Author: sam

Sam is owner of this blog and works as a senior lecturer in digital geographies.
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Internet of Things, ownership and Ts & Cs

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Toothpaste terms of service

Decided to make a spoof image that follows some others’ attempts to satirically reflect on the kinds of business models that seem to be creeping in for ‘Internet of Things’ products and services. My impetus is that I’ve enjoyed some of the recent posts on the @internetofshit satirical twitter stream, which lampoons IoT business ideas. These got me thinking…

Many of the successful posts take to the extreme a model we are already experiencing – which is that we do not necessarily totally control those things we think we own. I am aware that other folk will probably have commented in more depth and with greater nuance, but there we are… this is just a blogpost! (I welcome suggestions for further reading though)

For example – I recently bought a Kindle Paperwhite and to remove the inbuilt advertising I had to pay (in addition to the retail price) a £10 fee to ‘unsubscribe’ from ‘Special Offers‘. So, I had bought the device but to remove the adverts I had to pay more.

This, of course, resonates with the inkjet printer business model – in which the printer manufacturer can almost give away some models because the ink itself is highly lucrative, which led to stories comparing it’s value to that of gold…

In my most recent lecture for my third-year option module (Geographies of Technology) I addressed some of these issues and invited the students to consider the following questions when thinking about an ‘internet of things and places’:

Questions of ownership/responsibility:

  • Whose things?
  • Whose data?
  • Who has access? How? When? Where?

Questions of power:

  • How are decisions made on the basis of the data?
  • How doe these decisions influence our lives?

Questions of value:

  • How can/should we negotiate the value(s) of our data?
  • What are we willing to give(-up) for perceived benefits?
    • When does giving away lots of data become not worth it?

Later the same day, on the train home, I idly tweeted a speculative satirical scenario:

Which led me to create a still image (above). I think there’s a lot of scope of using speculative design techniques in a satirical way to provoke more debate about the kinds of relationship we want to enter into with and through the technologies we bring into our everyday lives. My key inspiration here is Anne Galloway‘s work, especially the beautiful Counting Sheep project.

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‘Vulgar’ cultural geographies and technology (new article online) and other ‘provocations for cultural geography today’

I have a short article/commentary recently published online in Social & Cultural Geography:

Vulgar geographies? Popular cultural geographies and technology

The article is one of several from a forthcoming theme issue that is the result of the OU Open Space Centre’s 2014 Doreen Massey annual event themed on ‘provocations of the present’. The theme issue Provocations for Cultural Geography Today has some great papers in it, including:

I strongly encourage having a read of these articles!

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A politics and economics of attention

Just before Christmas (and just before injuring myself) I took part in an ESRC-funded seminar concerning the politics and economics of attention, alongside my colleague Clive Barnett and others.

Jessica Pykett very kindly invited me to talk on the back of the theme issue of Culture Machine Patrick Crogan and I co-edited back in 2012.

There are slides from the talks plus an interesting commentary by Rupert Alcock now posted to the Behaviour Change and Psychological Governance website.

My slides are on ResearchGate…

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Gillian Rose on the shared visual imagination of drones / smart cities – great post

Gillian Rose has blogged about Derek Gregory’s recent lecture(s?) at Cambridge, which sounded interesting and provocative. It’s a great blogpost – I encourage people to read it.

I hadn’t thought of the similarities of visual imagination, or (systems of) visuality, across and between (military) drones and ‘smart cities’, but Gillian’s points make sense.

I was struck especially by this great point:

advocates of both smart cities and drone warfare share an absence of historical narrative so that their technologies can be seen as new, modern, better and more desirable.  (Which of course conveniently ignores various histories of failure, imprecision, rejection and unreliability.)

This seems especially important, and is a tactic/ approach shared by the kinds of computing R&D that I’ve studied and written about… it’s that lack of historical narrative ~ the ‘any-when’-ness, that facilitates some of the ways in which computing researchers have employed particular kinds of visual grammar to render particular kinds of possible future (in the) present.

Anyway – have a read…

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Sam Merrill on “Mapping Maps and Gaps: A Critical Digital Cartography of the ‘Mediterranean Refugee Crisis'”

Over on his blog, a little while ago, Sam Merrill blogged an excellent write-up of his participation in the 2016 Digital Methods Initiative Winter School (something I would’ve liked to do but didn’t know about[!] and anyway didn’t have time/funds to do). There’s a lot to think about from Sam’s blogpost, from the politics of different uses of maps in different phonic communities to the discursive politics of ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ and the complex representational politics of different media organisations. Definitely worth a read!

