Category: Sociology

Engines of social order

For any sufficiently complex dataset, the idea that ‘the data speak for themselves’ is implausible; developers and analysts select from a wide variety of mathematical and visual methods…

From fake news to junk news

The creation of a standardised market for online publics and its expansion to the long tail of the Web; the quantification of engagement through metrics of clicking and…

Where are we going?

Regardless of the lack of a term for phronesis in our modern vocabulary, the principal objective for social research with a phronetic approach is to perform analyses and…

Fuck Nuance

When faced with a problem that is hard to solve, or a line of thinking that requires us to commit to some defeasible claim, or a logical dilemma…

Disruption

Silicon Valley is famous for ‘disrupting’ business models and whole industries through innovative technology: this language – of technological disruption – is also a coded way of saying…

Not born to read

Let’s begin with a deceptively simple fact that has inspired my work on the reading brain over the last decade and move from there: human beings were never…

Déclencheurs de rêves

Les textes littéraires sont donc des déclencheurs de rêves éveillés, qui permettent de faire un retour sur, de prolonger, d’accompagner ou de préparer l’action. Loin d’être une activité…

Dark matter

Thus a crucial difficulty in anticipating futures lies in long-term shifts in structures of feeling, of thought as felt and feeling as thought. So when I argue for…

Certainty trough

One way of approaching this might be in terms of the relationships between trust in the future and different actors’ proximity to the actual scientific work. In other…

Suckers for change

Even though every innovation is judged on economic grounds, at least to some degree, by its potential adopters, every innovation also has at least some degree of status…

Logic of Digital Utopianism

Utopias consider a given situation in the light of possible alternatives; as a result, observed reality first is subjected to an explicit or implicit critique and secondly depicted…

Commoditization of scholarship

One of the strangest projects of privatization and commodification in the early twentieth-first century has been the movement to commoditize scholarship. Two versions have been surprisingly powerful. In…

That’s interesting!

QUESTION: How do theories which are generally considered interesting differ from theories which are generally considered non-interesting? ANSWER: Interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions of their…

Sociology of expectations

While necessary to raising the profile and attract allies, disappointments are also likely because of the specific structure of the expectations. Early technological expectations are in many cases…

Structure, culture, personnalité, nature

Rosa, H. (2010). Accelération. La découverte.

Le design de la visibilité

Aussi dans: Cardon, D. (2019). Culture Numérique. SciencesPo Les Presses.

Institutional isomorphism

We ask, instead, why there is such startling homogeneity of organizational forms and practices; and we seek to explain homogeneity, not variation. In the initial stages of their…

Quatre familles d’algorithmes

Cardon, D. (2019). Culture Numérique. SciencesPo Les Presses.

Critiquer

Critiquer signifie en premier lieu distinguer, faire voire des différences dans ce qui se présente, pris à sa valeur faciale comme amalgamé, obscur ou non maîtrisable. Luc boltanski…