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  • buzzfeed explain #asexuality and it’s surprisingly good

  • the Japanese recovery of participatory Taylorism

    From The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, loc 630-647. Taylor’s  experience of industrial resistance to his methods led him to replace this participatory aspect with an elaborate system of inspection and control: But perhaps the most important portant contribution of Japanese manufacturers to the theory and practice tice of scientific management has been to…

  • soft flexibility vs hard flexibility  

    From The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, loc 704: Soft flexibility ibility involves changes to the appearance and styling of a product, such as occurred on the auto assembly line at Nissan, with its variety of dashboards, boards, seats, radios, and carpets. This flexibility can easily be accommodated modated by a work regime that…

  • Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics

    Via Janice Malcolm: Submissions To submit CLICK HERE Submissions are due by Friday 15 January 2016.   Themes The conference welcomes submissions from staff and students (especially collaborations among students, and between staff and students), across the full spectrum of disciplinary lenses on the themes described below. We are especially keen on receiving submissions that address…

  • Inside the Lives of the 1% – How Power and Inequality Operate in Britain

    I really wish I could be in London that day. I can’t wait to read more about this project: Inaugural lecture by Prof Aeron Davis, Co-Director of PERC 5.30-7.30pm, 26th January Over two decades Aeron Davis has interviewed some 350 elite subjects from the worlds of business, finance, politics and media: from Nigel Lawson to Jeremy…

  • how much time do workers spend worrying?

    This extremely useful little book introduced me to this consideration recently. It’s very important to my developing argument about the intensification of work: the escalation of demands placed upon workers, their mediation through the internal conversations of individual workers and its implications for how they exercise their reflexivity in the workplace. Here’s the data I’ve just been…

  • algorithms, situated judgements and imposed patterns

    An interesting case discussed on pg 85 of Unforbidden Pleasures, by Adam Phillips: We may live in the aftermath of the myth of the Fall, and the even longer aftermath of the myth of Oedipus, but the first traffic lights were invented in the United States after the First World War. The traditional mutual accommodation travellers had been…

  • skill complementarity, skill substitution and skill debilitation 

    From The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, loc 208-219: Economists use the term “skill complementarity” to describe how information formation technology enhances the skills of high-income workers such as architects and engineers. They speak of “skill substitution” when technology eliminates the jobs of telephone operators or bank tellers. The examples of the physician and…

  • the distinction between ‘ambivalence’ and ‘mixed feelings’

    This is a really interesting distinction. From Unforbidden Pleasures, by Adam Phillips, pg 85: Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings. ‘Ambivalence has to be distinguished from having mixed feelings about someone,’ Charles Rycroft writes, in his appropriately entitled A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (as though an ‘Uncritical’…

  • the digitally-facilitated intensification of work

    From The New Ruthless Economy, by Simon Head, loc 149-164 From the early 1990s onward, the twin phenomena of”reengineering” and “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) have been prime examples of workplace practices built around new information technologies. Relying ing on computers and their attendant software, reengineering and ERP automate, simplify, join together, and speed up business…

  • CfP: Surveillance and Security in the Age of Algorithmic Communication 

    Surveillance and Security in the Age of Algorithmic CommunicationAn IAMCR 2016 pre-conference University of Leicester 26 July 2016 Deadline for abstracts: (500 words): January 15, 2016 More information: http://iamcr.org/leicester2016/algorithmic-surveillance The call as pdf: Click to access AlgoSurveillancePreconferenceCfP_0.pdf The Snowden leaks have put mass surveillance on the public and academic agendas. Data collection, interception and analysis…

  • CfP: Political Theory on Refugees

    This looks really interesting: Call for Papers University of Augsburg, 17-18 November 2016 CONFERENCE: POLITICAL THEORY ON REFUGEES Working Groups: Democracy and Flight: Political Theories on Refugees and the transcultural and comparative political theory group  Convenors: Sybille De La Rosa (Heidelberg University), Melanie Frank (University of Augsburg) and Viktoria Hügel (University of Brighton) Keynote speaker:…

  • against ‘hybrid beings’ as a way of understanding our entanglement with digital tech 

    Notes for a talk later this week  My objection to the notion that we should understand the ubiquity of digital technology within person life in terms of ‘hybrid beings’ is a fundamentally methodological one. At the level of social theory, I find it relatively unobjectionable as an attempt to conceptualise the entanglement of human beings…

  • why would anyone use Hootsuite rather than Buffer?

