In 1988 Pierre Bourdieu chaired a commission reviewing the curriculum at the behest of the minister of national education. The scope of the review was broad, encompassing a revision of subjects taught in order to strengthen the coherence and unity… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘technology’
The Return of the Unabomber
Twenty years ago Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard-trained maths prodigy obsessed with technology’s destruction of nature, was given eight consecutive life sentences for sending letter bombs in the US post which killed three people and injured 23 others. Generally known as… Read More ›
The exciting future of personal communications
From Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966):
The Familiarity of the Future: A Look Back from 1999
In preparation for writing a review of the Unabomber’s new book, I have gone through my files to find all the things I and others had said about this iconic figure when he struck terror in the hearts of technophiles… Read More ›
On the Militarisation of Everyday Life
By Hamish Robertson Introduction We live in world that increasingly applies military solutions to problems ranging from local ‘threats’ to the geopolitical disruptions as the norm. Across the political spectrum there is an increasing acceptance of the belief that military… Read More ›
“Please, sir, may I go home?”
An interesting snippet from Losing The Signal, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, concerning the lengths to which overzealous mangers would go during the early days of Research In Motion. From pg 39: One RIM manager became so obsessed with… Read More ›
On ‘disruption’ and ‘innovation’
Even though I believe the concepts of ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’ refer to sociologically significant phenomena, I cringe slightly whenever I hear someone use the terms. Particularly in the case of the latter, a whole theory of social change at the meso… Read More ›
CfP: (Dis)empowering technologies
“TransMissions: Journal of Film and Media Studies”, new online academic journal affiliated at the Jagiellonian University, Poland announced its first CfP: (Dis)empowering technologies. The main areas of our interests are: – social movement activism – ethnic, national and religion minorities… Read More ›
Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy of techno-fascism
From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 201. Losse was asked to write blog posts about Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy, something which he outlined to her in general terms: “It means that the best thing to do now, if you… Read More ›
The first gold rush of digital capitalism
From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 10-11. I think this understates the degree to which ‘playing hard’ was driven by a potent mix of fear and aspiration. But it’s a nice overview of circumstances which intruige me: And, in… Read More ›
The coding skills bubble
As we enter the second machine age, it’s easy to assume that coding skills will be in ever increasing demand. But this TechCrunch feature suggests both that the skills shortage will likely prove fleeting, due to the impending automation of… Read More ›
The Pre-History of the Internet of Things
I had no idea how long this notion had been around for. Blair Newman was a notoriously drug addled technologist (who once tried to claim cocaine as a business expense) into whose failed venture Microsoft ploughed $50,000 in the late… Read More ›
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
(HT Pat Lockley) Call for papers: Open issue Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology | adanewmedia.org Issue 9, April 2016 Editors: Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University) and Nina Huntemann (Suffolk University) We invite contributions to a… Read More ›
The comfort of a smartphone
By David Beer Last month I made the mistake of putting my mobile phone in the washing machine. Despite being quickly retrieved, the phone died. I left it to dry out for a few days, but nothing. There was an… Read More ›
The 5th ICTs & Society Conference
The 5th ICTs & Society Conference: The Internet and Social Media at a Crossroads: Capitalism or Commonism? Perspectives for Critical Political Economy and Critical Theory. Vienna University of Technology. Vienna, Austria June 3-7, 2015. Programme: http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/programme_ict&s5.pdf http://icts-and-society.net/events/5th-icts-and-society-conference/ Given that the… Read More ›
Routines and Reflexivity in Organisational Life
In this podcast recorded at a Centre for Social Ontology seminar in March 2014, Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) discusses routines and reflexivity in organisations. Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has… Read More ›
The gloomy digital sociology of Zygmunt Bauman
From Bauman’s talk at re: publica a couple of days ago. They’ve released these videos with remarkable speed:
Saying goodbye to Apple, Microsoft and Google
Provocative reading for those, such as myself, who have become utterly reliant upon the products produced by these corporations: I’ve moved to these alternative platforms because I’ve changed my mind about the politics of technology. I now believe it’s essential to… Read More ›
‘Questioning Technology’: The Importance of Empirical Work and Ontological Philosophy
by Declan Mcdowell-Naylor There’s little question that, for at least two decades, technology has been a centre piece of enquiries across the humanities and social sciences. Nearly every field has made valuable empirical contributions, addressing plenty of normative questions ‘about technology’…. Read More ›
Technology and Human Nature
In their Webcam, Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan offer what they describe as a theory of attainment. While I’m not sure they’d accept my terminology, I read this as an attempt to theorise the causal powers of technology in relation to the causal powers of… Read More ›
Self-tracking and social control: what would techno-fascism look like?
Earlier this week I finally bought the Jawbone Up24 after weeks of deliberation. I’d got bored with the Nike Fuel Band, losing interest in the opaque ‘fuel points’ measurement and increasingly finding it to be an unwelcome presence on my wrist…. Read More ›
Thirty Years On: Lessons from the Home Computer Boom
I wonder how many senior academics would feel comfortable rereading their PhD? Equally, I wonder how many current research students can imagine revisiting their work in twenty or thirty years? This is precisely what I did recently, having come to… Read More ›
Why Sociologists and Technologists Should Talk
An interesting article from ZDNet (HT Jean-Loup Richet) made a case for why all technologists should become technology sociologists. It contends that the question of how and why technology will be used tends to be occluded by the continual focus of technologists on the properties of… Read More ›
“I’m a cyborg? I thought I was just wearing glasses”: technology, agency and ontology
This is a quick attempt to elaborate on a thought which kept coming back to me during the Quantified Self seminar on Tuesday. It seems obvious to me that one of the key conceptual questions encountered in studying technology which… Read More ›
Beardyman’s polyphonic me
Beardyman, renowned beatboxer who we featured here, describes the machine he and his collaborators have built to overcome the limitations of the human voice:
Fashion online
It is interesting to see how the fashion industry has been employing new computer visualisation techniques to approach realistic, three-dimensional human body shapes. This influences the way we shop, as well as the dynamic of the market for clothes: for… Read More ›
Being Human in a Digital Age?
Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. See more of Erica Glasier’s fabulous work here.
The Permeation of Technology in Everyday Life
Sarah Kember’s research covers many aspects of the relation between technology and life, from the centrality of new media in everyday life to scientific projects such as Artificial Life which redefines life as information and seeks to both simulate life-as-we-know-it… Read More ›