I’d tended to think of the acceleration of journalism as being a matter of fewer staff producing more copy. But this passage from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth suggests the changing demands of editing are a factor as well. From pg 416: Before she left for ProPublica, Marilyn Thompson, the investigative reporter and proponent of […]
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I’m taking the site offline in the near future. But there’s a PDF available here. It’s a massive (80mb, 5000 page) PDF so it’s a pain to download. Milena, Sadia and myself will be producing a curated version of this at some point next year but it won’t be available for a while.
This is absolutely spot on from Phil BC about the nostalgia animating contemporary centrist politics: This uneasiness on sacred cow politics is compounded by the successive hit jobs undertaken on Corbyn. Because he doesn’t share the same conservative goals as centrism, it follows he does not respect the same rules either. And so the fall […]
28 – 29 November 2019 Lancaster University Higher education is increasingly ‘platformised’. Indeed, digital platforms have become ubiquitous. They are dominant intermediaries not only in our social, economic and political life, but have become central forms of capitalist accumulation. While platforms differ in terms of openness to developers and public access to data, they operate […]
From Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth pg 281 While the new-media pioneers at BuzzFeed and Upworthy produced LOLs and cultivated trumped-up umbrage over the killing of poor Cecil, a second guard of new-media publishers set out to capture the loyalty of another psychographic swath of America whose disaffection far surpassed mere boredom. The new wave […]
This is a really interesting call which I’d be contributing to if the deadline wasn’t so tight: The call for papers attempts to address a number of topics potentially connected with the research problem of data literacy for teaching and learning in Higher Education. Our questions include: What type of data is collected in specific […]
From Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth pg 348: One abiding feature was the draconian nondisclosure and nontraditional workplace agreements staffers were required to sign before joining the company, 7 which demanded, “Individuals employed by Vice must be conscious of Vice’s non-traditional environment and comfortable with exposure to and participating in situations that may present themselves […]
Unburn the boat, rebuild the bridge, Reconsecrate the sacrilege, Unspill the milk, decry the tears, Turn back the clock, relive the years Replace the smoke inside the fire, Unite fulfilment with desire, Undo the done, gainsay the said, Revitalise the buried dead, Revoke the penalty and the clause, Reconstitute unwritten laws, Repair the heart, untie […]
This is an admirably prescient post from 2014 by BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith about the viral populism which social media has facilitated. It brings a new dimension to political life which eludes the familiar expectations of pundits: At some point in the next two years, the pollsters and ad makers who steer American presidential campaigns […]
I thought this CfP looked really interesting. Thanks Filvos for sharing. CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS: Postdigital Humans Maggi Savin-Baden (Editor) The development and use of Postdigital Humans is occurring rapidly, but often in unexpected ways and spaces. This, second book in the Postdigital Science and Education book series, will present research-based chapters which explore approaches to […]
I just stumbled across this sketchy first draft of my PhD project written over 12 years ago: I want to explore the moral experience of young people under late modern consumer capitalism. I’m interested in the way that the changes you discuss in your later work lead to a collapse in the horizon of possible […]
The Goods Yard, Kings Cross, London, UK 10:13PM, December 3rd, 2026 He tapped forlornly at the phone. It had been a while since it last offered a response. Since that comforting weight had pulsated through his hands, offering out a range of haptic possibilities which his body would instinctively know how to grasp for. It […]
Viral marketing for the real world Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution Applied sociology in virtual worlds Nativism and nature: rethinking biological invasion Historical role-playing in virtual worlds: VRML in the history curriculum and beyond Teacher’s LAB : a platform for teacher learning The Wandering Eye: an on-line collaboration […]
A few creepy extracts from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth about the office culture at BuzzFeed. The pursuit of virality has been gamified, with these ostentatiously fun undertakings matched by an underlying threat that those who can’t reach these standards won’t survive at the company in the longer term. In light of this we should […]
I thought this was an interesting extract from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth about the rise of Vice. Limiting their circulation was a deliberate strategy to facilitate its expansion in the longer term, enabling them to side step some of the pressures they would have been subject to if they had dived headfirst into growth. […]
Many of the leading figures in contemporary Silicon Valley are those who survived the fall out from the earlier crash. Thiel made his fortune by co-founding the online payments platform Paypal, acting as CEO until its sale to eBay. He subsequently founded Clarium Capital (a hedge fund), Founders Fund (a venture capital firm) and Palantir […]
It’s important to grasp how much the development cycle for apps and platforms differs from that of software from a previous era. The typical app will go through a far higher number of iterations than a comparable piece of software would have in a pre-smart phone era. There are numerous reasons for this ranging from […]
Originally a 2003 book by financial journalist Michael Lewis, the 2011 film with Brad Pitt tells the story of the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season. Struggling with fewer resources than his competitors and lacking the resources to replace star players who have been poached, general manager Billy Breane embraces data analytics to assemble “an island of […]