    I’ve just tried using Hootsuite for the first time and I’m utterly baffled by it. I may be missing something obvious, but the software seems designed to be cumbersome and time consuming: Contrast this to the clarity of Buffer. If you’re using Hootsuite and haven’t yet tried Buffer, I can’t recommend it enough. It will…

  • Charting the Digital: Play, Discourse, Disruption

    This looks interesting: 8-9 October 2016, Venice (Italy) First call for papers Organised by the ERC funded Charting the Digital team: Sybille Lammes (Principal Investigator), Chris Perkins (Senior Research Fellow), Sam Hind (PhD candidate), Alex Gekker (PhD candidate) and Clancy Wilmott (PhD candidate and Research Fellow). ____ Whether a navigation device that adjusts its route-display…

  • Charles Babbage’s precursor to Mechanical Turk 

    From The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson, lol 474-491: Babbage knew of the devices of Pascal and Leibniz, but he was trying to do something more complex. He wanted to construct a mechanical method for tabulating logarithms, sines, cosines, and tangents. To do so, he adapted an idea that the French mathematician Gaspard de Prony came…

  • the recursive loop of technological metaphors for subjectivity

    One of my major irritants is technological metaphors for subjectivity, not least of all because I slip into invoking them myself when I use terms like ‘cognitive load’. The underlying idea that ‘the brain is like a computer’, as well as the complex network of associated metaphors leading from it, frustrates me because it seems…

  • the early music of brian fallon

    For some reason I’ve come back from Prague with a desire to listen to this stuff on endless repeat. The earliest band, Cincinnati Rail Tie: This Charming Man: Random Stuff:

  • AoIR 2016: Call for Proposals (anyone interested in proposing a #digitalsociology session?)

    Workshops: 5 October 2016 Main Conference: 6-8 October 2016 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany AoIR 2016 is the 17th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, a transdisciplinary gathering of scholars interested in the place of networked technologies in social processes. AoIR 2016 will emphasize the relevance of the Internet in today’s culture and politics.…

  • putting together an AoIR panel on Instagram

    This seems like a really important initiative: Instagram – the new(isn) kid on the social media bloc For the AoIR 2016 we, Jakob Svensson (Uppsala University, Sweden) and Uta Russmann (FHWien University of Applied Sciences, Vienna, Austria), are putting together a panel proposal on Instagram and its relevance in today’s communication. We are looking for…

  • The Challenge of Sociological Writing w/ @AcademicDiary, @thesiswhisperer & @ThomsonPat

    Register here: HTTPS://WWW.EVENTBRITE.COM/E/THE-CHALLENGE-OF-SOCIOLOGICAL-WRITING-TICKETS-19080409017 In this event organised by The Sociological Review’s Early Career Forum, a panel of accomplished writers with a long history of supporting younger scholars reflect on the challenges of sociological writing. Each participant will give a short talk, discussing a particular aspect of the challenge of writing, before the panel opens up for a general discussion…

  • Digital Health/Digital Capitalism One Day Conference CfP 4th July 2016

    Really interesting looking conference organised by Chris Till: Digital Health/Digital Capitalism One Day Conference CfP 4th July 2016 Digital technologies have had a profound impact on the ways in which people live their lives, relate to one another and think about themselves and their capacities. This event will bring together scholars who are interested in…

  • mapping the post-capitalist paradigm and its thinkers

    An interesting link via @samoore_. There’s some stuff one could take issue with but I think it’s an interesting exercise and the project as a whole looks extremely worthwhile.

  • Mediatization: Digital Revolution and the Chinese Setting

    Mediatization: Digital Revolution and the Chinese Setting* *Call for Papers* The 2016 International Communication Association Post-Conference and 14th Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC), with the theme of “Mediatization: Digital Revolution and the Chinese Setting”, will be held on June 14 to 15, 2016, in the Journalism School of Fudan University. *Theme and Content* The convergence…

  • CfP: Mediated (Dis)Continuities: Contesting Pasts, Presents and Futures

    Conference theme: ‘Mediated (Dis)Continuities: Contesting Pasts, Presents and Futures’ Discontinuity is the far side of change. Late modernity – as the unstoppable flow of permanent changes – is haunted by the disparity of its various histories, geographies, ontologies and technologies. How are media and communication practices engaged in communicating across these divides? The theme heralding…

