Digital Humanism: A Philosophy for the 21st Century, Christian Fuchs’s latest book, is a collection of essays that are linked, broadly, through examining different aspects of the digital humanities and humanity’s becoming digital. The best essays in the book cover… Read More ›
Books like Massimo Airoldi’s Machine Habitus contain radical, transformative ideas in accessible, professional prose. Airoldi’s ideas are radical because he advocates a shift of fundamental categories in what sociologists must consider the objects of their analysis in understanding modern society…. Read More ›
Like Florian Jaton (2022, 2021), I don’t have a lot of time for experiences that can’t be scrapped for parts and exchanged for healthcare benefits and other requisites to bare life. The book is as battered as he imagines, and… Read More ›
Ironically, as an academician, there are countless reasons why I don’t successfully engage in academic book reading. Undergraduate classes to prepare and teach, field notebooks to transcribe in NVivo software, languishing joint publication projects, obscure workshops, and, in my case… Read More ›
Florian Jaton’s The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating takes up a simple question: where do algorithms come from? Although a great deal of sociotechnical research implies problems of this kind, they are rarely posed so directly. There may be… Read More ›
The intimate relationship between expertise and ethos is mediated by rhetoric. Complex articulations of these social, political, and rhetorical relationships are found in Reddit’s r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series that allows a scientific expert to engage in an online question-and-answer period… Read More ›
Understanding is a demanding epistemic state. It involves not just knowledge that things are thus and so, but grasping the reasons why and seeing how things hang together. Gaining understanding, then, requires some amount of inquiry. Much of our inquiries… Read More ›