What I never understood about #PredictionMarkets like #Polymarket: how do they deal with the problem of #reflexivity and the moral issue of creating potentially troubling incentives for undesireable events to happen (to reward those betting on those outcomes)?
#Reflexivity
What do you need to become who you are?
It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come… – The Gay Science
When I was a 17 year old student it felt urgent that I found my way to London as quickly as possible. I didn’t know why, it just did. In contrast the vast majority of students at my college were trying to stay as near possible to Manchester. Indeed many of them went to Leeds en masse and it seemed, until I deleted Facebook, many of them remained connected. Why did I want to break apart and why did they want to stay together? It was the first sociological question I ever asked and it’s one which in many ways I’ve spent my entire career circling around. It’s an exemplar of what Margaret Archer terms the problem of reflexivity: why do people in similar circumstances nonetheless make different choices? There’s a whole conceptual vocabulary she developed which speaks to that initial question in rich and sophisticated ways. It wasn’t that I hated my environment, in the sense in which I needed to get away. I was already drifting towards a life in central Manchester, away from my college, finding a community in the anarchist movement. In this sense I wasn’t what she termed in The Reflexive Imperative a rejector but rather a disengaged in the stance I took towards this context:
“They manifested a critical detachment from their parents and dissociation from the modus vivendi in which they had been reared. Reviewing the dissensus characterizing their parents’ way of life, these subjects’ evaluation was that ‘there must be better than this’ and an avowed desire that their own would indeed be different.”
I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I couldn’t find it here. I was experiencing what in her earlier work she described as contextual incongruity: a mismatch between nascent aspirations and the cultural resources of my environment. It’s one of the least well developed concepts in her framework but I think one of the most salient. It’s not simply the fact of social change, novel situations which intergeneration socialisation can’t prepare someone for, but an active incongruity between the existential challenges raised by those situations and the cultural resources offered by the environment for thinking them through. It’s not just that you can’t identify a way of knitting together concerns into a mode of life within the environment, it’s that you can’t find what you need to see how to do this. There’s just a diffuse sense that something more is needed. The horizon needs to expand in some way. This immediately takes us into terrain which is more characteristic of philosophy and psychoanalysis than sociology, even if I think the dividing lines between these fields are more porous the tends to be assumed. There’s a preverbal element to it which I went through a phase of describing as a discursive gap, which is a theme I explored through my asexuality research.
I found myself reflecting on this in late December because I suddenly had the urge to read Nietzsche for the first time in years. Almost a decade in fact, since I read the Gay Science and Ecco Homo after finishing my PhD in 2014. In the preface to Human, All Too Human describes what he terms “the great separation”:
“For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out – it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in the senses.”
What he describes as “a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy” is, I think, a particularly forceful response to what Archer calls contextual incongruity. In his description of “this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorzation” we can perhaps begin to excavate the philosophical richness of the predicament that Archer addresses in a sociological register: if I don’t have what I need here, where do I go? Indeed what is it that I need and for what purpose? The way Nietzsche describes the retrospective illumination of these questions, in which one “begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory” speaks of (meta)reflexivity in Archer’s sense:
“You had to gain power over your For and Against and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment.”
You have to learn what matters to you. Which is hard. Harder I think then Archer often seems to suggest, sympathetic though she is to the difficulties of her research subjects. As Nietzsche puts it “Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present”. We know we need to do something but we’re not yet sure what that is. Or if we know what matters to us, we cannot see how to live in a way that expresses this. This is where Archer’s fondness for Taylor’s ‘unity of a life’ (which I concur with ontologically but which increasingly strikes me as psychoanalytically untenable) leads to a smoothing over of the messiness of this process. However when I read this alongside Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo I’m struck by the utterly quotidian way in which he talks about this challenge. He’s articulating a craft of living, the way to better or worse decisions in real world situations, in a way that would sound almost Aristotelian if you changed the mode of expression somewhat. I wonder how many people have tended to overlook the almost fussy quality of Nietzsche’s observations here, regarding them as empirical fluff alongside the philosophical substance.
#archer #change #development #metaReflexivity #Nietzsche #personalMorphogenesis #reflexivity
I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog
1. Agency
Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.
2. Reflexivity
Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.
3. Reflexive imperative
The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.