  • perspectives on the non-use of technology

    I just saw this fascinating new issue of First Monday. I think this is a hugely important topic and a collection on it is long overdue:

  • follow #fastuni for live tweeting from the accelerated academy

    There is little doubt that science and knowledge production are presently undergoing dramatic and multi-layered transformations accompanied by new imperatives reflecting broader socio-economic and technological developments. The unprecedented proliferation of audit cultures preoccupied with digitally mediated measurement, quantification of scholarship and the consolidation of business-driven managerialism and governance modes are commonplace in the contemporary academy. Concurently, the…

  • defending human rights in a digital age

    This looks great:

  • Toward a typology of participation in crowd work

    Second call for papersCSCW2016 workshop, February 28 Toward a typology of participation in crowd work Deadline for paper submissions December 7 http://ttpcw.blogs.dsv.su.se/ <http://ttpcw.blogs.dsv.su.se/&gt; The development of technologies and practices of broad public participation are changing the notion of the public. As the use of participatory and social media has become widespread in society and enabled…

  • the palestinian solidarity campaign and the growing climate of political repression in the uk

    As anyone who follows party politics in the UK will have noticed, the home secretary’s rhetoric on ‘extremism’ has been getting increasingly bellicose in recent months. While it remains an open question as to what extent she believes this, as opposed to simply positioning herself to the right of Osborne and Johnson for the coming…

  • the acceleration of viruses and malware 

    From Countdown to Zero Day, by Kim Zetter, loc 1000-1018: When Chien joined Symantec, antivirus researchers were like the Maytag repairman in those iconic ads— they had a lot of downtime. Viruses were still rare and tended to spread slowly via floppy disks and the “sneaker net”— carried from one computer to another by hand.…

  • international journal of social research methodology: ask the editors @ijsrm! TOMORROW at 11am

    In my capacity as social media associate editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, I’m arranging an ask the editors session on Twitter. It will take place on Tuesday 1st December, 11.00—12.00. We’ll definitely have Ros Edwards and Christina Hughes. We’ll possibly have Malcolm Williams participating as well. We’ll use the hashtag #IJSRM for the discussion.…

  • an introduction to social acceleration in 18 minutes

  • Michel Foucault – The Culture of the Self

  • Call for papers: digital gaming (cc @TGJBrock)

    e invite you to submit your paper on digital gaming, Game Studies or related disciplines focusing on digital game and gaming in all its theoretical dimensions and emerging applications. Digital technologies promote a transformation in the practice of gaming and the role it plays in contemporary society. From a broader perspective, the monograph aims to…

  • Call for Papers: The contemporary relevance of the work of Pierre Bourdieu

    CALL FOR PAPERS The contemporary relevance of the work of Pierre Bourdieu BSA Bourdieu Study Group’s Inaugural Biennial Conference 2016 Organised in association with the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol 4-6 July, 2016, University of Bristol Pierre Bourdieu has been one of the most influential sociologists of the second half…

  • an introduction to social ontology

    I just came across this superb introduction produced by the Cambridge Social Ontology group: The term ontology3 derives from Greek, with “onto” meaning “being”, and “logos” usually interpreted as “science”; so that ontology, as traditionally understood, is the science or study of being4. The word being has at least two senses: 1)  Something that is,…

  • neil gaiman’s 8 rules of writing

    From the Guardian, via BrainPickings: Write Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the…

  • what makes human beings distinctive amongst animals?

    What makes human beings distinctive amongst animals? This is an argument I found myself having a few times last week. I just came across a great passage by Martha Nussbaum, quoted on Brain Pickings, reflecting my own views on this. When I say ‘reflexivity is a defining characteristic of the human’, it’s a short hand for this…

  • new songs from brian fallon’s impending solo album

    Two new songs that are apparently from Brian Fallon’s impending solo album. I’m not that keen on the first but I can’t get the second out of my head. I still wish Gaslight Anthem hadn’t split up but it’s been a long time since I’ve looked forward to an album release this much.

  • research blogs as monuments to treating ideas seriously

    Another excellent annual reflection from Daniel Little on the eighth birthday of Understanding Society. It’s one of my favourite academic blogs and certainly my favourite theory blog: This week marks the end of the eighth year of Understanding Society. This year passed the 1000 mark — the blog is now up to 1,029 posts, or well…

  • are you conducting research on reflexivity?

