Three Questions I get Asked

Here are three questions that natural scientists and engineers often ask me, and which are commonly asked of social scientists participating in interdisciplinary collaborations. 

1. Why do people not like X?

e.g. why do people not like synthetic food additives?

This question usually has to do with a perception that scientists, or a particular field of scientific work, is not viewed favourably by ‘the public’ or by industry, governments, NGOs, and so on. Natural scientists and engineers sometimes have the impression that social scientists will be able to explain why it is that their technical ambitions have been thwarted by a political misconception or misunderstanding.

The question is sometimes embedded in a range of other faulty assumptions about public understanding of science and science communication. As a question, it can position social scientists as experts in the irrational behaviour of individuals and groups. Social scientists can also be positioned through this style of questioning as brokers, and so be expected to help to open governance and/or public doors.

I’d rather talk about:

What do people actually say and do in relation to X? What practices are involved in regards to X and how do you envision X changing, supplementing or supplanting those practices?

When it comes to something like food additives, for example, I’d be interested to know how people make sense of ‘synthetic’ and ‘natural’ from within cooking, eating, feeding and caring practices. We could ask in what ways are these concepts important to the organisation of such practices, or in what ways do these practices organise our demarcations of those concepts? It could be important to explore how novel methods of producing food additives sit alongside or displace existing methods of production, and with what global socioeconomic implications.

In this regard we could begin to understand why the notion or production of synthetic food additives might raise socio-political, economic or ethical questions from publics, NGOs, governments and so forth, rather than assuming people don’t like it because of ignorance.

 

2. What will people think of X?

e.g. what will people think of brain-based lie detection?

This type of question usually has to do with natural scientists’ worries about what ‘the public’ will think about their planned innovations or technical recommendations. It comes from a recognition that publics are interested and invested in scientific knowledge production. However, it is often motivated by a desire to ensure that people will think positively about X and so sometimes accompanied by a will to understand how to encourage people to feel positively about X.

The question is sometimes embedded in a range of other faulty assumptions about how people’s negative feelings about proposed technologies will inexorably lead to market failure and that this is necessarily a bad thing. It positions social scientists as PR gurus or pollsters, who can help to take the public temperature and design marketing strategies for innovations.

I’d rather talk about:

What kinds of imagined (necessary, likely, possible or peripheral) actions, routines, relations and social structures are being embedded in the sociotechnical work being conducted? In other words, putting the emphasis not so much on the object of technical interest but on how the envisaged object might impact upon existing practices of life, relations and social order, or open-up new practices. Do we want these kinds of practices and why/ why not? What effects will these changes have and with what implications for people’s experiences of social and technical phenomena?

In the given example of brain-based lie detection, I would want to know more about how we do lie detection now in different contexts and why we do it that way. I’d be interested to know how brain-based techniques would change these contexts if implemented and what implications such changes might have for our ways of living with each other. If we were talking about using brain scanning as evidence for use in legal proceedings, for example, we’d have to think carefully about why we currently use the investigation, interview, interrogation and jury systems. How would brain-based technologies fit in these practices and what would change? What kinds of life and forms of justice are implicated in such changes?

In this regard we could begin to unpick some of the tangle of concepts, practices, norms, politics and so on that are bound up with our current ways of doing lie detection and thus better understand what would be at stake for someone who is asked to give an opinion on a new lie detection technology.

 

3. Is it okay to do X?

e.g. is it okay to engineer life?

This question usually has to do with a perceived ethical ‘implication’ of some proposed technical innovation. The questions often centre on technical objects. They involve a recognition that sociotechnical innovation generally implies changes in how things are done or understood. They might have to do with abstract concepts like life or nature. However, by emphasising the objects of technical innovation or abstract questions these kinds of concerns largely miss the everyday practices that are at the heart of how ethical decisions and dispositions are made and formed.

This type of question is sometimes embedded in a range of assumptions about scientific objectivity and how ethical implications arise only from the implementation of knowledge and new technologies in the world rather than in the practices of knowledge production itself. In addition, such questions often come with the implication that X is going to happen anyway, but it would be good to know what moral status it is going to be given when it does happen.

This style of questioning is more comfortable for some social scientists than others, since some of us are experts in ethics. However, in the way the question is generally posed it positions social scientists as ethical arbiters, who themselves are being asked to judge the moral status of objects and so assess the social value of proposed innovations in order to help scientists justify actions they know they are going to take. This is a bit tricky and can be a far less comfortable space to inhabit.