4. Internal conversation
Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.
5. Internal conversation as object relating
This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.
6. Modes of reflexivity
I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.
7. Concerns
Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.
8. Personal morphogenesis
Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.
9. Distraction
Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.
10. Cognitive triage
Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.
11. Communicative escalation
Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.
12. Cultural abundance
Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.
13. Accelerated academy
The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.
14. Busyness
Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.
15. Platform capitalism
Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.
16. Platforms as structure
I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.
17. Platformisation
Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.
18. Epistemic chaos
Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.
19. Epistemic flooding
Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.
20. Post truth
I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.
21. Meta content explosion
The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.
22. Lifeworld
Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.
23. Colonisation of the lifeworld
Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.
24. LLMs in the lifeworld
This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.
25. Assessment panic
Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.
26. Detection scepticism
Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.
27. Dialogical toxicity
Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.
28. Public scholarship
Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.
29. Enshittification
Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.
30. Exit costs
Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.
Internal conversation as a form of object relating
What are we doing when we’re talking to ourselves? I’m realising the key to integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity is to conceive of internal conversation as a form of object relating. We are quite literally taking ourselves as an object. Indeed that is the definition of sociological reflexivity. If we look at real world examples of this we end up lodged within the terrain of the everyday, as Bollas demonstrates in The Shadow of the Object loc 900:
As I have been planning this chapter, for example, I have thought from the second person pronoun objectifying myself to say: ‘You must include Winnicott and Khan because much of your thinking comes from their work.’ Even if a second pronomial identification is absent, it may be implicit, as for example, when I think ‘don’t forget to provide ordinary examples of this phenomenon before going into more complex clinical examples’: the ‘you’ is implied. This constant objectification of the self for purposes of thinking is commonplace. It is also a form of object relation, as Freud so sagely understood when he evolved his theory of the superego to identify that part of the mind that speaks to us as its object. Naturally this intrasubjective relationship will change according to the person’s state of mind. If I write on a topic in my notebook I am more relaxed and permissive of the fanciful idea than when I write for a lecture.
And from loc 911:
On a recent trip to Rome to deliver a paper, I had several occasions for working through different issues in the management of myself. While leaving the plane and heading for a taxi I was anxious about not making my hotel on time. I had been thinking in the first person for much of the flight: ‘I will do this, prepare that, see this, visit so-and-so,’ but as the taxi went slowly, my anxiety increased and I required some brief holding activity. I said to myself: ‘Damn it, the taxi is too slow and I will be late [anxiety increases]. Look: there is nothing you can possibly do about it, so stop worrying [slightly modified]. But people will be kept waiting [re-emergence of anxiety]. Don’t be silly [unfortunate use of a bit of psychopathy]. Anyway, there is nothing you can do and what will upset your friends here is if you arrive in a state, so leave it be.’ This mental work is an example of holding, which is a feature of the total aspect of self management that…
He observes that “Much of psychoanalysis is about the nature of intrasubjective relations to the self as an object” (loc 906). From a sociological perspective this matters as a way of explaining why people relate to their context in the manner they do. For example why might people in a similar situation act differently? From a psychoanalytical perspective it’s a question of how the psychic structures which have emerged through development permit of certain modes of relating to the self qua object. From loc 941:
I am particularly concerned to emphasize the necessity of asking how each person relates to himself as an object within intrasubjective space. Who is speaking? What part of the self is speaking and what part of the self is being addressed? What is the nature of this object relation? Is it a good-enough object relation? Is instinct permitted representation? In what way? As a demand? Or are instinctual needs elaborated into the wish so that they become part of the subject’s range of desire?
In this sense we can understand the self as an object relation. Indeed Bollas elsewhere plays around with the idea of subject relations theory as a corollary to object relations theory.
#archer #christopherBollas #objectRelations #reflexivity #subjectRelations
Digesting Food Studies—Episode 108: Un-learning and Re-Learning
Should all food knowledge be freely shared? When we learn in university contexts, what structures shape our understanding? What should we try to un-learn? To re-learn? To reimagine?
https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2274516/
We start with an Amuse Bouche segment on the partial sharing of traditional knowledges, and then Alissa Overend and Ronak Rai talk about their article, “Un-learning and re-learning: Reflections on relationality, urban berry foraging, and settler research uncertainties” (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.649).
