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  • Social Media in the Accelerated Academy, March 2nd @CIMethods @SocioWarwick

  • Are social media algorithms killing online activism?

    Via John Brissenden

  • Living by numbers: big data & society

  • Amongst Algorithms: Technical Fieldwork between Software Studies and Digital Methods

  • Call for Blog Posts: the Rise of the Superstar Professor

    In a recent blog post Peter Walsh argued that the phenomenon of academic celebrity has been unjustly neglected within sociology. While there has been a substantial growth in the study of celebrity more broadly, research on superstar professors and those aspiring to this status has been largely absent. Yet it could be argued that such figures are…

  • Work in the Digital Society

    I just came across this great collection on Social Europe Journal. I’d stopped following it for a while but it seems to have gone through some changes. I look forward to working my way through these: http://www.socialeurope.eu/focus/shaping-the-digital-society/ The Digital Revolution is set to dramatically change our lives in the coming years and policy- and decision-makers need to…

  • WBS Paytech 2016: Technologies of Exchange in a Digital Economy

    WBS Paytech 2016: Technologies of Exchange in a Digital EconomyThursday, 4th and Friday, 5th of February 2016 Warwick Business School at The Shard, London Organizers: Dr. Markos Zachariadis: @MarkosZach & Dr. Nathaniel Tkacz: @__nate__ URL: bit.ly/WBSpaytech #WBSpaytech @WarwickBSchool @warwickuni 

  • will capitalism die? or merely trundle on in an ever more authoritarian way?

    A great article by Robert Misik in Social Europe. You should definitely read it in full here, but this is the gist of it:  Can one therefore imagine that capitalism is a caputalism bearing the Cain’s mark of collapse? And how can we envisage this end? “The image I have of the end of capitalism — an…

  • The Ontology of Corporate Grievance

    There’s an interesting section of In The Plex which details quite how much Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer hated Google. From pg 282-283: Just how intensely Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, despised his competitor to the south became clear in depositions that would be filed in the Lee lawsuit. The year before, in November 2004, a top Microsoft…

  • CfP: Technology and Culture – Policing Crises Now

    The Cultural Studies Association’s Working Group on Technology and Culture invites submissions for the 14th Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.), to be held at Villanova University in Philadelphia, PA, June 2-5, 2016. The theme of this year’s conference is “Policing Crises Now.” We encourage submissions of panels or individual papers that are…

  • Call for Papers: Digital Methodologies – Beyond Big & Small Data

    Digital Methodologies: Beyond Big & Small Data 9th International Conference on Social Science Methodology (RC33) September 11th – 16th, 2016, University of Leicester (http://www.le.ac.uk/) Session Organizer Christian Bokhove, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, C.Bokhove@soton.ac.uk Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick, United Kingdom, mark@markcarrigan.net Sarah Lewthwaite, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, s.e.lewthwaite@southampton.ac.uk Richard Wiggins, Institute of Education, United Kingdom r.wiggins@ioe.ac.uk Session…

  • Digital Social Science Essay Competition

    The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and Big Data & Society (BD&S) intend to award a prize of CHF 1,000 for the best essay on the topic ‘Influence and Power’. This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field. The winner will also be invited…

  • International Conference for Critical Realism 2016 in Cardiff: registration open

    Dear colleague, The International Conference for Critical Realism will be held in Cardiff on 20-22 July 2016. It will be preceded by an optional pre-conference workshop on 18-19 July. This year’s theme is de/humanisation. We welcome contributions from all areas of the humanities and the social sciences. A number of grants will be available for PhD students. Registration…

  • Moral Economies of the Digital

    I wish I could go to this: Mini-conference on *Moral Economies of the Digital* Call for papers for mini-conference at the Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) 28th Annual Conference ‘Moral Economies, Economic Moralities.’ June 24-26, 2016,  University of California, Berkeley. Organizers: Dean Curran, Dave Elder-Vass, Elisa Oreglia, Nikos Sotirakopoulos, and Janaki Srinivasan DEADLINE FOR…

  • On Fire

  • songs from Brian Fallon’s new solo album

  • Google’s war against latency

    Acceleration theory can too easily slide into seeing speed as a function of technological innovation. The susprisingly excellent In The Plex offers a nice counterpoint to this, identifying the sheer amount of effort involved throughout an organisation in order to increase speed across a diverse range of products. From pg 186: In 2008, Google issued…

