so cool! — Aparna Gonibeed (@aparnagonibeed) April 20, 2016 New…

  • Slack and Basecamp for Academics

    This is a short preliminary to a longer post I’ll write in the near future. I’ve become ever more convinced over the last couple of years that project management software, such as Slack and Basecamp, will become integral features of most working environments. Perhaps eventually to the extent that e-mail is. In fact e-mail is…

  • Patience for the epigrammatic, but brief

    Congratulations to the dry eyes Consolations to the nice guys And condensation’s on the underside of everything I touch I seem to chill the objects that I meant so much to love A man can keep you sane five-hundred-and-fifty days A year and a half, give or take an afternoon We should have sooner left…

  • Aaron Swartz on digital business models

    From The Boy Who Could Change The World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz, loc 309. He’s talking about the semantic web but what he’s saying could easily be applied to much of social media: So, uh, here’s the plan:  1. Collect data  2. ???????  3. PROFIT!!!

  • What would a socialist version of Netflix look like?

    From The Boy Who Could Change The World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz, loc 283: But if it turns out that doesn’t work, I’ve also been looking into a system called Compulsory Licensing. The idea is that you pay about $5 more a month on your cable modem bill in exchange for being able to…

  • The Difference Between Stealing and Copying

    From The Boy Who Could Change The World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz, loc 253-268: The law about what is stealing is very clear. Stealing is taking something away from someone so they cannot use it. There’s no way that making a copy of something is stealing under that definition. If you make a copy…

  • Call for papers: the politics of identity 

    This is such an interesting call for papers, co-edited by one of the new early career organisers at The Sociological Review: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY Call for Abstracts for Special Issue Historical Materialism Journal Historical Materialism Journal is seeking contributions for a Special Issue on “The Politics of Identity” Editors Ashok Kumar (QMUL) Shruti Iyer…

  • #BritSoc16 fringe event: ‘Radical Education Inside and Outside the Neoliberal University’

    I wish I could make it to this, but I’m leaving at 7ish to go a gig. I’d love to help organise a more substantial fringe at future conferences though – could there be a whole alternative BSA that’s free to attend? Apologies for the short notice, but we would like to invite your organisation…

  • On Redundancy 

    I’ve become ever more critical of Zygmunt Bauman in recent years. However I continue to see some value in his work and this passage, from his Wasted Lives pg 11-12, illustrates what I shall always like about his writing:  How different is the idea of ‘redundancy’ that has shot into prominence during the lifetime of…

  • Self-pimping as the prevailing social and business imperative

    From This Town, by Mark Leibovich, pg 56: One of the stubborn truths of Obama-era Washington is that everyone is now, in effect, a special interest, a free agent, performing any number of services, in any number of settings. It goes well beyond the technical classification of “registered lobbyists.” Self-pimping has become the prevailing social…

  • Social Media for Journal Editors

    This is a really useful reflection by Andy Miah on social media in academic life. It leads to a focused discussion about the significance of social media for editors of academic journals, but it has some more general reflections prior to this.

  • The End of You Too

  • An Archerian reading of Bourdieu: the reflexive imperative as the normalisation of hysteresis

    I’ve just cut this out of a paper I’m working on. It’s not up to scratch and it doesn’t really contribute anything to the development of the paper. But it’s an idea I’m planning to return to in future, so I’d be interested in any thoughts people have about it. I hadn’t actually compiled the…

  • A contagion of pivots reveals the hollowness of the sharing economy

    Interesting analysis of the difficulties that many platform firms are facing now that venture capital is starting to dry up. I also love the phrase “a contagion of pivots” more than I can express: A contagion of pivots began happening among other sharing economy startups. Companies like Cherry (car washes), Prim (laundry), SnapGoods (gear rental),…

  • Plutocrats being absurdly defensive: please share any examples you come across!

    A great round up plutocrats being absurdly defensive about their social position: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-12-20/bankers-join-billionaires-to-debunk-imbecile-attack-on-top-1- If anyone encounters further examples of this, I’d love it if you were willing to share them with me. I’m in the early stages of trying to systematically catalogue this stuff.

  • The Defensiveness of Elites

    From The Deep State, by Mike Lofgren, pg 255-256: The quality of blind self-absorption is not confined to our national security elites. Many Wall Street and Valley billionaires, living a hermetically sealed existence surrounded by sycophants and coat holders, appear genuinely surprised that their public reputation is not that of heroic entrepreneurs selflessly creating jobs…