Vincent Miller
I am a Reader (somewhere between Associate Professor and Professor in North American terms) in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
My current research interests focus on four broad themes:
Digital culture, media and new media
Social theory of space
Belonging, community and forms of association
Theories of urban social change and fragmentation:
In terms of my history, I previously completed my PhD in Sociology at Lancaster University (under John Urry and Bulent Diken), where I also taught for a time and worked on a number of research projects, the largest one being 'Biographies of Cultural Objects' with Scott Lash, Celia Lury, Dan Shapiro and Dede Boden. The results of this project can be seen in the book 'Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things', by Scott Lash and Celia Lury (Polity, 2007) and available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Global-Culture-Industry-Mediation-Things/dp/0745624839.
The results of another project I worked on at Lancaster, 'Housing decisions in old age' can be seen in my 'books' list.
Before that, I completed my BA and MA in Geography at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Some media things i have done:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011y87c
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8219000/8219466.stm
http://theengagingbrand.typepad.com/the_engaging_brand_/2009/09/sociologyofcommunity.html
My current research interests focus on four broad themes:
Digital culture, media and new media
Social theory of space
Belonging, community and forms of association
Theories of urban social change and fragmentation:
In terms of my history, I previously completed my PhD in Sociology at Lancaster University (under John Urry and Bulent Diken), where I also taught for a time and worked on a number of research projects, the largest one being 'Biographies of Cultural Objects' with Scott Lash, Celia Lury, Dan Shapiro and Dede Boden. The results of this project can be seen in the book 'Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things', by Scott Lash and Celia Lury (Polity, 2007) and available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Global-Culture-Industry-Mediation-Things/dp/0745624839.
The results of another project I worked on at Lancaster, 'Housing decisions in old age' can be seen in my 'books' list.
Before that, I completed my BA and MA in Geography at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Some media things i have done:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011y87c
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8219000/8219466.stm
http://theengagingbrand.typepad.com/the_engaging_brand_/2009/09/sociologyofcommunity.html
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Books by Vincent Miller
By focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, I argue that the real task for networked humanity is the recognition that these problems are at least in part the result of a certain ‘stance’ taken to the world and enabled by technology. The solution therefore, is not to focus exclusively on content and its regulation as much as it is to examine the alienating aspects of the media itself by understanding and resisting the more destructive tendencies in technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction, disembodiment and mediation which increasingly appear in our social encounters and presences. I suggest that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes.
Contents
Introduction
Revolutionary Technologies?
Chapter 1: Key Elements of Digital Media
Case Study: What Are Video Games? A Conundrum of Digital Culture
Chapter 2: The Economic Foundations of the Information Age
Chapter 3: Convergence and the Contemporary Media
Experience
Case Study: The Changing Culture Industry of Digital Music
‘Mash-ups’ and the crisis of authorship in digital culture
Chapter 4: Digital Inequality: Social, Political and Infrastructural Contexts
Chapter 5: “Everyone is Watching”: Privacy and Surveillance in Digital Life
Chapter 6: Information Politics, Subversion and Warfare
Chapter 7: Digital Identity
Case Study: Cybersex, Online Intimacy and the Self
Chapter 8: Social Media and the Problem of Community: Space, Relationships, Networks
Case Study: Social Networking, Microblogging, Language and Phatic Culture
Chapter 9: The Body and Information Technology
Conclusion : Base, Superstructure, Infrastructure, Revisited
References
Papers by Vincent Miller
Keywords: Affect, contagion, Gabriel Tarde, terrorism, (crime) waves, vehicle-ramming attacks, virality.
British Journal of Criminology. (doi:10.1093/bjc/azy017)
https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azy017/5052837?redirectedFrom=fulltext
A draft of this article is currently under restricted access at https://kar.kent.ac.uk/67097/, or feel free to contact one of the authors.
Keywords: Trolling, Cybercrime, Vulnerability, Merleau-Ponty, Online extortion, Data breach, Hacking, Existentialism, Being, Cybersecurity
Miller, Vincent (2018) The ethics of digital being: vulnerability, invulnerability, and ‘dangerous surprises’. In: Lagerqvist, Amanda, ed. Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and transcendence in Digital Culture. Routledge Studies in Religion and Digital Culture . Routledge, London, pp. 171-186. ISBN 9781138092433. E-ISBN 9781315107479. (In press)
Please contact the author for a draft copy.
By focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, I argue that the real task for networked humanity is the recognition that these problems are at least in part the result of a certain ‘stance’ taken to the world and enabled by technology. The solution therefore, is not to focus exclusively on content and its regulation as much as it is to examine the alienating aspects of the media itself by understanding and resisting the more destructive tendencies in technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction, disembodiment and mediation which increasingly appear in our social encounters and presences. I suggest that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes.
Contents
Introduction
Revolutionary Technologies?
