325 research outputs found
Diffusion or War? Foucault as a Reader of Tarde
The objective of this chapter is to clarify the social theory underlying in Foucaultâs
genealogy of power/knowledge thanks to a comparison with Tardeâs microsociology.
Nietzsche is often identified as the direct (and unique) predecessor of this genealogy, and
the habitual criticisms are worried about the intricate relations between Foucault and Marx.
These perspectives omit to point to another â and more direct â antecedent of Foucault`s
microphysics: the microsociology of Gabriel Tarde. Bio-power technologies must be read
as Tardian inventions that, by propagation, have reconfigured pre-existing social spaces,
building modern societies. We will see how the Tardean source in Foucaultâs genealogy
sheds new clarity about the micro-socio-logic involved in it, enabling us to identify some of
its aporiae and to imagine some solutions in this respect as well
The Lifecycles of Apps in a Social Ecosystem
Apps are emerging as an important form of on-line content, and they combine
aspects of Web usage in interesting ways --- they exhibit a rich temporal
structure of user adoption and long-term engagement, and they exist in a
broader social ecosystem that helps drive these patterns of adoption and
engagement. It has been difficult, however, to study apps in their natural
setting since this requires a simultaneous analysis of a large set of popular
apps and the underlying social network they inhabit.
In this work we address this challenge through an analysis of the collection
of apps on Facebook Login, developing a novel framework for analyzing both
temporal and social properties. At the temporal level, we develop a retention
model that represents a user's tendency to return to an app using a very small
parameter set. At the social level, we organize the space of apps along two
fundamental axes --- popularity and sociality --- and we show how a user's
probability of adopting an app depends both on properties of the local network
structure and on the match between the user's attributes, his or her friends'
attributes, and the dominant attributes within the app's user population. We
also develop models that show the importance of different feature sets with
strong performance in predicting app success.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, International World Wide Web
Conferenc
The social, cosmopolitanism and beyond
First, this article will outline the metaphysics of âthe socialâ that implicitly and explicitly connects the work of lassical and contemporary cosmopolitan sociologists as different as Durkheim, Weber, Beck and Luhmann. In a second step, I will show that the cosmopolitan outlook of classical sociology is driven by exclusive differences. In understanding human affairs, both classical sociology and contemporary cosmopolitan sociology reflect a very modernist outlook of epistemological, conceptual, methodological and disciplinary rigour that separates the cultural sphere from the natural objects of concern. I will suggest that classical sociology â in order to be cosmopolitan â is forced (1) to exclude non-social and non-human objects as part of its conceptual and methodological rigour, and (2) consequently and methodologically to rule out the non-social and the non-human. Cosmopolitan sociology imagines âthe socialâ as a global, universal explanatory device to conceive and describe the non-social and non-human. In a third and final step the article draws upon the work of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde and offers a possible alternative to the modernist social and cultural other-logics of social sciences. It argues for a inclusive conception of âthe socialâ that gives the non-social and non-human a cosmopolitan voice as well
Prestige, Performance and Social Pressure in Viral Challenge Memes: Neknomination, the Ice-Bucket Challenge and SmearForSmear as Imitative Encounters
This article examines social media challenges that emerged in 2013, focusing on Neknomination, the Ice-Bucket Challenge and SmearForSmear. We understand them as âviral challenge memesâ that manifest a set of consistent features, making them a distinctive phenomenon within digital culture. Drawing upon Tardeâs concept of the imitative-encounter, we highlight three central features: their basis in social belonging and participation; the role of prestigious people and groups in determining the spread of challenges; and the distinctive techniques of self-presentation undertaken by participants. Based upon focus group interviews, surveys and visual analysis we suggest that viral challenge memes are social practices that diffuse in a wave-like fashion. Negotiating tensions between the social and individual, imitation and innovation, continuity and change, viral challenge memes are best thought of as creative practices, rather than sheep-like acts of conformity, and affirm the usefulness of analytical principles drawn from Tarde
Monadology and ethnography: Towards a Tardian monadic
This article outlines the project of a âmonadic ethnographyâ based on Gabriel Tardeâs monadology. Tardeâs key contention is that âeverything is a societyâ, i.e. that the world is made up of composite and relational entities of infinitesimal complexity called monads. These assemblages of heterogeneous elements engaged in relations of mutual possession constitute the object of study of âmonadic ethnographyâ. Their analysis, in turn, has a series of methodological and formal implications, including a transformation of concepts of scale, spatiality and temporality and the need to find representational strategies suitable for conveying the monadsâ dynamic qualities. A fieldwork example which discusses the making of a car part in a small workshop based in the Can Ricart factory in Barcelona is provided. Throughout the article, the idea of âmonadic ethnographyâ is discussed in relation to the recent rediscovery of Tardeâs work, the work of Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze, and the so-called âontological turnâ in the social sciences
Locative media and data-driven computing experiments
Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are âstagedâ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote Big Data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures
The new empiricism of the fractal fold: Rethinking monadology in digital times