Finally, transdisciplinary food artist and researcher, Annika Walsh, adds her own flavor to the mix, with a deeply reflexive response to Alissa’s and Ronak’s text.
#DigestingFoodStudies
#Knowledge
#Epistemology
#Ontology
#IndigenousKnowledge
#IndigenousElders
#Colonialism
#SettlerColonialism
#Berries
#Strawberries
#SaskatoonBerries
#Foraging
#Academia
#Reflexivity
#FoodPodcast
photo: Bonnie McDonald on Pixabay
Feeling questioning? Or maybe a little reflective? Take a look at some past responses to the CFS/RCÉA “Choux Questionnaire,” our riff on the somewhat more literary “Proust Questionnaire.” Our respondents include food scholars, activists, philosophers, and writers. (Oh, and ChatGPT. Not sure that was the best idea, but its responses certainly show some pretty 'artificial' intelligence.)
Bryan Dale: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i2.755
Joshna Maharaj: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i1.735
Lenore Newman: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i3.715
Greg de St. Maurice: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.701
ChatGPT: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i1.688
Geneviève Sicotte: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.667
Lisa Heldke: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.650
#DigestingFoodStudies
#Proust
#FoodCulture
#Reflexivity
#FoodJustice
#Philosophy
#InstitutionalFood
#ArtificialIntelligence
#Folklore
#Literature
#Literature
image: "Chinese Croquembouche" (2023) © Annika Walsh
A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older
I turned 40 last month. Given how curious I’d found it to watch other people in my life find this a difficult milestone, I had long expected to feel little about it. I’d seen what I thought was people acting out in anticipation whereas I now wonder if it was in fact passage à l’acte. I suddenly felt what Archer called the necessity of selection with a new urgency in the months leading to my birthday. This could be construed in Lacanian terms as (belatedly) coming to terms with my castration, embarking on a journey of self-conscious wintering:
Castration means we are not whole, do not have everything we want, cannot be everything we might have wanted to be, cannot do everything we may have wanted to do. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, immortal beings.
Miss-ing by Bruce Fink, loc 689
It was so easy to see the problem once I looked, it felt clear to me that I hadn’t wanted to look until that point. My criteria for saying ‘yes’ to things were effectively that I found something vaguely interesting and vaguely appreciated whoever I’d be working with. It was such an absurdly low threshold for commitment of time and energy, that it was no wonder I only finished a fraction of the projects I started and have never done what I felt was my best work. It took an exhausting amount of planning, negotiation and positioning but I withdrew from most of what I was committed to, using the following heuristic to decide:
- Am I contractually obliged to do this?
- Has someone in a position of seniority directly asked me to do this?
- Do I care deeply about this? Does it excite me?
- Will I be letting a close colleague or friend down if I don’t do this?
I soon realised there were three things I really care about. Firstly, I’m convinced LLMs are being badly theorised in ways that make their social and cultural dynamics impossible to adequately engage with. Secondly, I see higher education as a fascinating (and convenient) case study of how these dynamics are playing out in ways we are failing to get to grips with. Thirdly, I have a commitment to Archer’s morphogenetic approach as a broad route through which to address these questions, as well as to supporting the diffusion and integrity of her work.
I’m writing a book to address the first commitment, I have a fellowship (as well as teaching) to address the second commitment and my active non-university roles all relate to the third commitment. There’s some residual teaching which doesn’t map onto this perfectly and a small admin role which is completely disconnected. But for the most part everything I do now is something which matters to me.
I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to sustain this. I now instinctively see invitations in terms of opportunity costs e.g. if I say ‘yes’ to this how much time is it taking away from the book? I’m still struggling with filtering speaking invitations because it feels like it’s broadly a positive thing for me to talk to as many people as possible about generative AI in higher education. To the extent I have a defined goal for my generative AI in higher education work it’s a matter of advocating for a pragmatic criticality and exploring what this means in practice. This is an unsettlingly open-ended ambition which probably needs a clearer formulation. But for the most part I feel like I’m experiencing an equilibrium between the quality and quantity of my work for the first time.
