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This book explores the possibility of drawing upon a punk ethos to inspire and invigorate sociology. It uses punk to think creatively about what sociology is and how it might be conducted and aims to fire the sociological imaginations of sociologists at any stage of their careers, from new students to established professors.
A significant new way of understanding contemporary capitalism is to understand the intensification and spread of data analytics. This text is about the powerful promises and visions that have led to the expansion of data analytics and data-led forms of social ordering. It is centrally concerned with examining the types of knowledge associated with data analytics and shows that how these analytics are envisioned is central to the emergence and prominence of data at various scales of social life. This text aims to understand the powerful role of the data analytics industry and how this industry facilitates the spread and intensification of data-led processes. As such, The Data Gaze is concerned with understanding how data-led, data-driven and data-reliant forms of capitalism pervade organisational and everyday life. Using a clear theoretical approach derived from Foucault and critical data studies, the text develops the concept of the data gaze and shows how powerful and persuasive it is. It’s an essential and subversive guide to data analytics and data capitalism.
This book examines the powerful and intensifying role that metrics play in ordering and shaping our everyday lives. Focusing upon the interconnections between measurement, circulation and possibility, the author explores the interwoven relations between power and metrics. He draws upon a wide-range of interdisciplinary resources to place these metrics within their broader historical, political and social contexts. More specifically, he illuminates the various ways that metrics implicate our lives – from our work, to our consumption and our leisure, through to our bodily routines and the financial and organisational structures that surround us. Unravelling the power dynamics that underpin and reside within the so-called big data revolution, he develops the central concept of Metric Power along with a set of conceptual resources for thinking critically about the powerful role played by metrics in the social world today.
Social media platforms hold vast amounts of data about our lives. Content from the past is increasingly being presented in the form of ‘memories’. Critically exploring this new form of memory making, this unique book asks how social media are beginning to change the way we remember.
This book explores the quirks of digital culture. Through a series of short punchy chapters, it uses these quirks as momentary glimpses into the hidden dynamics of our swirling, highly mediated and often unfathomable cultural experiences.
Digital media are rapidly changing the world in which we live. Global communications, mobile interfaces and Internet cultures are re-configuring our everyday lives and experiences. To understand these changes, a new theoretical imagination is needed, one that is informed by a conceptual vocabulary that is able to cope with the daunting complexity of the world today. This book draws on writings by leading social and cultural theorists to assemble this vocabulary. It addresses six key concepts that are pivotal for understanding the impact of new media on contemporary society and culture: information, network, interface, interactivity, archive and simulation. Each concept is considered through a range of concrete examples to illustrate how they might be developed and used as research tools. An inter-disciplinary approach is taken that spans a number of fields, including sociology, cultural studies, media studies and computer science.
The vast circulations of mobile devices, sensors and data mean that the social world is now defined by a complex interweaving of human and machine agency. Key to this is the growing power of algorithms – the decision-making parts of code – in our software dense and data rich environments. Algorithms can shape how we are retreated, what we know, who we connect with and what we encounter, and they present us with some important questions about how society operates and how we understand it. This book offers a series of concepts, approaches and ideas for understanding the relations between algorithms and power. Each chapter provides a unique perspective on the integration of algorithms into the social world. As such, this book directly tackles some of the most important questions facing the social sciences today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.
This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.
This all-new collection of David Shrigley's addictively strange and entertaining work reveals fresh, unsettling truths and anxious amusements in a format that welcomes the uninitiated and rewards the faithful.
Beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. Given the very quick rise of craft beer, as well as the myopic scholarly focus on economic and historical trends in the field, there is an urgent need to take stock of the intersectional inequalities that such realities gloss over. This unique book carves a much-needed critical and interdisciplinary path to examine and understand the racial dynamics in the craft beer industry and the popular consumption of beer.