@Chanders@sciences.social
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Chanders

@Chanders@sciences.social

Professor of Sociology. Interests include publics, assemblages, middlebrow culture, where Europe & the new world meet. Mann, Bolano, Charlie Parker, Virginia Woolf.

Associate Editor of the International Journal of Press/Politics and Sociologica.

(he/him).

I’m from New York, live in Bologna, Italy, and work in Milan. There’s a lot of stuff I miss about the USA and a lot I don’t. I miss cornmeal and Mexican food primarily.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

inquiline, (edited ) to mastodon
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Friends, strangers, haters: I have... made hay. Let no one say I haven't committed to the bit.

(Wrote a paper about Asstodon, everyone be kind)

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13367/11436

#STS #Mastodon #Commodon #autoethnography #DareIUseTheHashtag #Donkeygate #FirstMonday

Chanders,
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

@inquiline more scale eh you’ve sold out.

juergen_hubert, to history
@juergen_hubert@thefolklore.cafe avatar

I suspect that the introduction of moveable type to Germany greatly contributed to both witchcraft panics and anti-Jewish pogroms.

Even before the first actual, regular newspaper was published in 1604, Germany was rife with "news sheets" that printed all sorts of lurid and fantastical tales in order to increase sales. Think of modern-day tabloids or FOX News at their worst. And all those tales must be true, or else they wouldn't have been printed, right?

Some of the tales are rather amusing (like the Sankt Andreasberg cat that gave birth to 300 kittens and a goat in a single night while under the influence of a comet). But then there's a tale of a Jew who supposedly tried to "torture" blessed altar bread and, when he could not destroy it "with fire or water", he tried to "bake it into a cake". And then the dough became red, and he beheld a vision of Baby Jesus within the oven...

Such tales took on lives of their own, and helped keep all sorts of bigotries alive. Just like modern-day social media do...

(By the way, if anyone can give me some recommendations for scholarly works on the early era of mass printing, I am all ears - so far, I've mainly picked up individual anecdotes.)

Chanders,
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

@juergen_hubert Elizabeth Eisenstein is the go to writer in this topic in English. Adrian Johns has written the rebuttal to EE and @jeffjarvis has also written about this.

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

Mastodon periods of activity posting really come and go, and right now it feels like we're mostly in a lull. Outside of the handful of regular accounts I can count on, it feels sleepy around here.

Chanders,
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@Zeb_Larson except for a few users I think it will be an endless series of waves like it is for you.

Chanders,
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

@inquiline @Zeb_Larson it’s funny that this is literally the exact problem we ran into in 2005 with the NYC indymedia open publishing newswire. We tried to solve it by designing a … kind of algorithm😂

Chanders,
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@Zeb_Larson I felt like there was a major drop off last year around the winter holidays.

It’s a bit different this year with social media platform competition, so maybe not applicable, but I got the sense that without an algorithm generating engagement people just got busy doing other stuff - on or offline.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Am being asked to review an utterly depressing paper: authors check machine-generated aesthetic output for stereotypes

A future where we all elect to spend our time attending to casually-generated garbage and commenting on it is a bleak future

Chanders,
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@inquiline there’s gonna be so much of this.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Oh I see the blah ranch house in my neighborhood that sold for $2M in June 2022 and was relisted after they "upgraded" it into vulgar fanciness for $3.9M in April 2023 has still not sold and they've had to successively drop the ask price down to $2.8M now.

Very normal housing market. (I rent)

Chanders,
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@inquiline it’s a good thing that salary in California’s public and private university system is keeping pace … 😒

Chanders, to random
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I appreciate it when someone posts over here that “they are doing most of their posting at BlueSky these days so follow me there” so I can then unfollow them here.

Chanders,
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

Whatever sorry that was grouchy it has been a long week.

But life is too short to keep trying to cool on the internet.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

It is unspeakably grim that this (really long) HR training module (that I am still doing) has a suicide prevention hotline number plastered across the bottom. I'm not even sure how to parse this but WTAF.

Chanders,
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

@inquiline I’m keeping that one.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

I don't know who needs to hear this but make your draft/submission as easy as you can for a reader to follow. Have a friend or peer read it first, not for specialized meaning, but for follow-ability. I try extremely hard to be a generous reviewer but if I can't tell what you mean, over and over, I can't even offer a constructive critique.