A new configuration of social science is emerging in these digital times, as we tap into new kinds of data that trouble conventions regarding what constitutes the unit of analysis, and question the extent to which these data are owned or even correlated to a definitive organic and individuated subject customarily referred to as "human." These methodological shifts demand a more careful consideration of the historical lineage of empiricism and its relation to the history of science more generally. In this article, I track the historical mutations of monadology, an ontology well suited to empiricism in these digital times. Both Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour ascribe to variants of monadology in their proposals for a new empiricism, drawing extensively on the work of Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), a French sociologist, judge, and author of the audacious post-humanist 1895 text Sociology and Monadology. In this article, I discuss how monadology helps us rethink research methods in these digital times. I argue that a fractal monadology re-assembles the fold with the digital, the continuous with the discrete, and ultimately offers a philosophical foundation for contemporary social science research
This other atmosphere: against human resources, Emoji, and devices
Frequently humans are invited to engage with modern visual forms: emoji, emoticons, pictograms. Some of these forms are finding their ways into the workplace, understood as augmentations to workplace atmospheres. What has been called the âquantified workplaceâ requires its workers to log their rates of stress, wellbeing, their subjective sense of productivity on scale of 1-5 or by emoji, in a context in which HR professionals develop a vocabulary of Workforce Analytics, People Analytics, Human Capital Analytics or Talent Analytics, and all this in the context of managing the work environment or its atmosphere. Atmosphere is mood, a compote of emotions. Emotions are a part of a human package characterised as âthe quantified selfâ, a self intertwined with - subject to but also compliant with - tracking and archiving. The logical step for managing atmospheres is to track emotions at a granular and largescale level. Through the concept of the digital crowd, rated and self-rating, as well as emotion tracking strategies, the human resource (as worker and consumer) engages in a new politics of the crowd, organised around what political philosopher Jodi Dean calls, affirmatively, âsecondary visualityâ, high circulation communication fusing together speech, writing and image as a new form. This is the visuality of communicative, or social media, capitalism. But to the extent that it is captured by HR, is it an exposure less to crowdsourced democracy, and more a stage in turning the employee into an on-the-shelf item in a digital economy warehouse, assessed by Likert scales? While HR works on new atmospheres of work, what other atmospheres pervade the context of labour, and can these be deployed in the generation of other types of affect, ones that work towards the free association of labour and life
Prehistory of Transit Searches
Nowadays the more powerful method to detect extrasolar planets is the transit
method. We review the planet transits which were anticipated, searched, and the
first ones which were observed all through history. Indeed transits of planets
in front of their star were first investigated and studied in the solar system.
The first observations of sunspots were sometimes mistaken for transits of
unknown planets. The first scientific observation and study of a transit in the
solar system was the observation of Mercury transit by Pierre Gassendi in 1631.
Because observations of Venus transits could give a way to determine the
distance Sun-Earth, transits of Venus were overwhelmingly observed. Some
objects which actually do not exist were searched by their hypothetical
transits on the Sun, as some examples a Venus satellite and an infra-mercurial
planet. We evoke the possibly first use of the hypothesis of an exoplanet
transit to explain some periodic variations of the luminosity of a star, namely
the star Algol, during the eighteen century. Then we review the predictions of
detection of exoplanets by their transits, those predictions being sometimes
ancient, and made by astronomers as well as popular science writers. However,
these very interesting predictions were never published in peer-reviewed
journals specialized in astronomical discoveries and results. A possible
transit of the planet beta Pic b was observed in 1981. Shall we see another
transit expected for the same planet during 2018? Today, some studies of
transits which are connected to hypothetical extraterrestrial civilisations are
published in astronomical refereed journals. Some studies which would be
classified not long ago as science fiction are now considered as scientific
ones.Comment: Submiited to Handbook of Exoplanets (Springer
Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on
the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent
along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral
marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds
a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological
theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The
conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news
media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we
explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information
diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been
shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic
measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is
different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social
relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be
more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative
news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive
sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A
complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of
tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train
a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news
information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in
the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the
relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the
findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet
talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'.Comment: 14 pages, 1 table. Submitted to The 2011 International Workshop on
Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2011
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