It feels like this triad might be what sustains me for the rest of my career. Obviously the commitments will mutate in the process. I’m increasingly convinced this first generation of chatbots will be remembered fondly as an innocent time before a world saturated with enshittified language models proactively intervening in human affairs. The problems encountered in higher education will change significantly in the process in ways which the current assessment integrity discourse is spectacularly ill-suited to cope with. If I have a long term theoretical project I’m pretty sure it’s building aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Archer’s notion of reflexivity*.
There’s nonetheless a continuous thread in all all three cases which I can feel extending out in front of me. I’ve started my training as a group analyst and there’s many things which might flow from that in the future, though I suspect any clinical work I might eventually do will revolve around living with LLMs. I’ll probably be pressured to apply for external grants at some point which I’ll try to fit as closely as possible around these three commitments. I will inevitably have to do teaching and admin at points which don’t match them but whatever capacity I have to perform as an effective neoliberal subject will be orientated towards minimising that. I love teaching on things I’m actively thinking about and only want to avoid being asked to teach things I’m not actively engaged with. So while these commitments feel like a structure I can securely inhabit, it’s one I can feel I’ll continually have to rebuild to keep it intact.
*Sorry Maggie I know you would have hated this. But I also know you would have respected the intellectual seriousness with which I’m pursuing it.
“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."
― Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
Speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2003
#SusanSontag #writers #essayists #journalists
#indie #authors #culturaltheory #critics #reflexivity #politics
LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use
This is a concise summary by Ethan Mollick of what I increasingly see as a key factor driving the evolution of consumer-facing LLMs:
Using AI well used to be a pretty challenging process which involved crafting a prompt using techniques like chain-of-thought along with learning tips and tricks to get the most out of your AI. In a recent series of experiments, however, we have discovered that these techniques don’t really help anymore. Powerful AI models are just getting better at doing what you ask them to or even figuring out what you want and going beyond what you ask (and no, threatening them or being nice to them does not seem to help on average).
What limited truth there was to the inflated discourse of ‘prompt engineering’ has largely evaporated at this point, leaving us in a strange position. The conversational approach I’ve always advocated, literally treating the LLM as an interlocutor analogous to a human collaborator, remains the best way of getting the most out of these systems. But neither this nor ‘prompt engineering’ is necessary to get LLMs to perform usefully in real world contexts.
This seems like an obviously positive thing for users. However my concern is the burden of articulation with LLMs, explaining what you want in a clear and substantive way, was a necessary condition for responsible use of LLMs. This burden was never sustainable at the level of a commercially viable product. It presupposed a consistent level of reflexivity, a degree of cultural capital and a fluency with writing which was always incompatible with the kind of mass market software that has a user base of one billion plus.
However it did ensure that users were thinking carefully about their use because you literally couldn’t produce valuable outcomes with an LLM unless you were doing this. Now it’s very easy to get LLMs to infer what you want, with success much of the time to at least some degree. What’s lost in the process is the reflexivity which came prior to use (i.e. the moment when you stopped to think “what am I actually asking Claude to do here?”) and the learning which came through reflecting on the output and the related interaction it generates, as your sense of what you were trying to do is refined and expanded through dialogue.
This is how Claude Opus 4 glossed my analysis here. It conveyed my own words back to me but it did it in a way which surfaced an element (“the pause”) which was only latent in my original phrasing (“the moment when”), leading me to reflect more on the temporal dimension to “the burden of articulation”:
The “burden of articulation” you describe served as a kind of productive friction – it forced users to crystallize their thinking before engaging with the tool. There’s something valuable in that pause, that moment of having to translate a vague intention into clear language. It’s reminiscent of how writing itself can clarify thinking, or how explaining a problem to someone else often helps you understand it better yourself.
In this sense friction with LLMs was a positive thing because it necessitated meta-cognition. The optimisation of the human-model interaction erodes a feature which I would argue was immensely important, even if its value is only manifested outside of the interaction itself. It doesn’t I think level the playing field because those with the necessary capital and fluency can still use LLMs in a deeper and more reflective way, with better outcomes emerging from the process.
But it does create worrying implications for organisations which build this practice into their roles. Earlier today I heard Cory Doctorow use the brilliant analogy of asbestos to describe LLMs being incorporated into digital infrastructure in ways which we will likely later have to remove at immense cost. What’s the equivalent analogy for the social practice of those operating within the organisations?