  • Page’s Law as a counter-point to acceleration theory

    From In The Plex pg 185: Sergey Brin even put a label on his cofounder’s frustration at the tendency of developers to load more and more features into programs, making them run way too slowly. Page’s Law , according to Brin, was the observation that every eighteen months, software becomes twice as slow. Google was…

  • Devil’s Medicine

  • Workshop: Conceptual Challenges in Interdisciplinary Social Media Research

    I’m very excited that the Digital Social Science Forum’s workshop has been accepted at Social Media & Society in London this year. Susan Halford, Les Carr, Emma Uprichard and Evelyn Ruppert will be speaking at the workshop & I will be facilitating. It will take place on Monday July 11th and you’ll have to register…

  • the rise of human centred data science at facebook

    An absolutely fascinating account of developments in the newsfeed algorith at Facebook since its introduction: Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s 32-year-old director of product for news feed, is Alison’s less technical counterpart—a “fuzzie” rather than a “techie,” in Silicon Valley parlance. He traffics in problems and generalities, where Alison deals in solutions and specifics. He’s the news…

  • the burden of chrono-reflexivity at work

    I was interested to learn that Netflix has a seemingly enlightened approach to the working and holiday patterns of their employees: Since 2004, Netflix employees have taken as many vacation days as they’ve wanted. They have the freedom to decide when to show up for work, when to take time off, and how much time it will…

  • the winner-takes-all dynamic of digital capitalism

    Great New Yorker article on the winner-takes-all dynamic that characterises innovative new tech-driven markets. Two escalatory dynamics drive this: the increasing competitive advantage of having better infrastructure and the increasing value of the platform as more users join. Add in the over-eagre venture capital seeking to back the eventual winner in the market and you have an…

  • the challenge of life planning in a digital age

    I just got back from the CSO workshop in Paris where I gave a paper on the challenge of flourishing amidst variety. My interest is in how social digitalisation ‘opens up’ the archive, albeit in a deeply uneven way, as well the implications this has for the process of shaping a life.  However the paper needed a bit of…

  • Google Anything, So Long as It’s Not Google

    I just came across this fascinating article, now 10 years old, detailing how former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut off relations with CNET after a reporter  there had the temerity to detail the information she was able to find out about him via Google: Last month, Elinor Mills, a writer for CNET News, a technology…

  • the corporate housewife, eliminating the need for mundane reflexivity

    From In The Plex, by Steven Levy, pg 134: It’s sort of like the corporation as housewife,” wrote Googler Kim Malone in an unpublished novel. “Google cooks for you, picks up and delivers your dry cleaning, takes care of your lube jobs, washes your car, gives you massages, organizes your work-outs. In fact, between the…

  • the intellectual elitism of Silicon Valley

    From In The Plex, by Steven Levy, pg 138. I’m interested in the politics likely to emerge when this self-conception thrives, all the more so when so many of the early Googlers went on to become multi-millionaires. Google took its hiring very seriously. Page and Brin believed that the company’s accomplishments sprang from a brew…

  • “now listen you queer!”: the origins of contemporary political punditry

    I just watched Best of Enemies, a great film about the rivalry between William Buckley and Gore Vidal that was most famously captured in this scene: A subsequent exchange of words in high brow magazines then led to an exchange of lawsuits. I’ve been fascinated by this video since I first came across it. However…

  • one month left: the @bigdatasoc & @digitalsocsci essay competition

    The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and Big Data & Society (BD&S) intend to award a prize of CHF 1,000 for the best essay on the topic ‘Influence and Power’. This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field. The winner will also be invited…

  • dear PhDs/ECRs: need funding to go to a conference? @thesocreview can help

    The Sociological Review has launched the next round of its support scheme for unfunded PhDs and ECRs. Find out more and apply here: We are pleased to announce our latest round of funding, supported by The Sociological Review Foundation. Funds of up to £1000 per applicant are be available for unfunded PhD students and postdocs (within 3 years of…