Chanders,
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@inquiline as someone who has been “sending” these emails out for the last two weeks (by which I mean the SAGE system version of me) I agree.

Chanders, to random
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"But this was an angle that I hadn’t thought of before. At some point in the future there will be somewhere in the universe where there will be a last sentient being. And a last thought. And that last word, no matter how profound or mundane, will vanish into silence along with the memory of Einstein, Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha, & Eve, while the remaining bits of the physical universe go on sailing apart for billions upon billions upon billions of lonely silent years."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/science/end-of-universe.html?campaign_id=51&emc=edit_mbe_20230503&instance_id=91636&nl=morning-briefing%3A-europe-edition&regi_id=60201592&segment_id=131964&te=1&user_id=b637f759312c7fe8bc635947e83b971b

Chanders, to random
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Man I didn't get the crypto spam everyone else is talking about, now I feel like a loser.

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

"It’s hard to think of a time since the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee when Congress has made such an effort to investigate disfavored ideologies in academe."
Republicans Wanted a Crackdown on Israel’s Critics. Columbia Obliged. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opinion/columbia-antisemitism-hearing.html?pvid=OMITSuEWAYCkwy-DOfZKmW9a&ugrp=c&smid=tw-share

Chanders,
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@jeffjarvis it would have been interesting to see how Mr First Ammendment Bollinger would have managed this.

Chanders, to random
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Thanksgiving week is definitely the hardest week to live abroad, even for a curmudgeonly American-skeptic like me.

Chanders,
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@inquiline god bless the USA.

Chanders, to random
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I’ve generally been pretty supportive/ forgiving of Biden. Even his support for Israel, not because I agree with the policy, but I can’t imagine him temperamentally or politically doing anything else.

But linking the border bill and Ukraine aid has been an utter debacle. Truly a failure of political skill and a massive strategic unforced error.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/ukraine-aid-border-bill-israel-senate

Chanders,
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

“Republicans as a whole aren’t a viable negotiating partner because any one Republican, including any Republican at the negotiating table, can be quickly outflanked on the right and lose any bargaining power.

Democrats participate anyway because, to give it the most most favorable interpretation I can, they believe that they will come out looking better having tried and having exposed GOP bad faith. No matter that this has failed to come to fruition countless times in the past decade.”

Chanders, to random
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Nothing beats peer-reviewing an article and coming face-to-face with the fact that entire, sustained, years-long arguments that colleagues were having / making not even a decade ago have been entirely forgotten or where never noticed at all! This is why I am sanguine about the hurly-burly of academic life. Soon we will all be lost to time ...

Chanders, to random
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A NYE tradition for me: posting Virginia Woolf’s NY resolutions for 1931. Always good.

Chanders, to random
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“The user migration from Twitter to Mastodon that followed Elon Musk's purchase of the Blue Bird site represents one of the largest digital migrations in the history of the Social Web and it is one rare examples of collective behavioral change that is documented through large-scale digital traces.”

From: @lajello
https://datasci.social/@lajello/111561167426229265

Chanders, to random
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

Happy to celebrate my coming out as an official old by never having heard of the Oxford Word of the Year for the first time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2023/12/04/rizz-meaning-oxford-word-of-year/

Chanders, to random
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I’ve now moved six times in 8 years and my advice is: never move.

Chanders, to random
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/now/ Mastodon is awake.

Chanders, to journalism
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

An interesting and entirely unscientific data point today: my largely European journalism and political communication masters students today said they got most of their news from Instagram by following individual journalists directly.

Chanders, to random
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“My CD single reviews are no great loss to posterity – but vast swathes of 21st-century music criticism are now literally unreadable. Every dead link on the reviews’ aggregator Metacritic tells a story of neglect.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music/2024/01/the-pitchfork-years

Chanders, to random
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An RPG set in the Westing Game Universe.

Chanders, to random
@Chanders@sciences.social avatar

“"Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs," Osgood said. "There's nothing that can't be improved by making it shorter and better."”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/charles-osgood-veteran-cbs-newsman-and-longtime-host-of-sunday-morning-dies-at-91/

Academics take note.

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