I’d rather talk about:

What kinds of moral or ethical values are embedded in the scientific practices out of which the question has emerged? In other words, what has been decided about ethics already, what kinds of questions have been closed off and with what justification?

I’d also be looking to explore what kinds of ethics and norms are used in contexts in which the proposed X is being invoked. Are there differences in the ethical frameworks used to think about X across different spaces and times and in what ways do these differ? If there are differences of opinion about the ethical valence of X how do we decide amongst such opinions in governance, regulation, and technical innovation practices?  

Dementia and Everyday Life: Creative Approaches

7th April 2016, University of Manchester

 Understanding dementia and its entanglement with everyday life presents a conceptual and methodological challenge to a range of disciplines in the humanities, health and natural sciences. In this day of academic seminars, we explore some of the work being conducted in humanities and health research to examine this topic, focusing on the creative approaches that are being developed to tackle questions of selfhood, relationality, materiality and narrative.

The event is co-hosted by the Morgan Centre for the Study of Everyday Life, the Dementia and Ageing Research Team and MICRA, the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing.

 Photo and art by Lynne Chapman

 

Time and Location

7^th April, 2016. 11am-5pm
Jean McFarlane Building Oxford Road, University of Manchester

Building 92 on the Campus Map

Nearest train stations: Oxford Road and Manchester Piccadilly, both around 10-20 minutes walk from the Jean McFarlane Building. 

Speakers

Dr Andrea Capstick and Dr Katherine Ludwin, School of Dementia Studies, University of Bradford

Dr Christina Buse, Department of Sociology, University of York

Dr Lucy Burke, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University

Dr Jackie Kindell, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist, Older People’s Mental Health Service, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust.

Early Career Speakers

We have a few opportunities for early career researchers (including PhD students) to present their work and some limited funding to cover their travel expenses. If you are working on dementia and everyday life phenomena, particularly if you are using creative methods, then please consider putting forward a proposal to speak. We are open to creative suggestions for format, although ECR speakers should bear in mind that their slots will likely be limited to 15-20 minutes. To apply, contact the organisers with a suggested title and abstract of no more than 300 words by 21^st March 2016. We will inform successful applicants by 23^rd March.

Attendance

This is a small event and is open to academic researchers working in the field of dementia and everyday life, or related areas.

To request a place at the workshop please email sarah.campbell@manchester.ac.uk with your name and a sentence or two about your area of research.

Organisers

Dr Andrew Balmer, Sociology and the Morgan Centre for the Study of Everyday Lives, University of Manchester. Andrew.Balmer@manchester.ac.uk

Sarah Campbell, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, and the Dementia and Ageing Research Team, University of Manchester. Sarah.Campbell@manchester.ac.uk

 

 

 

PhD studentship on Dementia and Friendship

My Morgan Centre colleague, Vanessa May, and I have received funding from the North West Doctoral Training Centre for a scholarship for a PhD student to study dementia and friendship, in partnership with Manchester Carers Forum. The information is below, please encourage any prospective students to apply.

Offer

The University of Manchester’s Morgan Centre for the Study of Everyday Lives is offering one fully-funded ESRC CASE PhD studentship in partnership with Manchester Carers Forum. The funding includes payment of tuition fees as well as a doctoral stipend at the UK Research Council’s required level of £14,057 per annum. The studentship is available to outstanding candidates wishing to commence their doctoral studies in September 2016.

Project description: In the past decade, friendship has become a concern in sociology as well as in anthropology and related disciplines. This PhD project will examine questions of friendship in the context of dementia, focusing on the experiences of people with dementia and their carers, as well as their friends. A crucial feature of this study will be to take seriously the relational perspective, understanding changes in the lives and friendships of carers and people with dementia as being fundamentally entangled. The project will develop a variety of elicitation and sensory methods (for example photo or music elicitation), as well as more conventional narrative and biographical methods, for the study of friendship and dementia. As an ESRC CASE studentship, this project will also involve close work with Manchester Carers Forum. As part of the funding requirements, the successful candidate will volunteer at Manchester Carers Forum as a member of the peer mentor coordination team, working directly with carers and peer mentors to support people living with dementia. The PhD student will work for 3 months of the year at the Carers Forum, broken down into a certain number of hours per week.

Studentship Details: The successful candidate will be supervised by Dr Andrew Balmer and Dr Vanessa May in the department of Sociology. It is anticipated that the studentship will be for direct entry onto the three year (+3) PhD programme in September, however candidates for the 1+3 (MSc. Sociological Research followed by the 3 year PhD programme) will be considered. Continuation of the award is subject to satisfactory performance.

