It’s hard to believe a year has passed since I published Digital Divisions, my first sole-authored book. Weirder still to think that I published it during a pandemic. This is an attempt to share a bit about what was great and not so great about the experience, and what I’d…

It was a frigid fall morning in Upstate New York. The seven of us unloaded ourselves from the van our teacher had rented and we spilled out into a parking lot outside of one of the libraries at Syracuse University. I remember looking up at the brick building in awe…

So what, exactly, is this 800+ online community of tech-focused social scientists you’ve been hearing about? We, the administrators of TechnoSoc: Sociologists of Digital Things (SDT), wanted to share with you what we do, what members get out of it, and how it works. There’s also a lot of new…

Around this time last year I shared a list of articles and books I read over the last 12 months — writing that really shaped my thinking about human behavior. It was so much fun (and so much better than listing things I was proud of about myself…I’m bored even…

Thanks to Connor Gilroy, Andrew Lindner, Paul Morgan, CJ Pascoe, Amber Tierney, and Nga Than for feedback. Sociology is increasingly wading into the study of digital technology use. As a graduate student, I remember searching for terms like “digital” or even “technology” and next to nothing would come up in…

They’re uniquely equipped to map how users interface with digital technology. — The tech industry has always had a curious relationship with social scientists. As a PhD student in sociology in 2010, I remember hearing professors discuss the “Xerox Parc days”: starting in the late 1970s, anthropologists helped technologists encounter their machines in more natural habitats beyond the lab. Since then, social…

Schools that rely on remote learning during the pandemic are trying to ensure that all kids have the devices and internet bandwidth they need. While important, it takes more than everyone having comparable equipment and working WiFi for all children to get an equal shot. In my new book based…

We designed our first online course that uses student videos as a driving feature of the class. The semester just ended. Time for reflection! I’ve decided to write some reflections on running an online course on Social Inequality (Sociology) that I co-designed and taught with Andrew Penner here at UC-Irvine…

So I’m going to preface this with the fact that I’m co-hosting an academic-ish hackathon on Monday at 1pm (PST). It will be wildly fun and thought-provoking and we will be crowdsourcing #alloftheknowledge. (Please join!) But why can these things be fun and helpful? First of all, one of the…