Mapping Maps and Gaps: A Critical Digital Cartography of the ‘Mediterranean Refugee Crisis’

Last month I attended the 2016 Digital Methods Initiative Winter School led by Richard Rogers and his team at the University of Amsterdam. Organised in the format of a data sprint the event saw participants attend a day of keynote talks presented by the likes of, among others, Lilie Chouliaraki, Mathieu Jacomy, Carolin Gerlitz and Rogers himself before turning their attention to a hands-on digital project for the remainder of the week. With the rather clever title of, Otherwise Engaged – Critical Analytics and the New Meanings of Engagement Online the Winter School set out to problematize online engagement and develop new methods by which to measure, visualise and interpret that engagement. The group I joined, which was made up of Natalia Sanchez-Querubin (University of Amsterdam), Rik Smit (University of Groningen), Belal Islim (University of Amsterdam), Quentin Lobbe (Telecom Paris Tech), Gabriele Colombo (Density Design), Suzanne van Geuns (Utrecht University) Jasper Bol (University of Amsterdam), Lars Dellemaan (University of Amsterdam), Hadewieg Beekman (University of Amsterdam) set out to create a digital critical cartography of the so-called ‘Mediterranean Refugee Crisis’ (although this phrase formulation arguable shifts attention from the true location of the crisis in the Middle East) .

Our pilot study compared the maps, images, locations and texts returned by Google searches for the queries ‘refugee routes’ and ‘migrant routes’ in seven languages: Arabic, English, French, Italian, Dutch, German and Spanish. As we expected the result showed the different levels of empathetic distance, dehumanization and solidarity associated with the two terms (refugee and migrants) and reinforced the relevancy of the recent debates in the European press about the responsible use of these terms and the campaign by the UNHCR about the degree to which, in this context particularly, word choice matters. It would take too much space to explain in detail all of the different hybridized digital-human methods that we explored and used over the week not to mention all the multi-leveled findings suggested (but not necessarily confirmed) by our initial interpretive forays. So instead I direct those interested to visit our project wiki, which although still being updated, gives a good idea of what we got up to during the week.

Read the full blogpost.

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Reblog> The scholar and social media

Excellent advice here from Tamson Pietsch on the uses and limits of social media, especially blogging. Found through @HelenPallett.

I very much support the ethos and practices suggested here:

The scholar and the social media

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Last week I gave a talk on social media to post-graduates from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Foolishly (but only fairly) I promised to practice what I preached. So here are the salient points (and links) as I remember them.

Why you should think about the social media

Increasingly scholarly conversation is happening online – in curated and individual blogs, on twitter, and through other electronic forums. If you are not engaging with these forms of publication you are likely to be missing part of what is happening in your field.

Participating in the world of social media helps generate a bigger (and more diverse) academic audience for your research. Much of this will be  in aligned disciplines, or in different national contexts. If you are not engaging online, you’ll be missing part of your potential audience.

Social media also helps generate a broader non-academic audience, especially with those industries to which your thesis may connect. Try to consciously develop and promote your “shadow expertise”; that aspect of your work that might inform a non-academic sector. It’s tough in the academic job market, and this could well be where your post-phd career ends up going.

And finally, social media is increasingly a factor in every employment sector. Engaging online gives you skills that will serve you well, wherever you work.

But always remember the golden rule

NEVER LET YOUR MOUTH EXCEED YOUR VOICE.

This is Stefan Collini’s advice to public intellectuals in Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain and it should be etched onto the computer screens of every academic who reaches for the internet.  Have something to say that is well founded and established, and well supported. Be respectful of other people’s work and opinions and give them due reference. The last thing a junior (or indeed any) academic needs is to have a ruined reputation all over the internet.

If there is a second rule, it might be this: VALUE YOUR TIME – blogging & tweeting can be very rewarding because unlike most other parts of academic life you get direct feedback. But it’s a drug. Keep your main game in view and remember: your authority to speak will in 98% of cases come from your research. So respect it, foster it, prioritise it.

How to start

See how other people are doing it. Set up a twitter account and follow scholars you admire (and those you don’t!) Read the relevant blogs in your field – some of these are likely to be co-authored. If you are totally lost, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog page is as good a place as any to begin (and you have discovered this blog so you’re not doing too badly!)