Entry Requirements: Applicants must hold a Bachelors First Class or Upper Second Class Honours UK degree in a relevant social science discipline, which should generally be in Sociology or Anthropology, although other disciplines will be considered. Candidates must also have (or expect to gain before the start of the programme in September 2016) a UK Masters degree (or overseas equivalent) recognised as a research training masters by the ESRC. They should be qualified at minimum Merit level, with a coursework/examination average of 60% or more. Students without a Masters degree (intending to enter the 1+3 programme) will be considered but preference will be given to those with a Masters qualification. You must satisfy ESRC UK residential criteria to qualify for this studentship (information here: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/skills-and-careers/studentships/prospective-students/am-i-eligible-for-an-esrc-studentship)

Candidates meeting the following criteria will also be given preference: above 70% in their Bachelors or Masters; some demonstrable knowledge of the sociological literature on personal life and/or friendship; demonstrable expertise in qualitative research methods, particularly creative methods.
Enquiries should be directed to andrew.balmer@manchester.ac.uk.

Deadline: 7^th February 2016. 

How to apply

Applicants should email Dr Andrew Balmer, Andrew.balmer@manchester.ac.uk with a full CV (including grade transcripts) and a covering letter explaining your interest in the project. Please note that applying for this PhD studentship funding is a separate process to applying for entry to the Manchester PhD Programme.  The successful candidate will therefore also be required to fulfil the normal admissions procedures for the School of Social Sciences once they have been offered the NWDTC scholarship.

Affect and Dementia

Some definitions of ‘affect’ hold it to be pre-linguistic, something fundamentally ‘non-representational’ (Massumi, 1995), like the sensation of anxiety conjured by a particular urban environment.

Affect in this guise is automatic. It is something the world conveys upon us as if by magic. The brain and wider nervous system are often crucial to such arguments, since they react to stimuli so rapidly it is easy to see how unconscious some of our responses can appear. In contrast, Margaret Wetherell (2012) understands affect to be entangled with all the rest of the mess of the world. Something that can happen in the blink of an eye, something embodied and habitual, yes, but also something that we designate to ourselves and others as part of situated everyday life. Affect is something that we reflect on, foster or discourage. It is structured and also specific.

In my own work I have been musing on affect and emotions as part of studying a very messy situation: what it is like to be caring for someone with dementia. Primarily I have been interested in how we deal with change in this context. No matter which kind of dementia a person is living with, there will be a lot of change involved, not least in their behaviour, but also in their relationships and in their capacities. One form of dementia is particularly pertinent to understanding affect and emotion. Behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) involves a range of symptoms, but central to its manifestation are changes to a person’s affective disposition. People can become disinhibited and lack shame, empathy and insight. They might cry or laugh uncontrollably. Sometimes their tastes change, particularly as regards their appetite for sweet and sugary foods. They can also become obsessional, repeating routines and behaviours without relent.

For example, arranged around the living room of a carer I interviewed, Mike, there were several electronic drum kits. However, Mike told me as I we walked in that he doesn’t play the drums. They were for his wife, Lucy, who was living with bvFTD. Lucy would repeatedly bash and drum on anything she could find. Mike had bought the drums because at least they made familiar sounds, had a volume control and weren’t easily demolished.

This led me to ponder on whether Lucy drums things because of a change in her brain. Certainly there is a neurological problem causing a disruption in her everyday life. But why drums? This was a question Mike regularly posed to himself and doctors. Some answers he received were that it might stop some unpleasant sensation that Lucy feels, or that she might derive some pleasure from the physical activity, from the sound or from the effect it has on others. Mike wonders if she’s angry, and says that she doesn’t show any empathy for him as he struggles to tolerate the endless cacophony. And Mike struggles to manage his own anger as he soldiers on. But why do the drums bother him, exactly? It seems that there’s certainly an element of automation here. The drums make an unpleasant noise, which makes him feel angry even against his will. But how do we judge a pleasant noise versus an unpleasant noise? There are physical factors. Some noises hurt our ears. But cultural ones too, having to do with the way in which rhythm and melody has been structured in the West. These physical and cultural factors also inform each other.

And surely Mike is also angry because of the sense of injustice he feels. That dementia has affected Lucy in this way and that she does the things that she does. And that he is losing her. He is still angry with her even though he knows this, which makes him angry with himself, and further angry with the disease and that he can’t do anything about it.

Clearly there are multiple forces shaping the manifestation of anger in Mike and Lucy’s relationship, each time situated, specific and multiple, but also part of a broader story of changing embodiment, capacity and everyday life, one that is at least partly shared with others living with bvFTD and their carers.

