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 Molloy College, Long Island, New York and you can follow him on Twitter @michaelrosino  You can listen to the episode and subscribe on the Anchor website via the link below or by searching for “Digital Sociology Podcast” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever else you get podcasts. This will be the last episode for a while but I hope to be back with some more in the future. However, in the meantime I will be launching a new series of my Social Theory Podcast in the next couple of weeks.

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 fascinating chat about different examples of radical collective action (from striking cinema and restaurant workers to anti-vaxxers and the storming of the Capitol) and the guests suggest some creative and challenging ways of understanding these events. What role have digital technologies and networks played in these events? Do they enable easier and more effective political action? Are these digitally facilitated resistances only disruptive or can they lead to constructive political alternatives? You can follow Peter on Twitte

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 posts, photos or other content. We talk about what kinds of memories Facebook values and how it draws in previous interactions to create new content which is likely to produce more engagement in the present. They tell me about how the distinction between a "real" memory and one created by Facebook is blurring and how the platform's perspective on what memories are valuable differ from those of users. This also tells us a lot about the role which the platform plays in creating or assessing the value of memories. You can read more

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 Press. Scott tells about how algorithms and processes of datafication are influencing how politics functions. In particular, how the role which particular form of capitalism which has been enabled by the internet and digital technologies and networks affects politics. We talk about credit rating systems, the hidden ways in which we are influenced, Trump and the progress which needs to be made on considerations of race in our analysis of politics and technology amongst many other things. It was was really fascinating to talk to Scott

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 spend all or most of their time at home engaging with other people solely online. This has been a familiar experience to many people over the last 18 months or so which makes Mark's research and insights more important than ever. Mark tells me about this growing phenomenon and the experiences of people he spoke to which challenge some of the perceptions of people who spend much of their time physically alone at home. The "Hidden Youth" are not necessarily isolated or disconnected, rather, they are highly connected with other

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 ways in which (usually female) telephone operators were not only responsible for connecting calls but for maintaining the smooth front end experience for callers. One of the key tasks required of them was to distinguish between "message" and "noise" and remove the latter. Content moderators have to make similar distinctions in with online content by removing violent, sexual and other content which doesn't fit with the values which the platform wishes to present. The power of this analysis is made stark through the example

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" within those documents (WolframAlpha is an example of a basic version of the semantic web). Susan says that this is a significant ontological task of identifying what kinds of things do and do not exist in this space. For the semantic web to develop  huge amounts of data on all kinds of topics would need to be gathered and analysed which would also require decisions to be made about what kinds of data to include and exclude.  We also discuss about the benefits and challenges of working working across the social

 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 has found from his detailed research with young people that many might not be engaging with the school curriculum on digital literacy (for instance) but nevertheless have sophisticated skills and are quite entrepreneurial with online and creative activities. The two papers of Huw's we discussed were: Davies HC and Eynon R (2018) Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’? New Media and Society. DOI: 10.1177/1461444818783102. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444818783102 Davie

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 how humour is used in the very rule bound world of memes both by applying the format of a particular image macro to a new and context, subverting the form or commenting on it (as with the one above).
A big part of the analysis was how memes create collective identities for those who know the rules and the references but are also exclusionary for those who don't and if they are the target of the memes with many being sexist and misogynistic.
The other part of Jess's research was into the use of humour in a workplace conte

  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 payment (like the raw materials of the new world were by colonisers). We also talked about Nick's book The Mediated Construction of Reality, written with Andreas Hepp, which suggests ways in which we can take proper account of the role which media play in the ways in which we understand the world. In particular, we focused on how data is shaping our experience and understanding of reality. Here is the website for Nick's forthcoming book is: https://colonizedbydata.com/ Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias 'Data Colonialism:

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 critiques of data driven analysis and ranking can often just lead to more surveillance.We talk about the how big data can create discrimination as conclusions from one type of data can be applied to other areas of our lives. Frank stresses The importance of keeping human input into rankings and ratings. You can follow Frank on Twitter @FrankPasquale and see his website at
http://www.frankpasquale.com/
The abstract to Frank's book The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information is here: http

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 performance in terms of a vast array of metrics.
It was fascinating to hear about the embodied experience of elite video game playing including the strains put on bodies in order to compete at a high level and the insecure lifestyles of those hoping for a share in the potential riches of prize money or sponsorship.
As someone who is terrible at video games I really connected with they way in which Tom conceptualised the perverse pleasures of failure when playing games.
You can read more about what Tom is doing on his website and

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 social media) generate through their interactions. Through a critique of some strands of “autonomist” Marxist analysis she suggests that he gendered character of this “digital labour” is often overlooked and the novelty of this situation is overplayed. Some people (usually women) have long been contributing “free labour” necessary to the functioning and maintenance of capitalism (broadly speaking social reproduction). Kylie has suggested the concept of the "digital housewife" to describe this. Social media companies have

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 to use these systems which generate data and enable control of academic life by multinational corporations. Along the way there are some diversions in our chat into the state of academia, the pressures created by systems of measurement, digital capitalism and even Doctor Who and Charlie from Casualty. Warning! This is a wide-ranging chat which I considered cutting down to something more focused but actually the charm of this episode is in the shambolic loose character of it. Penny also tells me plenty about one of her oth

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 Imagination website which has since been closed down. Mark is on Twitter @mark_carrigan I have just changed over my podcast host from Soundcloud to Anchor. If you listen on a podcast app this shouldn't make any difference and you should get new episodes as normal. But if you usually listen through a browser on Soundcloud you will just need to go to my profile on the Anchor site instead. 

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 increase of digital work. Karen explains the relationship between gender, work and social reproduction and how feminist thought can help us to understand this. She also emphasises the importance of labour history for understanding the contemporary digital economy. A few times Karen mentions a book called Lower Ed: The troubling rise of for-profit colleges in the new economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom. She also discusses Kylie Jarrett’s book Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife See he

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 (which they wouldn’t usually see). You can follow Murray on Twitter @murraygoulden

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 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 tells me about the theoretical traditions he has drawn upon influenced by Erving Goffman and Karan Barad amongst others. I also here about the innovative way he has applied the analysis of comic books to social media. We also talk about

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 tells me about the theoretical traditions he has drawn upon influenced by Erving Goffman and Karan Barad amongst others. I also here about the innovative way he has applied the analysis of comic books to social media. We also talk about whether communities are possible online and how the Facebook model of community differs from the “anonymous” one. This is the first episode that I haven’t been able to edit properly. All of my previous episodes have included intro/outro music, stings and various bit

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 global south. Central to their project is challenging the idea that the internet is a space dominated by risk but also one which provides opportunities for them. Conversely, there is also a "digital determinist" discourse which is equally simplistic which assumes that access to the internet will in itself produce more highly skilled and knowledgeable young people. The research has produced findings which show a nuanced picture particularly around how risk is understood differently by children compare