In a frenetic world obsessed with deliverables and results, Jenny Odell makes the case for How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, arguing not for passivity, wilful ignorance or sloth, but rather for the potential we create by refusing productivity and redirecting our attention to active modes of listening and contemplation. By shining a critical light on … Continued
Category: Social Media
Weibo – How is China’s second largest social media platform being used for social research?
Social media research in the global north is primarily focused on western social media platforms, notably Twitter and Facebook. In this post Shulin Hu describes how researchers have used data from Weibo, China’s second most popular social media platform, to undertake a variety of research projects and provides resources for researchers looking to use Weibo … Continued
Book Review: The Quirks of Digital Culture by David Beer
In The Quirks of Digital Culture, David Beer provides a patchwork of quirky vignettes that together create a representative picture of the cultural environment in which we now live, showing how digital culture offers a means of access, insight and possibility while also bringing the payoff of surveillance, manipulation and a sense of inescapability. Ignas Kalpokas highly … Continued
Book Review: Are Filter Bubbles Real? by Axel Bruns
As references to echo chambers and filter bubbles become ubiquitous in contemporary discourse, Axel Bruns offers a riposte in Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which questions the existence of these phenomena. While not convinced by all of the author’s arguments, Ignas Kalpokas welcomes the book as a must-read for those looking to critically reflect on some of the assumptions surrounding social … Continued
The future of public intellectualism lies in reforming the digital public sphere
Public intellectuals as they have traditionally been perceived, as individual scholars speaking truth to power, are a declining feature of public life. Responding to the centrality of digital communication in the public sphere Mark Murphy and Cristina Costa, argue that academia needs to further value and prioritise engagement with the digital public sphere and that beyond simply taking its forms […]
2019 In Review: Communicating your research
From formal academic papers, to the use of emojis in social media, communicating your research can take many forms. This post brings together some of the top posts on research communication featured on the LSE Impact Blog in 2019. The Art of Connection – To deliver a good research seminar you need to connect with an audience at a pragmatic, […]
From hermits to celebrities – How social media is reshaping academic hierarchies and what we can do about it.
By adopting social media in increasing numbers, academics have also bought into the dynamics of social media celebrity. In this post Mark Carrigan reflects on the impact of the attention economy on academia and how attention is often unfairly concentrated on a small number of individuals. Taking this into account, he argues that well edited multi-author outlets can play an […]
Book Review: Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts
In Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, Sarah T. Roberts explores the work conditions and experiences of people employed in ‘commercial content moderation’, drawing on interviews with those tasked with detecting and removing harmful and upsetting online content. As the problems faced by CCM workers reveal the economic, social and political distortions of the digital age, this book […]
“Why I’ve deleted my Twitter account #exhaustionrebellion” ~ by Mark Carrigan
After close to a decade of using twitter as an academic, Mark Carrigan reflects on why he has decided to leave the platform. Highlighting, the benefits of twitter, but also the increasingly institutionalised nature of academic social media and the way in which social media work has become a required, but unrecognised feature of academic labour, he suggests that twitter has […]
Book Review: The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
In The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias argue that the quantified world is not a new frontier, but rather the continuation and expansion of both colonialism and capitalism. This book shines in using the theory underpinning the idea of data colonialism to articulate sites of resistance, writes […]