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338
#articulation #chatbots #coryDoctorow #LLMs #metacognition #promptEngineering #prompting #reflexivity
Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age
From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, pg 37
I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself.
From pg 86:
So anyway, my muscles right now are really tight, and stretching doesn’t loosen them up. I’m peaking in terms of training, but even so they’re tighter than usual. Sometimes I have to hit my legs with a fist when they get tight to loosen them up. (Yes, it hurts.) My muscles can be as stubborn as— or more stubborn than—I am. They remember things and endure, and to some extent they improve. But they never compromise. They don’t give up. This is my body, with all its limits and quirks. Just as with my face, even if I don’t like it it’s the only one I get, so I’ve got to make do. As I’ve grown older, I’ve naturally come to terms with this. You open the fridge and can make a nice—actually even a pretty smart—meal with the leftovers. All that’s left is an apple, an onion, cheese, and eggs, but you don’t complain. You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.
From pg 153:
Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have
#ageing #Murakami #reflexiveImperative #reflexivity #running
Great read by Sarahanne Field and Madeleine Pownall:
Subjectivity is a Feature, not a Flaw: A Call to Unsilence the Human Element in Science
https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/ga5fb_v1
#OpenScience includes practices such as #reflexivity in order to increase the transparancy of the research process.
#Transferability in #QualitativeResearch is key to extending the applicability of your study beyond its original context. Strategies like #ThickDescription, #Reflexivity, and #DataTriangulation help enhance transferability.
https://qdacity.com/trustworthiness/transferability/
#QDA #QDAcity #ResearchMethods
Ensure objectivity of your #QualitativeResearch by tackling #ResearcherBias head-on!
Boost your research integrity with strategies like #Reflexivity, #PeerDebriefing, #Triangulation, #MemberChecking, and #AuditTrail. https://qdacity.com/researcher-bias/
#QDAcity #ResearchMethods #QDA #Student
#Trustworthiness, pivotal in #QualitativeResearch, as per Lincoln & Guba (1985), encompasses Credibility, Transferability, and Dependability. #PeerDebriefing, #triangulation, #reflexivity, and #AuditTrail strengthen trustworthiness.
https://qdacity.com/trustworthiness/
#QDA #QDAcity #PhDlife
Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are
Well I’m a bit dismayed that it’s £145 and hardback only (at least initially) but still nice to see this being trailed for an October release:
This book examines how digital platforms are reconfiguring the parameters of agency and reflexivity in contemporary social life. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s social realist framework, it moves beyond treating platforms merely as tools or environments to conceptualize them as distinct sociotechnical structures with emergent properties and powers that shape human action without determining it.
The book develops the concept of platform and agency to explore the temporal dimensions of sociotechnical change, tracing how platforms condition personal and collective reflexivity through mechanisms of distraction, cultural abundance, and multiplying communication channels. While affirming the analytical distinction between structure, culture and agency, it demonstrates how platforms constitute a fourth dimension necessary for understanding contemporary social morphogenesis. Through the conceptual pairing of psychobiography and personal morphogenesis, the book offers a nuanced account of how individuals become who they are within platformized lifeworlds. Rather than announcing an epochal break with previous social forms, the analysis illuminates the accumulating consequences of platform mediation across biographical timescales.
This book will interest researchers and graduate students in social theory, philosophy of technology, digital sociology, platform studies, media and communication studies, critical data studies, internet studies, surveillance studies, sociology of knowledge, digital anthropology, and social informatics.