Encounters like these with changes in affect lead me to believe that we need to better understand its entanglement with the body and the brain, certainly, but that such an investigation has to be conducted from within the relational world in which these changes take place.

References

Massumi, B. (1995) ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique, 31, 83-109.

Wetherell, M. (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: Sage Publications).

Choosing an iGEM Project

iGEM is promoted to undergraduate students as an exciting and playful competition in which you get to create a cool new organism. The jamboree, for example, is organised as a way of performing this enthusiasm, through the way in which trophies and medals are awarded, but also through the parties, and workshops and all the photo opportunities.

Lots of the concepts embedded in the idea of iGEM are borrowed from the world of software engineering and computer gadgetry. Take ‘biohacking’, for example. This set of concepts, ways of thinking, images and so on also relate to certain values of judgement and decision making. Trying to make something ‘cool’ or ‘exciting’ pushes thinking and design in some directions and not others. It influences the choices we make and how we evaluate our work.

Which is cooler? Designing an organism that uses bioluminescence to signal air quality, whilst also removing pollutants from the atmosphere; or making an organism that produces an enzyme involved in the industrial production of paint for ship hulls. They both sound reasonably helpful and there might be a commercial market for each one, but I think most people would say bioluminescence is a bit cooler than ship hulls. But why should science be designing things on the basis of them being cool, or fun, or exciting?

The way the iGEM competition tends to work is to prioritise and celebrate projects not only for their scientific success but for their fun spirit. I am not trying to make a case for or against the notion of fun and excitement as a relevant factor in the judging process or indeed in science more generally. It is just to begin to point out that there are dimensions to the choices that iGEM teams make and the decisions that judges make that are not simply objective. Instead, making choices of this kind involves a range of values and emotions that we tend not to see, and that we often erase from our descriptions of why we chose certain projects over others.

In this regard, I want to remind iGEM teams that the ways in which they choose their projects are laden with values and social features of everyday life that aren’t captured by the usual assumptions about how science and innovation progress.

Indeed, iGEM isn’t all about fun and playfulness. In fact, the fun and playfulness are part of a larger issue: iGEM is often more about demonstrating that synthetic biology as a field is useful itself.

Being useful, being industrially-relevant, solving a problem and so on: these are some of the values that engineers often prize in their work and they have become central to synthetic biology. And perhaps these seem obvious and uncontested.

But in order for synthetic biology to be funded and to distinguish itself from previous forms of genetic engineering, it has had to organise itself directly in relation to making stuff that’s useful to industrial partners.

And hopefully here we can see that there are certain ethical implications. If we just focus on the ideas of being useful and industrially-relevant there are a number of questions we can pose. To whom will the work be useful? To what uses will they put it? Will it be used solely in the ways intended? Why should we make something that is industry relevant in the first place? And which industries do we prioritise? What are the values of those industries? What do they do in the world and with what implications? How do the values of these industries and companies align with your own values?

In this regard it becomes important to think about the specifics of the project you’re considering working on and whether the context of the industry in which you plan to work makes a difference to how the object you produce will be used. Is making something useful for the pharmaceutical industry just the same as making something useful for the agricultural industry, or for the weapons industry, or the space industry?

The common assumption that iGEM teams should make something that is useful is generally attached to making something industrially-relevant. But this embeds a certain relationship between science and industry into the process of choosing a project. Generally, it puts science in the service of industry.

That relationship is not necessary and doesn’t have to be part of how science and engineering work. However, it has become a background assumption in iGEM. It has been embedded into iGEM’s emphasis on demonstrating the relevance and usefulness of synthetic biology. And this plays out in team’s choices.

UCSF’s Sponsors in 2009.

So when you’re thinking about what to focus on for your project, consider why you want to make something for industrial use. What kinds of industry do you want to create things for? Think about how they might use it. Who will gain from this technology and who will lose?

It can be easy to get lost in making your iGEM choices, particularly if there are lots of options and you’re excited about a lot of different ideas. It is of course part of iGEM that you should have fun, but choosing your iGEM project has to be an ethical choice and it is one that you should make explicitly, that you should think about carefully, and that you should talk about with a range of different people before settling on an idea.

Public Perceptions, Knowledge Deficit and Expertise.

This is the third in a series of posts I’m writing about human practices. They are specifically targeted at undergraduate iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine competition) teams currently working on summer projects to create novel microorganisms.

