Digital Sociology Podcast

For this episode I spoke to Michael Rosino about his book Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and the Media which comes from a detailed analysis of the discourse on drug policy and race in newspapers and the comment sections of their online versions. Michael tells me about the discourses he identified which often deny racism and racial oppression as a factor in patterns of criminalisation of groups in drug related crime statistics. Michael is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at...

For this episode I spoke to Peter Bloom who is a Professor of Management at the University of Essex, Owain Smolović Jones who is Director of the Open University's Research into Employment, Empowerment and Futures academic centre of excellence and Jamie Woodcock who is Senior Lecturer at the Open University. We talk about their new book Guerilla Democracy: Mobile Power and Revolution in the 21st Century which is a theoretically sophisticated analysis of digital politics. We have a...

This episode is a really great chat I had with Ben Jacobsen and David Beer both of The University of York. We talk about their new book Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past which is an exploration of the ways in which social media engages with memory and how this becomes significant for their platforms. They focus on the "Facebook Memories" app within the Facebook platform which generates reminders to users of previous...

In this episode I spoke to Scott Timcke who is a comparative historical sociologist, with an interest in race, class, and technology in modernity. He is a research associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and a fellow at the University of Leeds’ Centre for African Studies. The basis of our discussion is Scott's book Algorithms and the end of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st Century American Life which was published in 2021 by Bristol University...

There has been a huge gap since the last episode as life, work and then Covid got in the way. I will be putting out a few episodes over the next few weeks which have all been recorded recently with the exception of this first interview with Mark Wong. This was recorded in 2019 and was intended to be the first of a series which I didn't manage to do at the time. But Mark's work is fascinating to reflect on in 2021 as he has done fascinating work on "Hidden Youth", that is, young people who...

In this episode I am talking to Elinor Carmi who is a Postdoc Research Associate in Digital Culture & Society at the University of Liverpool. She tells me about how her experience of working in radio and music production and as a feminist has influenced her current analysis of digital media work. In particular we discuss her comparison and analysis of early 20th century telephone operators and contemporary online content moderators. Elinor suggests that there are similarities between the...

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Susan Halford who is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol and the President of the British Sociological Association. Amongst other things she explains the emergence "semantic web" to me and we discuss why this is of interest to sociologists and what sociology my have to offer in understanding it. If the web is a massive database of documents then the semantic web is a way of identifying and connecting "entities"...

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I am talking to Huw Davies who is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Huw tells me about his research into young peoples' use of technology (and particularly the internet). His research has shown that there are significant social class differences between how young people of different social class backgrounds tend to use technologies. However, this doesn't always follow the patterns we might expect. He...

On the latest Digital Sociology Podcast I am talking to Dr Jess Drakett who is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Jess shares some fun and fascinating insights from her PhD research into representations of gender in meme culture and sexism in the tech industry. She conducted qualitative, discourse analysis of probably the most commonly used memes - "image macros". These are usually an image with white writing overlaid at the top and bottom. The research looked into...

For this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Nick Couldry who is Professor of Media, Communication and Social Theory at the London School of Economics He suggests that digital platforms are appropriating "human life without limit" as all aspects of our life become transformed into data. Nick and his co-author Ulises A. Mejias describe this as a form of big data colonialism as it is a process through which our lives are deemed apt for extraction and appropriation without...

In this episode I am speaking to Frank Pasquale who is Professor of Law at the University of Maryland. We talk about his work which has addressed the impact of big data and algorithmic processing on reputation, search and finance. We discussed how the data we generate an hour every day lives has enabled a drive to assess, rank and judge ourselves and others. He offer some insight as to why and how credit rating agencies have become so powerful and what impact they have. Frank also warns that...

For this episode I spoke with Tom Brock who is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He tells me about his research into e-sports and video games and how the changes in the political economy of video games leads to a more rational approach to games. Is this damaging to the experience of play if it becomes instrumentalised. He also suggests this potentially encourages a neo-liberal orientation to the self as we are encouraged to measure ourselves and our...

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I am talking to Kylie Jarrett who is a lecturer in Department of Media Studies at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. She writes and researches on internet cultures and has written on the “culture of search” inspired by Google. But in this episode we are mainly talking about her feminist analysis of digital labour. This is a concept which has been developed to describe the value which users of the commercial internet (and particularly...

In what is likely the most fun episode I spoke to Penny Andrews. This started out as a chat about Penny’s research into current research information systems, institutional repositories and academic social networking services such as academia.edu. Penny gives some fascinating insights from her research into how people use these systems and the political economy around in which they are integrated. I found it particularly fascinating to hear about how people increasingly have little choice but...

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke with Mark Carrigan. Because it has taken me ages to upload this podcast my introduction to Mark on the podcast is a bit out of date now. But Mark is the Digital Engagement Fellow at The Sociological Review and a researcher in the Culture Politics and Global Justice cluster in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge where he works on research on the digital university. I also mention that he runs the Sociological...

For episode 13 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I had a chat with Karen Gregory who is a digital sociologist at the University of Edinburgh. She tells me about her work on the exploitation enabled by the rise of digital labour. She tells me about the importance of challenging the individualised and empowering picture of digital technologies and platforms which are often claimed to enable empowerment for individuals. We also discuss the relationship between right wing politics and the...

For this episode I spoke with Murray Goulden of the Horizon centre at the University of Nottingham and he told me about the projects he is working which, amongst other things, use digital traces as a memory aid as part of ethnographic research. To do this him and his colleagues have designed methods and technologies to extract data from people’s digital devices (with consent of course!) to present these data back to people. The participants were then encouraged to make sense of these data...

This episode was turning up in a lot of podcast apps in a shorter version so I have uploaded it again as a separate episode which will hopefully fix this. So if you have the first version as a 13 minute audio delete that one and download this (should be 39 minutes). For this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Harry Dyer about his work on online social platforms and identity. Harry tells me about his thoughts on the development and design of different platforms and how they...

For this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Harry Dyer about his work on online social platforms and identity. Harry tells me about his thoughts on the development and design of different platforms and how they make different actions and connections possible and restrict others. Harry told me about what he has found from his research on the way in which young people use different platforms and the subtle ways they interpret and use platforms to present their identities. He...

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Mariya Stoilova who is working on a project called Global Kids Online. Mariya is based at the London School of Economics but the project is an international one which looks at the experiences, opportunities, risks and rights and how these relate to inequalities. The project developed out of a previous one called EU Kids Online and Mariya has been working on developing an open source toolkit which is adaptable to countries in the...