  • 2 weeks left to submit: digital methodologies, beyond big & small data

    Digital Methodologies: Beyond Big & Small Data 9th International Conference on Social Science Methodology (RC33) September 11th – 16th, 2016, University of Leicester (http://www.le.ac.uk/) Session Organizer Christian Bokhove, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, C.Bokhove@soton.ac.uk Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick, United Kingdom, mark@markcarrigan.net Sarah Lewthwaite, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, s.e.lewthwaite@southampton.ac.uk Richard Wiggins, Institute of Education, United Kingdom r.wiggins@ioe.ac.uk Session…

  • my plans for 2016

    My new year is starting with the two most challenging things I’ll do in the whole of 2016 within the first 18 days. I’ve got really clear plans for this year, much more so than at any point I can remember, which I thought I’d lay out now in a post before I get lost in…

  • grooming the next generation of the digital elite

    An interesting extract from Steven Levy’s In The Plex about Google’s Associate Product Managers, a select group being groomed as future leaders. From page 3: The APM program, I learned, was a highly valued initiative. To quote the pitch one of the participants made in 2006 to recent and upcoming college graduates: “We invest more…

  • the political psychology of the super rich

    A really insightful Paul Krugman article on a topic I’m getting increasingly fascinated by: Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely…

  • the best description of Corbynism I’ve encountered 

    From John Harris in the Guardian: Whatever his suitability for the job, Corbyn is where he is for one reason above all others: the fact that Britain’s post-1979 journey into a new reality of a shrunken welfare state, marketised public services, rising inequality and an impossible job market had reached a watershed with the deepening…

  • enjoying it: candy crush and capitalism

    I was slightly disappointed by Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism but I’ve come away from it with one core concept stuck in my mind. The author distinguishes between what he calls ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ enjoyment: the former is that which ‘serves’ social and cultural structures, while the latter is pointless activity which serves no purpose.…

  • I’ve never had a contract with @VirginMedia, yet they’re sending me details of my ‘spending’

    I just wasted half an hour on the phone, only to be told that they can offer no explanation as to why I’ve received this letter:

  • Calling PhDs & ECRs: @thesocreview conference funding competition is now open!

    The Sociological Review has launched the next round of its support scheme for unfunded PhDs and ECRs. Find out more and apply here: We are pleased to announce our latest round of funding, supported by The Sociological Review Foundation. Funds of up to £1000 per applicant are be available for unfunded PhD students and postdocs (within 3 years of…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #17

    The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism by Alfie Brown The Pathology of Communicative Capitalism by David Hill The New Ruthless Economy by Simon Head The Prince and the Wolf by Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and Peter Erdelyi Overheads by Ann Oakley Submission by Michel Houellebecq The Grownup by Gillian Flynn Graphic Novels: Criminal: The Last of…

  • the most read posts on my blog in 2015

    Looking for an Evernote alternative? Centrallo might be what you’re looking for Productivity culture, cognitive triage and the pseudo-commensurability of the to-do list Human Beings, Social Agents and Social Actors The Rise of the Self-Funded Studentship and What It Says About Academia (and Academics) The myth of ‘us’ in a digital age why are we…

  • imagining an academy in which academics were paid not to write

    From Ann Oakley’s satirical novel Overheads. A remarkable rant from a professor who has just been discovered to have fabricated the vast majority of his publications list: The thing is, Lydia, few people realise how few books or articles are ever read by anybody. The average number of people who read an academic article is 4.6.…

  • institutionalised goal setting in tech firms 

    How companies institutionalise certain forms of (quantifiable) reflexivity. From Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! pg 10: Starting in 1999, Google management used a system called Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, to measure the effectiveness of its employees, divisions, and the company overall. The idea for OKRs came from Google investor John…

  • killer mike from run the jewels interviews bernie sanders

    And it’s really good. Though I’d like to understand the everyday intuitive and peculiarly American sense of ‘capitalism’ used by Killer Mike here.

  • ever wondered how to drink beer properly?

     Well now you know. Courtesy of @thebeerhawk.

  • what if we talked of digital ‘weeds’ rather than ‘viruses’?

