Creative Destruction and Cultural Lag in the Digital Age

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the two ideas of \u201ccreative destruction\u201d and \u201ccultural lag\u201d both brought together in this article to analyze cutting-edge changes in the digital world, especially as they relate to consumption. Several studies have documented that we are increasingly living in a hybridized environment of swiftly evolving devices and technologies. Within this context, cultural lag refers both to the conflict between digital versus material consumerist developments, as well as to the subsequent delays in social understanding. Creative destruction describes the introduction of new forms of consumption that eliminate existing ones. However while all destruction tends to lead to cultural lag, this is especially true in the case of creative destruction. The article will also suggest at the end that not all destruction, especially, but not exclusively, as it relates to the environment, is necessarily creative. It can also be mainly, if not exclusively and totally, destructive

The Velvet Cage of Educational Con(pro)sumption

In the year that George Ritzer publishes the ninth edition of The McDonaldization of Society, moving his famous theory firmly Into the Digital Age, critical educator Petar Jandrić and sociologist Sarah Hayes invited George to a dialogue on the digital transformation of McDonaldization and its relationship to consumer culture. In this article, George first traces for us the origins of his theory that has endured for four decades. A key dimension of McDonaldization is the ‘iron cage’ of control, via rationalization, that was once contained within physical sites of bricks and mortar. Increasingly now, we encounter a ‘velvet cage’ in sites of digital consumption, at the hands of non-human technologies, that threaten human labour and autonomy. Exploited as unpaid con(pro)sumers, we labour to provide information for corporate digital billionaires, keeping McDonaldization alive, well, and even more predominant in augmented settings, including Higher Education, in the form of the McUniversity. With the rise of prosuming machines such as blockchain and bitcoin, that can both produce and consume without intervention from human prosumers, George concludes that prosumer capitalism will explode into unprecedented and unpredictable directions in the years to come

Specific Adhesion of Membranes Simultaneously Supports Dual Heterogeneities in Lipids and Proteins

Membrane adhesion is a vital component of many biological processes. Heterogeneities in lipid and protein composition are often associated with the adhesion site. These heterogeneities are thought to play functional roles in facilitating signalling. Here we experimentally examine this phenomenon using model membranes made of a mixture of lipids that is near a phase boundary at room temperature. Non-adherent model membranes are in a well-mixed, disordered-fluid lipid phase indicated by homogeneous distribution of a fluorescent dye that is a marker for the fluid-disordered (Ld) phase. We specifically adhere membranes to a flat substrate bilayer using biotin–avidin binding. Adhesion produces two types of coexisting heterogeneities: an ordered lipid phase that excludes binding proteins and the fluorescent membrane dye, and a disordered lipid phase that is enriched in both binding proteins and membrane dye compared with the non-adhered portion of the same membrane. Thus, a single type of adhesion interaction (biotin–avidin binding), in an initially-homogeneous system, simultaneously stabilizes both ordered-phase and disordered-phase heterogeneities that are compositionally distinct from the non-adhered portion of the vesicle. These heterogeneities are long-lived and unchanged upon increased temperature.This work was funded by start-up funds from The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) to VDG. MR was supported in part by undergraduate research fellowships from UT Austin. We are grateful to Professor Jeanne Stachowiak (Biomedical Engineering, UT Austin) for helpful conversations about membrane formation and to her and her group for technical assistance. We thank Professor Ernst-Ludwig Florin (Physics, UT Austin) for the extruder and for cover glasses. We thank Professor Lauren Ehrlich (Molecular Biosciences, UT Austin) for helpful conversations about the immune synapse.Center for Nonlinear Dynamic

X-ray nanoprobe and electron beam investigations of kesterite and chalcogenide thin film solar cells

As an alternative for Si-based solar cells Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (CZTSSe) and Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) thin film solar cells have recently received great attention as their efficiency has been steadily increased over the past decades. Nevertheless, the efficiency is still below the theoretically predicted upper limit, which is mainly related to inhomogeneities in the absorber composition, structural defects, and the formation of secondary phases. This thesis provides insights into efficiency-limiting properties of highly efficient Ge-doped CZTSe, CZTSSe, and CIGS thin film solar cells by accessing local compositional, structural, microstructural, and functional properties using a combinatorial approach of electron- and advanced synchrotron-based methods at the nanoscale: First, it has been demonstrated that an exceptionally homogeneous element distribution in the CZTSe absorber accompanied by the absence of harmful Cu-, Zn- or Sn-based secondary phases is achieved by introducing small amounts of Ge during the synthesis. Within the absorber, Ge is heterogeneously incorporated into the CZTSe matrix, but also forms nanoscale GeO2 secondary phases. Second, the interplay of performancelimiting nanoscale features in CZTSSe solar cells were revealed. Investigations of the local composition indicates the formation of harmful ZnS(Se) secondary phases whose presence, number, and dimension increases strongly with the reduction of Cu and the increase of Zn content. Furthermore, the local composition of the CZTSSe phase shows strong variations within the absorber, which significantly reduces the efficiency. Third, a CIGS solar cell that underwent a post-deposition treatment with RbF was investigated in a combinatorial approach, which simultaneously monitors the local composition and device functionality. This work demonstrates that Rb-enriched grain boundaries have a negligible influence on the collection efficiency, indicating the passivation of detrimental defects

Occupational Myths

http://web.ku.edu/~starjrn

I Never Metatheory I Didn't Like

The invitation to write autobiographically for the Centennial Celebration of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas arrived at an opportune moment for me. First, I was in the midst of book in which I was writing about the role of biography and autobiography in metatheoretical work in sociology (Ritzer 1991a). Second, I had just finished a review essay in which I analyzed three recent biographical and autobiographical works from (hat point of view (Ritzer 1991b). Third, I'd been reading a hot new autobiographical expose on drugs, booze, sex, and glitz in Hollywood, You'll NeverEat Lunch in ThisTownAgain byJulia Phillips (1991), that had startling similarities to my experiences at Kansas in the early 1970s. It is the fact that biographical work is of intellectual and personal concern that I am able to overcome the natural embarrassment about writing autobiographically and to deal with my "Kansas years.

Occupational Myths

http://web.ku.edu/~starjrn

The “New” Prosumer: Collaboration on the Digital and Material “New Means of Prosumption”

Many of “cyber-utopians” have lauded the Internet, especially social networking sites, for a variety of reasons, including making possible a dramatic and revolutionary increase in social collaboration (Benkler, 2007; Tapscott and Williams, 2006). The goal of this essay is to examine- and, at least in part, debunk- this claim from a new and unique sociological perspective- the relationship between collaboration and the “new means of prosumption”. Such an examination is suggested by the fact that collaboration is, by definition, a form of prosumption. That is, it involves one or more parties “producing” and other(s) “consuming” something of mutual interest and importance. However, the collaborative process, like prosumption more generally, is not as separable as all that. In fact, collaboration is a dialectical process in which those involved are continually changing their positions on the prosumption continuum (see below), sometimes they are mor