I recently co-authored a paper with Mark Johnson and Tom Brock about the moral economy of celebrity streamer on Twitch. We attempt to understand how the aspiration for celebrity, the imperative to be seen, reflects the broader conditions in which the aspirant streamers make their way through the world: More broadly than the phenomenon of […]
On pg 102 of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, he highlights email exchanges between YouTube’s founders, released in a court case, which suggest the invocation of ‘user generated content’ might be a matter of branding rather than a meaningful growth strategy for social media platforms: In another email exchange from 2005, when full-length […]
In 2014 Peter Walsh identified extensive self-plagiarism (as well as some actual plagiarism) in Zygmunt Bauman’s work and made his findings public. He was subject to some remarkable attacks by senior figures (including Brad Evans and Henry Giroux invoking the image of “a Stasi witch hunt” to attack the “micro-fascist” Walsh) which I found as hyperbolic as […]
In Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, there’s an interesting reflection on pg 46 about Trump’s first experience of being in a newspaper: In his third year at the academy he earned a headline in the local paper—“ Trump Wins Game for NYMA”—and the experience was almost electrifying. “It felt good seeing […]
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 […]
Much deserved Guardian coverage of the weird phenomenon that is the internet cat video festival. What grips me about things like this is not the fact that people are trying to make money from their cats, but rather that many others people are trying and failing to make money from their cats. Not unlike the aspiring professional […]