    From Spam, by Finn Brunton, pg 89: “Alan Solomon . . . a veteran antivirus researcher with a PhD in economics, critiqued the virus metaphor, suggesting that this medical/ biological metaphor of ‘virus’ is ‘too emotive’ . . . Instead, he proposed ‘weeds’ as a more appropriate concept for describing the threat of computer code.”…

  • the problem of ‘community’

    From Spam, by Finn Brunton, pg 6-7: Two qualities unite these disparate uses of “community.” First, deep uncertainties about properties and edges: is community about location and face-to-face proximity, or does it consist of affective bonds that can be established by a text message as they are by an embrace? Does it encompass huge swathes…

  • is Twitter making the Internet local again?

    In his fascinating book Spam: a Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton offers an example on pg 23-24 of how the early ARPANET was local in a way that is no longer the case. in September 1973, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock used his ARPANET connection in Los Angeles to get back the electric razor…

  • the geopolitics of phone sex

    From Spam, by Finn Brunton, pg 67-68: The business of phone sex is structured around arbitraging the different settlement rates—how much it costs to call a given country from the United States. A company in the United States leases lines in another country to route the calls and takes a per-minute cut of the settlement…

  • CfP: Mediated Intimacies

    This looks great: CFP Mediated Intimacies DEADLINE EXTENDED Mediated Intimacies Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies to be published in March 2017 edited by Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim, Alison Winch EXTENDED DEADLINE – 30th January 2016 In what ways does media convergence culture represent, intervene in, exploit and enable intimate relations?…

  • CFP: CSCW’16 Workshop on Algorithms at Work

    CALL FOR PAPERS CSCW 2016 workshop on Algorithms at Work CSCW: http://cscw.acm.org/2016 <https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fcscw.acm.org%2f2016&data=01%7c01%7cJAONEIL%40064d.mgd.microsoft.com%7c4e6487c269ac451ce5b208d30086852e%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=lQc4OuFfiFbq1ebRUi9jI8iIczHE0eDOYVgWKYt4y90%3d> Sunday, February 28th, 2016 San Francisco, CA, USA Workshop website: algorithmsatwork.wordpress.com <https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2falgorithmsatwork.wordpress.com&data=01%7c01%7cJAONEIL%40064d.mgd.microsoft.com%7c4e6487c269ac451ce5b208d30086852e%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=SCkHceRw2eFmloSogO64R%2ffM4pbsHkGU7GG%2f437VulA%3d> Submission deadline for a short position paper (1-4 pages): December, 30th, 2015 Notification deadline: January 5th, 2016 WORKSHOP The algorithms at work workshop critically discusses computational algorithms and the diverse ways in which humans…

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#22)

  • want to lose all faith in the future of higher education?

    Then read through the comments that have accumulated on this morning’s Anonymous Academic post on the Guardian. Or don’t actually. Perhaps I just want others to share in my misery after having read through the whole set. Possibly the most depressing thing I’ve read all year. As I made my way to my office at…

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#21)

  • “in an ideal world, American sociology would look like British sociology before it became Americanised”

    A really nice interview with Doug Porpora by Tim Rutzou. But it ends on a jarring suggestion: “in an ideal world, American sociology would look like British sociology before it became Americanised”.

  • Dynamics of Virtual Work: Book series launch

    How good do these look? A potentially really important book series: Dynamics of Virtual Work Book Series Launch University of Westminster 309 Regent Street, W1B 2HW, London January 21, 2016, 18:00-20:00 http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/events/dynamics-of-virtual-work Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dynamics-of-virtual-work-tickets-19751489236 Sponsored by the University of Westminster’s Communications and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), the University of Hertfordshire and Palgrave MacMillan, this event will…

  • Deadline Jan 8th: Mapping Alternative Routes out of Capitalism

    Really interesting project by Phoebe Moore: See below a call for panels and papers for a section in the EISA conference, Izmir, Turkey, 7-10 September 2016. The section seeks panels and papers on alternatives to capitalism, and how we might achieve them, both within the capitalist present and on the route to a post-capitalist society. We…

  • #DigitalSociology and the Future of the Discipline

    I’m quite pleased with this little collection I curated for The Sociological Review: Sociological Imagination: Digital Sociology and the Future of the Discipline by Kate Orton-Johnson, Nick Prior and Karen Gregory Should Digital Technology Lead Us to Reconceptualise the Social? by Jessica Heal Sociology and Human-Computer Interaction: A Call to Arms for Greater Collaboration by Effie Le Moignan Disruptive Technologies, Social…