People disagree on the merits of maintaining an individual blog as against contributing to established co-authored or other forums such as The Conversation, but my view is to go for both:

  1. Set up a blog site for yourself that will act a bit like your online CV:
    • use it to a) experiment with writing pieces and b) as a place to collect any material you publish on other platforms. WordPress is easy to use and integrates well with other social media.
  2. Generate content:
    • Work in progress & the process of working (see for eg. the Thesis Whisperer or Trickster Prince).
    • Communicate research you have published (eg https://t.co/UCbgE8RslC)
    • Wait for news item & apply research
    • Provide context through your “shadow expertise” – are you writing a Phd on the history of fashion? Contact fashion magazines and pitch articles to them.
  3. Maximise your reach
    • Connect to other people’s online content through using links, and cross-promote on twitter (using #hashtags), facebook, linkedin and academia.edu.au, among other social media outlets.
    • Write for established platforms, such as co-authored blogs, The Conversation, print outlets, your university, industry publications. The internet is a big place with a lot of shouting people on it, and you need to find a way to be heard. Established sites offer you support and a readership that is invaluable.

Parting comments

Academic research usually takes a long time to produce. It frequently works with complex information and tells stories that complicate what we think we know. The interwebs do not thrive on such complexity. This doesn’t mean you should go for simplifications , but it does mean you need to work with people’s attention spans. Put your argument up front, rather than at the end; try to stick to 500-800 words maximum. Inject some personality. Too often wonderful academic research is communicated in ways that do not make it easy for people to access or connect with. Paywalls and professional convention carry part of the responsibility, but as scholars we can do a lot more too to reach out to a public that has demonstrated a robust appetite for ideas.

Reading list

Prof Patrick Dunleavy’s Shorter, better, faster, free: blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is communicated and How to write a blogpost from your journal article

LSE public impact blog and in particular their twitter guide and reading list on using social media for research

The Times Higher Education magazine’s Tips for academics on Blogging and Social Media

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Illness, reflecting on work…

I was off work for about a week and returned to work a week ago. Since then I’ve been struggling to catch up and I confess I’ve found it really hard. I’ve never really been properly ill during term-time before (that’s pretty lucky isn’t it?!) – it is exceptionally stressful. Pressure comes to return to work from your employer, from your students, from yourself – about possible student complaints, about dissertation anxiety, about delayed/late marking etc etc.

Moral of the experience: do not get ill. The work just piles up and you still have to do it all.

This got me thinking anyway…

The weird thing about any job, but (in my experience) academia especially, is that there’s lots of things you do not learn until they happen. The PhD is supposedly a form of training but it is a tremendously poor preparation for any role beyond a full-time researcher. Some postgrads get some teaching experience, which is good – but it doesn’t prepare you for what I found to be the most surprising and perhaps testing parts of the job: managing the weight of adminstrivia and dealing with your pastoral role. The way I have experienced this is: admin just keeps coming, and will only grow; and: students’ lives are bewildering.

Relatedly, the only advice I think I’d dare give a colleague new to the job is: make sure you take care of yourself. I’m afraid no one else will. The job will take all you can give and want more. The things I continue to negotiate to handle this are:

  1. Decide how much of yourself you are willing to give to your job/career. This fundamentally changed for me when my son came along.
    • Think about how your work and life ‘balance’, for example: in my experience commuting is not a long-term career strategy, especially with small children.
    • Try not compare yourself to others. Just because they are doing things you privately perceive to be ‘better’ than you does not make it a valid comparison. Feel proud about your own achievements, celebrate others’ success (if you feel able – we’re all human!) and keep muddling along.
    • Do not let performance management systems rule your life – think about how what you want to do can be spun to answer the requirements. AND >> keep a handle on your self-worth, sometimes expectations are unrealistic – this doesn’t make you “bad” or a “failure”. Talk with those whose opinion you trust and talk with those going through the same thing, you do not need to be alone (plus: join the union).
  2. Prioritise what you must/want to do and then find ways of firmly but politely saying “no” to the other things.
    • You may find you actually have some latitude to change things, like re-scheduling tutorials etc. If this makes things easier: do it!
  3. Most importantly: enjoy the job, regardless of the things we all know are difficult about it, teaching and researching for those who are interested can be very rewarding.