One of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had with a journal appears to be coming to a happy conclusion, and that’s not a bad way to start a Monday.

This video has been on my mind all morning, and it makes me so sad.

I don’t personally need research funding, but I work in an academic ecosystem that’s highly dependent on it. Things aren’t looking good.

I hate doing anything that seems to give Skinner any credit—especially after seeing how critical of him Ellul has been—but associating cleaning off our breakfast bar with lighting a scented candle has worked some behaviorist magic on me.

I was already planning to voice skepticism about Apple partnerships with universities in a manuscript I’m writing, but now I’ve got this to cite as well.

Masnick’s writing has never struck me as inflammatory or rushed. If he’s using this language, we should all be worried.

This is unlikely to make a difference, but I’m grateful anyway.

This is what my employer cut ties with.

This is an ambitious book—probably overambitious, and I don’t agree with all of the claims, especially with 60-70 years for Ellul’s ideas to marinate in continued technological development. Yet, his ideas are valuable and prescient—I don’t buy his claims as an ontological argument, but I think they make for a compelling theoretical framework for making sense of lots of what’s happening today.

Last month, I wrote on both my reading up on Jacques Ellul and on concerns about how we understand the purpose and value of research. I’m continuing to read—or, rather, listen to—Ellul’s The Technological Society, and I was interested to find a passage that brought together these two ideas. Here’s Ellul, writing in the mid-twentieth century: We have already examined the requirement of immediate applicability; here we meet it again on the state level.

Look, I don’t have experience running an academic publishing company, but I don’t know if I’d activate the experimental AI summarizer on an article exploring the ethics of generative AI.

Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.

“My anxiety is really high; taking some time off during spring break would be the healthy thing to do.” vs. “Not using spring break to get caught up is making me anxious about work I feel behind on.”

So, it turns out that spending time with Jacques Ellul’s mid-20th century critiques of systematization, abstraction, “productivity,” and “efficiency” does NOT make it any easier to write letters evaluating colleagues’ progress toward tenure.

C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.

On one hand, if the university’s connections are tenuous, I can understand making the easy move to get the administration off our back—especially when I’m confident that UK is pushing back against NIH indirect costs and other issues. On the other, I certainly hope that our response to every attack isn’t going to be to roll over and wash our hands of things.

I mean, I’ve always wanted to live and work in France, but I’ve never wanted to feel like I would have to.

I’ve been teaching my department’s class on content management systems since Fall 2019, which means that I’m coming up on my seventh(!) time with the course next August. Every time that I’ve taught it, I’ve used the Hugo static site software and the WordPress CMS as examples of content management concepts. WordPress is the more (most!) popular web CMS out there, and so it’s always been my main area of focus; I think that Hugo does a wonderful job of illustrating some CMS concepts, but it also has a higher technical learning curve, so I’ve always felt conflicted about its role in the classroom.

Laugh to keep from crying.

Hmmm. Don’t love this.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen two different CFPs that apply perfectly to a paper I wrote and then abandoned after a rejection and a paper I’ve wanted to write but had no good reason to. This may be what gets me back into a research groove this semester.

This last weekend, I made a brief appearance in an article from the Salt Lake Tribune discussing the influence of social media on Mormon masculinity. As I’ve noted before, the Tribune aggressively paywalls, but it’s hard to fault them. I get access to their religion coverage by paying $3/month to the Patreon for their Mormon Land podcast. My appearance is brief—a simple mention that Jordan Peterson is mentioned a number of times in a forum site I’m studying with colleagues—but those colleagues (Levi Sands at the University of Iowa and Amy Chapman at Arizona State) have more to say about the unsurprising, ambiguous, and worrying overlap between figures like Peterson and Andrew Tate and online Mormonism.

This is very cool, especially the SSO bit.

I feel like half of ClassDojo’s business model is “let’s prey on parental anxiety.”

My stress and anxiety levels have been high ever since the second Trump administration began and immediately started taking an axe to all sorts of things that one should not take an axe to. For admittedly selfish reasons, though, I’ve been particularly anxious since Friday, when the NIH announced that it was dramatically cutting its support to universities (and other research institutions) in the form of indirect costs. I don’t do NIH-funded work, but we’re a very medically focused campus, and there’s no way that the $40 million that the University estimates we could lose over the next year isn’t going to have ripple effects across campus (not to mention the fact that my colleagues in the College of Communication and Information regularly look to the NIH as a source of funding health communication research).

Been waiting for this email all day: the University of Kentucky estimates that the NIH limits on indirect funding, if maintained, would cost us $40 million over the next year.

Me, all of December: “Next semester, I have a course release and a once-a-week evening class. I’m going to get so much research done during the day!” Me, on February 7th: “Wow, it’s great to finally be getting to research this semester.”

I’m teaching a social media research methods class this semester, and I’m pretty sure I need to bring this article up in this week’s class.

Throughout my career, I’ve been a data-first researcher, and theory has always been one of my weak areas. This is not to say that I dismiss the importance of theory: I appreciate danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s critique of Chris Anderson’s “the numbers speak for themselves” in their 2012 paper Critical Questions for Big Data as much as I appreciate Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s similar critique in their book Data Feminism.

Tonight’s ethics lecture for my internet research class this semester will include a brief discussion of protecting researchers, so I got to go through my collection of screenshots of when a reactionary Mormon group took issue with our studying their posts.

I intentionally keep receiving ClassDojo marketing emails because I keep thinking I ought to archive them all to write an autoethnography of my (negative) experience with it as a parent with an ed tech PhD, but I keep not doing that and just being angry at the emails.

I’m proud of the research I’ve done on online communities taking cues from dark corners of the internet, and I’m glad that some reporters find it interesting. It’s still uncomfortable to read certain excerpts from my data out loud to people over the phone.

A few months ago, I blogged about teaching being something that’s somewhat performative, and that’s on my mind again as the local district announces “Non-Traditional Instruction” for tomorrow.

No, I’m not ready for classes to start next week, but schools are cancelled for snow and I’m under the weather, so kiddo and I are watching the new Wallace and Gromit this morning.

More suckiness in the world of academic publishing.

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…