  • smart phones and work place repression

    A really interesting BuzzFeed article about the use of smart phones on building sites to increase efficiency (the 30% of on-site time that is regarded idle, for reasons attributed to ‘miscommunication and disorganisation’) and their implications for workplace surveillance. What’s particularly striking is that inefficiencies are often the result of the complex subcontracting arrangements now…

  • the deroutinisation of work

    What other practices are there which should be added to this list? From The Pathology of Communicative Capitalism by David Hill, loc 877: For example, ‘alternative officing’, the business practice of having workers frequently change the location they occupy, is designed to add spontaneity to the work day in order to facilitate creative new collaborations.…

  • CFP Special Issue of Popular Communication: Self-(Re)presentation Now

    This looks really interesting: Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture Special Issue: Self-(Re)presentation Now Guest Editor: Nancy Thumim *Call for Papers* The editors of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture invite submissions for a special issue on the topic of Self-(Re)presentation. We welcome critical approaches in new media, film,…

  • Ann Oakley on the psychology of the academic male

    From her wonderful novel Over Heads, pg 13: Like most academic men, he regarded equal opportunities and gender as something of a turn-off. But one wasn’t supposed to say so. Gone were the days when one could happily ridicule women for being interested in themselves, confident of not getting the rejoinder that in a patriarchal world…

  • CfP: From Global Justice to Occupy and Podemos: Mapping Three Stages of Contemporary Activism

    From Global Justice to Occupy and Podemos: Mapping Three Stages of Contemporary Activism Call for Abstracts/Contributions Special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society Special Issue Editors: Todd Wolfson, Rutgers University, US Emiliano Treré, Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico / Lakehead University, Canada Paolo Gerbaudo, King’s College London, UK…

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#20)

  • 2 PhD scholarships in digital labour analysis & digital ideology critique

    This looks like a really good opportunity: 2 PhD scholarships in digital labour analysis & digital ideology critique 2 PhD scholarships in digital labour analysis & digital ideology critique University of Westminster: Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies & Comunication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) Three years, full time £16,000 annual stipend plus fee waiver http://www.westminster.ac.uk/courses/research-degrees/research-areas/media-arts-and-design/research-studentships/westminster-institute-for-advanced-studies-research-studentship…

  • Donald Trump: The Reluctant Fascist

    Until relatively recently, I’d assumed that Donald Trump’s political ambitions amounted to little more than self-promotion, not unlike Sarah Palin’s post-2008 career trajectory. Sean Illing suggests this is still the case and that Trump’s recent pronouncements can be seen as increasingly desperate attempts to disqualify himself while creating a media storm: Like almost everyone else in…

  • the riddle of society 

    From pg 165 of Margaret Archer’s Realist Social Theory: What is it that depends on human intentionality but never conforms to anyone’s intentions?  What is it that relies upon people’s concepts but which they never fully know?  What is it that depends upon human activity but never corresponds to the actions of even the most…

  • the idiocy of defensive elites

    As over-the-top rants go, this one’s a doozy. It’s possible this is all a contrivance but why would a senior lobbyist come out with something so contrary to his industry’s interests? I’m really interested in the defensiveness creeping in amongst elites who see themselves as embattled, as well as the possible courses of action this might…

  • Techno-Religions and Silicon Prophets

    A really interesting talk via the BSA Digital Sociology group:

  • some thoughts on responsibility

    At an event in Liverpool last week, I was asked by Steve Fuller about what I understood responsibility to mean in a sociological sense. He was sceptical that I could support claims of responsibility given my understanding of human agency as situationally performative but biographically continuous. In essence I understood him to be asking: do I think there’s something about…

  • Silicon Valley: The Invisible Trap. Evgeny Morozov on How to beat bureaucracy

  • some thoughts about the accelerated academy

    Saved here for my own reference: https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672108416530259968 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672108934115774465 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672109317504557057 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672109675140247552 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672109928807538688 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672110744947859456 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672111381127299072 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/672111910565888000

  • technological drivers of institutional isomorphism

    From The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, loc 1972: Companies should give up trying to create their own reengineered processes and instead buy them off the shelf from ERP vendors such as SAP and Oracle. cle. In the words of Chris Deacon, a senior ERP specialist at the consultancy sultancy Computer Science Corporation (CSC),…

  • What will the Millennial Fascist look like?