#BecomingWhoWeAre #personalMorphogenesis #PlatformAndAgency #platformStudies #realistSocialTheory #reflexivity
An experiment: how to use Claude Opus 4 to help myself say ‘no’ to stuff at work
Over the last three months I’ve radically reduced what I’m committed to at work, with a view to focusing on really matters to me. However this process has made me realise quite how bad I am at saying ‘no’, even when I genuinely intend to. Therefore I’m going to try and enrol Claude to help me with this process, by sharing every new invitation with it in order to inform my decision making. Here’s my prompt:
I’m a mid career academic who has varied interests and often struggles to retain my focus. I’ve identified the topics I want to fully commit to over the next phase of my career, but I still routinely find myself saying ‘yes’ to invitations which are vaguely interesting (e.g. connecting in an intriguing way to a core interest, or reflecting a wider interest outside my research agenda) or desirable in some way (e.g. that will involve going to places I want to visit, even if I don’t want to do the event). These are the projects I intend to focus on for at least the next few years:
🤖 Build a robust theory of LLMs 💼 Design & implement UoM training *💻 Contribute to DTCE’s success * *📚 Deepen expertise about Maggie’s work * 🙏 Build system to disseminate her work
I would like you to play the role of a critical friend, perhaps a senior mentor figure, willing to talk to me about every new invitation. I will commit to raising the invitation with you, in order to examine whether it directly *and *valuably contributes to one of my five commitments. If it doesn’t connect in some way then I will say ‘no’, even if my initial reaction is to say ‘yes’.
You should not try and talk me out of doing things. Your role is to ask me questions which help me examine my initial reactions, in order to assess them in relation to these core commitments. If I can’t substantially justify the relevance of the invitation I should never say ‘yes’ to it, even i there might be extrinsic reasons I am considering. While you should not simply push me to say no, I want you to critically interrogate my reasoning in order to ensure that I’m honest with myself and really can substantiate my claim. You should be academic in your style, collegial in your approach and forceful in your argumentation.
I would like you to build up an understand of my projects through our conversation. This is a secondary goal but it should inform your questioning, given the relevance which my understanding of the projects has to our primary undertaking. In this sense I am asking you to play the role of a reflexive technology, deepening my insight into *why *I am doing these things (why it has meaning and matters to me) through an accumulating understanding of *what *I am doing. I will take your insights seriously and you should attempt to draw connections and offer interpretations which go beyond my own understanding, though these should be framed as hypotheses rather than arguments.
I will report back later this year to reflect on whether this has worked!
Want your #QualitativeResearch to stand out?
Achieve #ReferentialAdequacy by engaging in #reflexivity, #MemberChecking, #PeerDebriefing and providing #ThickDescriptions. Make your research trustworthy!💪
https://qdacity.com/referential-adequacy/
#QDAcity #ReferentialAdequacy #QDA #CAQDAS #Student
The unpredictable, unfathomable point of decision
From Bruce Fink’s Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0, loc 3496:
it is no easy matter to interest people in talk therapy, and even once they are in it to guide them to a point—an unpredictable, unfathomable point—where they “decide” to do something for themselves (see Whitaker, 2010, p. 125), find the will to do something to get out of what they’ve spent decades getting into […] And I would add that this decision to be something other than an object or victim is not made once and for all, but must be made again and again as each unpleasant memory is unearthed, as each unsavory wish and “filthy enjoyment” is faced.
From Bruce Fink’s Lacanian Subject, loc 5683:
Predictably enough, the second face of the Lacanian subject appears in the overcoming of that fixation, the reconfiguring or traversing of fantasy, and the shifting of the way in which one gets one’s kicks or obtains jouissance: that is, the face of subjectivization, a process of making “one’s own” something that was formerly alien.
Chapters abstracts for my new book
I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗
Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age?
This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life, using illustrative real-world examples while still retaining a conceptual focus. The chapter argues that while digital technologies have transformed information access and social interaction, we need a more robust analytical framework than technological determinism or epochal generalization. It establishes the book’s aim to investigate the ontological status of personhood amid digital transformation, proposing a sociological recovery of agency as central to understanding contemporary sociotechnical change.
Chapter 2: Personal Reflexivity and Social Change
This chapter critically examines influential accounts of ‘late modernity’ from theorists like Giddens, Bauman, and Beck, particularly their claims about detraditionalization. It demonstrates how these approaches recognize the crucial relationship between personal reflexivity and social change but ultimately fail to develop adequate conceptual tools for analyzing this relationship empirically. The chapter reveals how Giddens’s structurationist approach, despite its sophistication, creates an oscillation between voluntarism and determinism that cannot properly account for the variable ways in which agents relate to their social environments. This critical analysis lays groundwork for a more robust account of reflexivity that can better grasp how digital mediation transforms everyday experience.