    Following from our successful workshop earlier this year, we’re organising the first of what will hopefully become a regular reflexivity forum at the University of Warwick on May 24th. The intention is to provide a space in which people conducting empirical research into human reflexivity will be able to present work in progress, discuss issues they’ve encountered and meet…

  • a question about cultural globalisation

    How did ‘love locks’ spread from the great cities of Europe to a grim motorway junction in suburban north Manchester? There’s about 10-20 on here at present. I’m going to keep checking back to see if they spread.  They can also be found in Manchester city centre:  

  • international journal of social research methodology: ask the editors @ijsrm! december 1st at 11am

    In my capacity as social media associate editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, I’m arranging an ask the editors session on Twitter. It will take place on Tuesday 1st December, 11.00—12.00. We’ll definitely have Ros Edwards and Christina Hughes. We’ll possibly have Malcolm Williams participating as well. We’ll use the hashtag #IJSRM for the discussion.…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #16

    Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage et al How to Thrive in the Digital Age by Tom Chatfield Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate by Abdel Bari Atwan Untangling the Web by Aleks Krotoski Jony Ive by Leander Kahney The Modi Effect by Lance Price

  • the grateful serfs of the sharing economy

    One of the most interesting developments in the so-called sharing economy is the growing tendency for the largest of these companies to try and mobilise their users as lobbying and protest groups at the municipal level But when Airbnb’s executives look out at the world, they don’t see a fragmented puzzle of local politics and…

  • social psychological approaches to understanding why people are blasé about data security

    I’m reading Untangling the Web, by Aleks Krotoski, as an accessible precursor to beginning to engage with the social psychological literature on online behaviour. It’s proving to be an enjoyable read so far, though maybe not quite as much of a pop social psychology book as I had hoped it would be. It’s more of a collection…

  • voluntarily disclosed personal information online and susceptibility to manipulation 

    From Untangling the Web, by Aleks Krotoski, pg 127-128: As I wrote earlier in this book, if you stick “Aleks Krotoski” into an online search engine, you’ll be able to learn a lot about me. Along with basic biographical details such as where I was born and who my parents are, you can find out…

  • the liquid warfare of ISIS

    From Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, by Abdel Bari Atwan, pg 137: Islamic State battalions and units are extremely adaptable to changing situations and new developments on the ground, and field commanders are given total autonomy in implementing the operations they are charged with. This flexibility, and confident delegation, makes IS’s war effort extremely effective…

  • cfp: the dehumanisation of contemporary societies

    International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) 19th Annual Conference Wednesday 20 – Friday 22 July 2016 Pre-conference workshop: Monday 18 – Tuesday 19 July 2016 Postgraduate Teaching Centre, Cardiff Business School Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU De/humanisation The dehumanisation of contemporary societies In many ways, our current epoch witnesses dehumanised social relations. While alienation (Marx)…

  • reflections on six years spent studying asexuality 

    Notes for a talk tomorrow It’s now been quite some time since I undertook my research on asexuality. It was initially motivated by sheer curiosity, as I guess research should be under ideal conditions: I’d met a couple of asexual people socially around the time I was completing a masters degree project on sexual identity.…

  • Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance

    Via Tom Dark: Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance  Lucas Melgaço (CRiS-VUB) and Jeffrey Monaghan (University of Ottawa) launch the following call for chapters for their book on protests in the information age.  Editors: Lucas Melgaço (Dept. of Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) & Jeffrey Monaghan (Dept. of Criminology, University of…

  • the 2016 international association of critical realism conference 

    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…

  • Crowd Dynamics: Exploring Conflicts and Contradictions in Crowdsourcing 

    Call for papers: Deadline December 21, 2015. Crowd Dynamics: Exploring Conflicts and Contradictions in Crowdsourcing A one-day workshop at CHI 2016, 7 or 8 May 2016, San Jose, CA, USA In this workshop we explore the reasons, processes, power relations, and dynamics of conflicts within crowdsourcing. We invites participants to contribute with insights from different types…

  • why are we not boycotting academia.edu?

    Via Nick Mahoney. How good does this event look? Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu? Coventry University Tuesday 8th December 2015 3:00-6:00pm Ellen Terry Building room ET130  With: Janneke Adema – Chair (Coventry University, UK) Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France) Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US) Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK) David Parry (Saint Joseph’s University, US) …

  • “world of warcraft is the new golf”

    From Untangling The Web, by Aleks Krotoski, pg 53-54: Joi Ito is the head of the Media Lab, a powerful thinktank based at MIT, one of the most respected academic institutions in the US. The Media Lab has been one of the most influential research laboratories for developing cutting edge technology. It’s also been in…

  • what terms would you like to see included in a glossary of social ontology?