    I love this post by David Banks on Cyborgology: the future Millennial fascist will need to employ a highly adaptive messaging system enabled by what Zeynep Tufekci has called “computational politics”. Computational politics allows political leaders to portray themselves very differently depending on whom they are talking to. By using finelytuned algorithms fed by enormous databases of our…

  • six ways till sunday

    The years unfold in one moment The voices that we heard so loud Are now suddenly silenced Inside this crowd And you’re surrounded by the lives Of those who found something to hold So bringing everybody down Is all you know You’ve been hiding so long You can’t find yourself In this sheltered life you…

  • Found in Nigel Thrift’s book from the Warwick library

    Ironically, I’m pretty sure this is exactly the sort of political intervention he (theoretically) applauds:     

  • the appalling state of @crosscountryuk trains

    Half the toilets were out of order as per usual. Once I squeezed myself through an astonishingly overcrowded train, this was the state of the other toilet. The floor was pretty awful but thought it was nicer not to photograph it:      

  • bureaucratic bloat as a defining feature of digital capitalism

    In The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, there’s a great discussion of the expansion of bureaucracy in American healthcare. From loc 1728-1737: Between 1968 and 1993, the number of managers and administrators tors in U.S. health care rose fourfold from 719,000 to 2,792,000, outstripping the growth in the number of physicians, which less than…

  • critical realism as the natural ontological attitude of physicians?

    A thought I had when reading this description of medical decision making in The New Ruthless Economy loc 1842. Medical diagnosis is a form of causal reasoning, alive to its own provisionality and fallibility, seeking to identify real mechanisms which explain events that have manifested empirically: Physicians constantly have to make decisions based on incomplete…

  • the irreducibility of interpretation in socio-technical systems

    A really interesting example discussed in The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, loc 1398-1407. CasePoint was a system which aimed to remove expertise from the customer-facing service function by turning the call centre operator into an ‘information conduit’. But inevitably interpretation was necessary and the assumption that it could be avoided produced all sorts of unintended consequences: CasePoint’s…

  • from governing the body to governing the mind

    Another interesting bit from The New Ruthless Economy about the transition from a Taylorism of the body to a Taylorism of the mind. It’s important that we see algorithmic and quantified control in this longer-term historical context. From loc 1382-1390: Ford and Taylor were mostly intent on controlling the bodily movements of workers tied to machine…

  • self-tracking to pre-empt social tracking

    I came across an interesting extract in The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, which shone an interesting light on the relationship between self-tracking and social tracking. From loc 1318: Paula Dabbart, an employee ployee at an American Airlines reservations center in Tucson, said that she wore a stopwatch on a string around her neck to time each…

  • judith butler lecturing on the performativity of assembly

  • Everyday analytics: The politics and practices of self-monitoring

    Everyday analytics: The politics and practices of self-monitoring Self-monitoring is a pervasive part of contemporary life, entwined in many spheres of the everyday, for example work, health, fitness, energy consumption, finance. The analysis of these activities, once the preserve of scientific, professional and technology experts, is expanding, as the scanning, recording, memorising and tracking of…

  • animals being amazed by magic tricks

    I just came across this lovely video on Twitter: This is the best thing I've seen today. pic.twitter.com/HwhY29TALj — Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) December 9, 2015 This has turned into a whole genre of YouTube video:

  • a taxonomy of corporate monitoring software

    From The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, loc 1209. I wonder what ‘innovations’ have emerged in the ten years since this was book was published? There are at least five distinct types of monitoring software. First, there are what might be called “classic” monitoring products, software that embodies the Taylorist preoccupation with timing and…

  • The Lives and Deaths of Data

    This looks superb: Open Track: The Lives and Deaths of Data Convenors: Sabina Leonelli and Brian Rappert, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology & Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis), University of Exeter, UK (see also the Exeter Data Studies group: http://www.datastudies.eu)  Abstract: This track investigates the relational constitution of data:…