Who’s to hold up the sky if not you and I?So long, so long, so longWho’s to tame the volcanoes on mountains high?So long, so long, so longJust how long does it take to drink oceans dry?So long, so long, so longAnd someday we’ll say goodbye to goodbyeSo long, so long, so long, sail on
Category: Archive
Well, I got a job and tried to put my money awayBut I got debts that no honest man can paySo I drew what I had from the Central TrustAnd I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus Now, baby, everything dies, honey, that’s a factBut maybe everything that dies someday comes backPut […]
Are we all digital scholars now? Social distancing has normalised digital scholarship within higher education to an unprecedented degree, as what was called a decade ago ‘the coming social media revolution in the academy’ has now come to pass due to the disruption brought about by COVID-19 and associated public health responses. However, the radically […]
From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis, pg 52. I found this really useful for getting my head around how outbreaks are dispersed as a consequence of physiological, behavioural and social differences between people who are infected: This variation in R0 across individuals in a population […]
While I’m on the subject of Slavoj Žižek, I thought it was worth recording how sections of his Pandemic! 2 reproduce his Hegel in a Wired Brain (oddly combining acknowledgments he is ‘drawing’ on that book while straight forwardly copying & pasting at least one paragraph). But most of the book is seemingly reproducing posts […]
There are lots of criticisms which can be made about Modern Family, as a distinctly old fashioned show dressed up in a superficial liberal progressivism. It’s nonetheless been a guilty pleasure of mine and I’ve been rewatching it during this grim coronic winter. There’s one aspect which stood out to me during this time which […]
I’m in love with the nightEvery breath of this house creakingI’m familiar with the cold and the windows and the doorsAnd the sound of my heart beatingBeating in and out of time
I’ve always been slightly sceptical of the concept of the post-digital. Firstly, it seems to defeat its own deflationary ambitions by defining itself in epochal terms. I’m not convinced it can help us overcome hyperbole about ‘the digital’ if it’s implied that we’ve entered a new era predicated on this moving into the past. I […]
This section from pg 2 of Rupert Wegerif’s Dialogic: Education for an Internet Age captures something of my preoccupation with what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’. The immediacy with which we can act on this feeling has been vastly increased by the affordances of digital technology: Thinking and writing with the […]
I’m digital sociologist based in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, where I lead activities within the Culture, Politics and Global Justice Cluster and work as an embedded researcher within the Digital Learning Working Group. I direct the Post-Pandemic University project which is an international network comprising an online magazine, podcast hub […]
I’ve enjoyed reading Twitter: A Biography very much. I came to it after myself and Lambros Fatsis finally submitted The Public and Their Platforms to a publisher, which is a shame because it resonates with and would have helped us further develop the arguments in our book. At the heart of these is the question […]
The first is The Public and Their Platforms co-authored with Lambros Fatsis. It’s a rethinking of the public sociology debate from the ground up, built around the critical realist sociology of platforms I’ve been developing over the last few years. This was so hard to finish but I’m really enthusiastic to see what people make […]
What significance has been accorded to digital technology within the sociology of higher education? For a long time it’s seemed the tendency has been to treat this in terms of the application of technology within specific subdomains, in a way that obscures the connections between them and their role in a broader institutional transformation. However […]
The Digital Condition is an open discussion group, organised by myself and Milan Stürmer, building on last year’s experimental project to inquire about the digitalised experience of the pandemic. For each meeting there will be a short article and a series of questions posed in advance, with the session being an open forum for raising […]
I thought you might be interested in this new podcast series I’ve started. It’s the audio diary of a social theorist during the pandemic, with self-consciously rough thoughts, speculations which haven’t quite reached the status of work in progress. Mostly short thoughts from me but I’ll have conversations with other people as well. It will involve meta-reflections […]
With the imminent demise of cinema, it seems like a good time to share this list of the films I’ve seen since July 2018: Hotel Artemis Generation Wealth Annihilation Under the Tree Ant Man and the Wasp The Escape The Heiresses Mad to be Normal Moneyball BlackKklansman Apostasy Cold War Searching American Animals A Simple […]
I turned off comments almost a year ago when I deleted my Twitter account, in pursuit of a less overwhelming digital existence. However I realised recently this has obliterated the sense I had of people actually reading this blog, as opposed to stumbling across it via the google footprint which has accrued over ten years […]
In his recent book of essays, Will Davies draws a comparison between securitisation and digital platforms. From pg 15-16 of This Is Not Normal: These are just some of the ways in which the credit derivative and the platform have transformed our political world in the twenty-first century. But there is more to it than […]