    Along with Adam Wood from MMU, I’m planning a glossary of social ontology. What terms would it be useful to see included within it? The idea would be to collect and introduce different uses of terminology, rather than to pronounce on their singular correct use. These are the obvious ideas I’ve had so far: Structure…

  • social media and constraints upon personal morphogensis 

    I’ve been thinking a lot about themes from my PhD recently and how to introduce them into my current work. My overarching focus was on personal morphogenesis: how people change and how we understand this process sociologically. I’m particularly interested in cases where people seek to change, though having such a goal implies neither the…

  • I’m talking about asexuality at this book launch on Friday 

    I’m looking forward to this event on Friday. It’s been ages since I’ve talked about a/sexuality! Sexuality and Gender Conference & Official Launch of the Palgrave Handbook of the Psychology of Sexuality and Gender The Open University Camden, 1-11 Hawley Crescent, Camden Town, London NW1 8NP Map here Friday November 27th 2015 9.30am until 7pm…

  • what ‘freedom’ will mean in a gamified world

    From Addiction By Design pg 83-84 Seeking to engender this same compelling sense of efficacy, secondary “bonus games” on video slots invite gamblers to perform actions over which they seem to have control (but do not). Anchor Gaming’s 2000 game Strike It Rich, for instance, presented players with a bonus game in which the object…

  • digital dilemmas: transforming gender identities and power relations in everyday life

    Digital Dilemmas: Transforming Gender Identities and Power Relations in Everyday Life Colloquium, 5-6th August, 2016, University of Waterloo, Canada Due date for abstract submission 31st January, 2016. The proliferation of digital technologies, virtual spaces, and new forms of engagement raise key questions about the changing nature of gender relations and identities within democratic societies. Over two…

  • social media and social science research ethics

    CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS Social Media & Social Science Research Ethics Location: 33 Finsbury Square, London. EC2A 1AG Date: Monday 21st of March, 2016 The Research Ethics Group of the Academy of Social Sciences and the NSMNSS network invite abstracts and poster/video submissions for a one-day conference that aims to further develop and…

  • the right-wing plot to overthrow FDR and install a dictator in the US (and more on the potential for fascism in the united states)

    Saving this for my own reference. I’ve read lots about this case but I’ve never come across a documentary before: A few other videos on similar themes which look good:

  • techno-fascism and six factors which could bring it about

    An interesting article on Truthout which has some degree of cross over with the ideas I’m developing at the moment. I agree with quite a lot of this in its own terms but see it as a tendency, susceptible to being resisted, emerging against a background which makes that resistance decreasingly likely (depoliticisation and the fragility…

  • social media in the accelerated academy: march 2nd @CIMethods

  • got an idea for a monograph? submit to @thesocreview monograph call

    The international refereed journal The Sociological Review is home to the Sociological Review Monograph Series. This series publishes edited collections of outstanding and original scholarly articles on issues of wide sociological interest and is dedicated to promoting emerging as well as established academics. For more information, see www.sociologicalreviewmonographs.com CALL FOR PROPOSALS: We are currently seeking proposals for two…

  • places available: the challenge of sociological writing

    In this event organised by The Sociological Review’s Early Career Forum, a panel of accomplished writers with a long history of supporting younger scholars reflect on the challenges of sociological writing. Each participant will give a short talk, discussing a particular aspect of the challenge of writing, before the panel opens up for a general discussion with the…

  • call for blog posts: #digitalsociology and the future of the discipline

    In recent years Digital Sociology has emerged as an increasingly prominent trend within the discipline at an international level. But it remains unclear precisely what this tendency represents, provoking enthusiasm and skepticism in equal measure. In this special section for The Sociological Review’s website, we invite short blog posts (1500 words or less) addressing digital sociology and the questions it…

  • follow @accelerateduni for accelerated academy updates

    We’re planning to keep the project going after the initial conference in a couple of weeks. Stay in touch for updates: @accelerateduni

  • international journal of social research methodology: ask the editors @ijsrm! december 1st at 11am