Chapter 3: The Realist Account of Reflexivity
This chapter introduces Margaret Archer’s realist theory of reflexivity as an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between personal and social change. It outlines Archer’s ‘three-stage model’ of structure and agency, contrasting it with ‘two-stage models’ that black-box reflexivity. The chapter explores how reflexivity operates through internal conversation, manifesting in four distinct modes (communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fractured) that condition how individuals navigate social constraints and enablements. Focusing on the relational and cultural dimensions of reflexivity, it demonstrates how ideas and relationships shape our deliberative processes and life projects, creating a foundation for understanding how digital platforms might transform these fundamental aspects of agency.
Chapter 4: Biography as an Ontological Category
This chapter develops biography as a critical ontological category for social analysis, moving beyond the limitations of concepts like Giddens’s ‘fateful moments’. It draws on Archer’s morphogenetic approach to conceptualize biography not as a sequence of discrete turning points but as a temporally extended process through which persons become who they are. Through critical engagement with biographical research, the chapter demonstrates how treating biography as ontologically robust provides a more secure foundation for understanding social change. It concludes by proposing two essential concepts (psychobiography and personal morphogenesis) as tools for analyzing how individuals navigate social transformation through ongoing cycles of change and stability.
Chapter 5: Personal Morphogenesis
This chapter elaborates the concept of personal morphogenesis as a framework for understanding how people change over time through their engagements with the social world. It explores how personal morphogenesis unfolds through three temporal relations: past conditioning (‘Me’), present action (‘I’), and future orientation (‘You’). Drawing on Derek Layder’s concept of psychobiography, the chapter demonstrates how social contexts and reflexive responses accumulate over time to shape who we become. Rather than reducing the individual to an individualistic frame, this approach recovers the person as a stratified entity whose biographical emergence is central to understanding social change, establishing a conceptual foundation for analyzing how platforms shape this process.
Chapter 6: Sociotechnical Transformation
This chapter traces the historical development of digital technologies from early utopian visions to contemporary critical perspectives on platforms. It examines how the initial rhetoric of technological utopianism has given way to growing concerns about surveillance, manipulation, and digital power. The chapter offers a periodization of digital change from Web 1.0 to social platforms to generative AI, highlighting how technological shifts have transformed user experiences and infrastructural arrangements. It pays particular attention to the rise of “big data” as both technological development and ideological project, revealing how the epistemic claims of data science have contributed to an evisceration of human agency in platform contexts.
Chapter 7: Personal Reflexivity
This chapter analyzes how digital platforms transform personal reflexivity through three key mechanisms: the multiplication of communication channels, the digitalization of the archive, and the problem of cultural abundance. It demonstrates how these changes create conditions of distraction and cognitive triage, making sustained reflection increasingly difficult in platform environments. The chapter introduces an adverbial approach to understanding platform effects, focusing on how reflexivity becomes distracted rather than what people reflect upon. By examining the proliferation of digital interruptions and cultural options, it reveals how platforms shape the temporal structure of reflexive deliberation, with significant consequences for personal identity and life projects.
Chapter 8: Collective Reflexivity
This chapter investigates how platforms transform collective action and social movements through two key mechanisms: the ease of mobilization and the rise of computational politics. It develops the concept of ‘fragile movements’ to describe how platforms enable rapid assembly while undermining the organizational capacities needed for sustained collective action. Alongside ‘distracted people’ these ‘fragile movements’ create a problematic dynamic where democratic steering of sociotechnical change becomes increasingly difficult. The chapter examines how collective reflexivity, the capacity of groups to deliberate about shared concerns, is simultaneously enhanced and compromised by platform mediation, with profound implications for normative transformation in digital societies.
Chapter 9: Platformised Socialisation
This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s arguments to address how socialization processes are transformed under platform conditions. It challenges simplistic notions like ‘digital natives’ while acknowledging the profound ways platforms reshape how people become who they are. The chapter examines how the cultural context for socialization changes through platform mediation, particularly in how potential and possible selves are encountered and constructed. It concludes by situating the analysis within broader questions of epochal change, arguing that while platforms fundamentally alter the parameters within which human agency unfolds, they do not create wholly new types of people. Instead, they reconfigure the temporal and relational dimensions of personal becoming in ways that demand new conceptual tools for social analysis.
#archer #humanAgency #MorphogeneticApproach #PlatformAndAgency #reflexivity #socialRealism
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