Chapter 1: Key Elements of Digital Media
Case Study: What Are Video Games? A Conundrum of Digital Culture
Chapter 2: The Economic Foundations of the Information Age
Chapter 3: Convergence and the Contemporary Media
Experience
Case Study: The Changing Culture Industry of Digital Music
‘Mash-ups’ and the crisis of authorship in digital culture
Chapter 4: Digital Inequality: Social, Political and Infrastructural Contexts
Chapter 5: “Everyone is Watching”: Privacy and Surveillance in Digital Life
Chapter 6: Information Politics, Subversion and Warfare
Chapter 7: Digital Identity
Case Study: Cybersex, Online Intimacy and the Self
Chapter 8: Social Media and the Problem of Community: Space, Relationships, Networks
Case Study: Social Networking, Microblogging, Language and Phatic Culture
Chapter 9: The Body and Information Technology
Conclusion : Base, Superstructure, Infrastructure, Revisited
References
Keywords: Affect, contagion, Gabriel Tarde, terrorism, (crime) waves, vehicle-ramming attacks, virality.
British Journal of Criminology. (doi:10.1093/bjc/azy017)
https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azy017/5052837?redirectedFrom=fulltext
A draft of this article is currently under restricted access at https://kar.kent.ac.uk/67097/, or feel free to contact one of the authors.
Keywords: Trolling, Cybercrime, Vulnerability, Merleau-Ponty, Online extortion, Data breach, Hacking, Existentialism, Being, Cybersecurity
Miller, Vincent (2018) The ethics of digital being: vulnerability, invulnerability, and ‘dangerous surprises’. In: Lagerqvist, Amanda, ed. Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and transcendence in Digital Culture. Routledge Studies in Religion and Digital Culture . Routledge, London, pp. 171-186. ISBN 9781138092433. E-ISBN 9781315107479. (In press)
Please contact the author for a draft copy.
Here I suggest that the problem lies in how such presences are not encountered as 'being', but instead as abstract 'data'. Indeed, I argue that contemporary being is subject to five different modes of abstraction (commodification, informatisation, depersonalisation, decontextualisation and dematerialisation), which work to separate information produced by beings, from beings themselves. Thus, as data, this virtual matter is mistakenly conceived of as 'information about' beings as opposed to 'the matter of being' in contemporary environments. I argue that this 'information about’ beings carries with it little ethical weight, and thus the handling of personal data is therefore largely freed from any kind of ethical or moral responsibility. This separation encourages the rampant collection of data, the spread of personal information, invasions of privacy, and violations of autonomy.
To work against these trends, I propose that we consider expanding the notion of 'self' or 'being' to include the presences we achieve through technology. This means including the virtual presences of profiles, avatars, databases as part of the 'matter of being' or the self. Such a shift would give 'ethical weight' to an otherwise ethically weightless set of mathematical data conceived of purely in instrumental terms by re-establishing and emphasising the link between ‘data’ and its human origins.
In this paper, I build upon previous arguments which suggested that the rise of social networking demonstrated that online culture and communication had become increasingly ‘phatic’ and less dialogic. Here I use previous empirical work to challenge the above claims of digital politics enthusiasts. I then suggest an alternative theoretical account of the function of digital media activism which better suits these empirical findings. I suggest that digital politics demonstrates a rise of ‘phatic communion’ in social media. Incorporating Heidegger’s notion of ‘idle talk’, I further suggest that the rise of a phatic online culture in social media activism has atrophied the potential for digital communications technologies to help foster social change by creating a conversational environment based on limited forms of expressive solidarity as opposed to an engaged, content-driven, dialogic public sphere.
Keywords: Phatic, Heidegger, Clicktivism, Social Media, Online Politics, Multitude, Arab Spring, Occupy, Twitter, Facebook.
Please see the link below to access the paper. If you do not have access to Convergence, feel free to send me a message and i will e-mail you a copy.
Largely inspired by sociological phenomenology, but multi-disciplinary in nature, this paper will try to address this issue by positing ‘resonance’ as a useful concept by which sociologists and social scientists more generally, can engage with the more fluid forms of belonging and affinity achieved in everyday life contexts.
Keywords: resonance; everyday life; intimacy; anonymity; collective effervescence; communitas; Durkheim; affect; Schutz; Ingold.
In that sense, an important disjuncture exists between the largely liminal space of online interactions and the ethical sensibilities of material presence which, as these two spheres become more intensely integrated, has potential consequences for the future of an ethical social world and a civil society. I use the examples of online suicides, trolling, cyberbullying to illustrate these ethical disjunctures.
"""
Keywords: Maps, Power, Harley, Lefebvre, Baudrillard, Phenomenology, Non-Representational Theory.
Keywords: Space, Enclosure, Vagueness, Terrain Vague, Photography, Eruv, Lefebvre, Eruvim.
This ipaper is an early draft of the above paper. Try to reference the above paper if possible, or better yet, buy the book! There are some great chapters in it.
Key Words: blogging • database culture • microblogging • network sociality • phatic • post-social • social networking