    In my capacity as social media associate editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, I’m arranging an ask the editors session on Twitter. It will take place on Tuesday 1st December, 11.00—12.00. We’ll definitely have Ros Edwards and Christina Hughes. We’ll possibly have Malcolm Williams participating as well. We’ll use the hashtag #IJSRM for the discussion.…

  • CfP: Data Literacy Special Issue

    Special issue – Community Informatics and Data Literacy Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net) Call for Submission v2 – Important: deadline extended to the 18th of December 2015 A special issue of the international Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net) will be devoted to Data Literacy. Community Informatics (CI) is the study and the practice of enabling…

  • Visiting Scholar Program – Ryerson University Social Media Lab

    This looks good. I’ll be tempted to apply for the scheme next year if it runs on the same basis. The lab is run by one of the Big Data & Society editors: The Social Media Lab, part of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada) invites academic researchers at any…

  • call for proposals: @thesocreview seminar competition

    The Board of The Sociological Review are pleased to announce that the journal is sponsoring a single-themed Research Seminar Series (which may consist of three or more research seminars) as well as three One Day Symposia events.  The Board hopes to make this funding available on an annual basis. Guidelines for Applicants The proposed Research Seminar Series…

  • the slippery slope towards techno-fascism

    There’s a great section in this paper by Frank Pasquale, The Algorithmic Self, which relates to my developing and deliberately provocative account of techno-fascism: Stray too far from the binary of Democratic and Republican politics, and you risk being put on a watchlist. Protest shopping on Black Friday, and some facial recognition database may forever…

  • southpark on the vertigo of the filter bubble

  • digital wildfire: project showcase on jan 12th

      

  • call for papers: the rapid spread of provocative content on social media

    Collaborative Work and Social Media:  Responding to the rapid spread of provocative content Special Issue call for the Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work  Deadline for submissions March 7th 2016                                            The rapid spread of…

  • cyber war between non-state actors 

    From Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, pg 16: To date, the most effective cyber- retaliation on Islamic State for the murderous January 2015 Paris attacks (on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket) has come from an unlikely source – the veteran anarchist hacking collective Anonymous. Anonymous declared war on IS in January 2015…

  • CfP: Political Agency in the Digital Age: Media, Participation and Democracy

    An interesting call for papers emerging from an excellent conference I was at last month: CfP Special Issue of Media and Communication (Guest Editors: Anne Kaun, Julie Uldam, Maria Kyriakidou) Political Agency in the Digital Age: Media, Participation and Democracy Based on the successful conference Political Agency in the Digital Age (9-10 October 2015), we…

  • the future of transparency in the civil service?

    From The Modi Effect, by Lance Price, pg 246: To the horror of some officials, Modi even went so far as to introduce biometric clocking- in devices and a new online portal, attendance.gov.in, through which anybody could check on the timekeeping of civil servants. Some of the abuses exposed by the new regimen were astounding.…

  • CfP: Demystifying Blockchain Through an STS Lens

    Demystifying Blockchain Through an STS Lens: Challenges and Opportunitiesof a New Infrastructure for the Commons.* “The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?” William Morris (1834-1896) In News from Nowhere (Morris 1890/2008), the narrator, William Guest, finds himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of…

  • digital micro-politics and digital macro-politics 

    In a number of books, Nikos Mouzelis offers a really important critique of the tendency to equate ‘micro’ with face-to-face and ‘macro’ with impersonal and international. He cites an international summit, Yalta if I remember correctly, as an example of a face-to-face encounter that is very much macro. I was thinking about this when reading…

  • peter thiel on the first silicon valley gold rush

    From Zero to One, by Peter Thiel, loc 155-171: Dot- com mania was intense but short— 18 months of insanity from September 1998 to March 2000. It was a Silicon Valley gold rush: there was money everywhere, and no shortage of exuberant, often sketchy people to chase it. Every week, dozens of new startups competed…

  • the ascendancy of the quants 

    From Other People’s Money, by John Kay, loc 310: Larry Summers (of ketchup economics) described the transformation in this way: ‘In the last 30 years the field of investment banking had been transformed from a field that was dominated by people who were good at meeting clients at the nineteenth hole, to people who were…

  • it (literally) pays to visit an open day 

    On a cold Sunday morning watching Frasier in bed in my hotel room, I was slightly amazed to see an advert for Staffordshire university on channel 4. What makes it even more surprising is that they’re offering £1000 to people who enroll with them who registered it as their first choice. The advert proclaims that…