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During past scientific controversies, natural scientists have often sought to convince people from ‘the public’ to trust that they know what they’re doing with science because they’re the experts. They also often seemed to feel that ‘the public’ and the government should just let scientists make decisions on their own because they are the most qualified to judge the science on its own terms. This was a common response, for example, to questions that were asked of scientists about the emergence and use of genetically modified foods, which forms an important background to the contemporary development of synthetic biology. Researchers largely seemed to think that people were frightened of GM foods because they didn’t understand the science. A related idea was that this ‘public ignorance’ of the science could be somehow cured if we educated people about GM technologies. In this regard, scientists assumed the main problem was a ‘knowledge deficit’ in public understanding of science, which meant that public perceptions of science were skewed and inappropriate but could be changed by better education and ‘outreach’.  So scientists set about telling people about the GM work they were doing, hoping to calm ‘the public’ fears by providing knowledge.

In iGEM much of the work that teams do in human practices still follows this model. Most teams go out into public spaces like schools, community centres and so forth, to tell people about the work they’re doing. Mostly it is a one way thing, where teams tell people the science and hope that this interests them or at least that it allays some of their fears. One reason for this is that there is a major constraint on human practices work in iGEM. You have very little time to read or explore HP scholarship, and – for the most part – having only studied a single subject at university, most of you will be unfamiliar with the methods and conceptual apparatus used in humanities and social sciences. So it is much easier to adopt these kinds of one-off outreach activities, talk to the public and then get back to the lab, to updating your wiki pages and preparing for the jamboree. After all, there’s no hope of a medal or an award if you haven’t actually got an engineered microbe to present no matter how many people you’ve talked to about your project or how much you’ve learned about social science. So the priorities of iGEM teams are set-up in part by the medal criteria.

So what’s the point of engaging with ‘the public’ in iGEM human practices or in synthetic biology more generally? Before I approach that question I first want to dwell on this phrase for a paragraph or two. ‘The public’ is usually invoked by scientists and iGEM team members alike to indicate the mass of people who are not familiar with the scientific knowledge that they themselves have developed. It implies a uniform group, made of non-scientists. But of course, ‘the public’ isn’t a unitary group. There are all kinds of differences in people’s lives, like gender, race, religion, class, age, education, profession, and so on, that change their experience of the world in ways that have nothing at all to do with whether they have studied genetic engineering or not. This is why social science researchers tend to talk about ‘publics’, in order to imply all those differences and complexities that make up the worlds of human life.

Moreover, scientists themselves are part of publics, since they also have lives that extend beyond the lab, they have concerns outside of academia, and most will have relationships and intimacies that are not part of their professional work. In this regard, scientific developments, innovations, knowledge-making practices and so on are just as important to different individual scientists as they might be to non-scientists. One chemical engineer who has a child with a genetic disease might think quite differently about how we begin to use epigenetics in our organisation of society than might another chemical engineer who doesn’t have children.

Importantly, scientists also comprise a number of different publics because they also have values and perspectives as part of their work. Scientific values and perspectives are part of the practices of different kinds of scientific education and research. So – as I’ve tried to describe in previous posts – these values and ways of thinking are going to be difficult to disentangle or even to see or describe by the scientists who are competent in those practices. Some of these values, for example, consist in a commitment to certain forms of evidence and argument, to certain ways of doing knowledge-making, to ethical principles about life, its meanings and what human beings are about and how we should relate to each other. Scientists also often have beliefs about the roles of science in governance of social life and how expertise should be used. And, much like riding a bike, these assumptions, values and perspectives are just part of how you do it – they’re embodied in how you do the work and how the practices are organised.

In this way, we can begin to see that scientists are also just humans doing a specific kind of practice, namely, synthetic biology in the case of iGEM.

Why talk to publics then? Well, because it will help to explore what it is that you have assumed about your work, its purposes and how the technologies you’re making might be used. Importantly, though, this involves more than just asking people what they think. It means trying to see the significance of practices that you’ve invoked in your iGEM project work and to think critically about how you are intending to change those practices. It also means accepting that there are other forms of expertise that are relevant to changing practices with scientific innovations. The contexts in which innovations are imagined to be used in the future – like how we currently envisage the use of synthetic artemisinin – will involve a number of different people from different publics who will be competent experts in the practices involved in those contexts.

So, for example, imagine you’re designing an organism that will make a kind of sustainable cooking oil. Brilliant – there are lots of ways in which a sustainable cooking oil could be good for the world. But you should also use your human practices to explore how cooking oil is currently used. In what practices does it play a role? Of course, there’s home cooking, there is also restaurant and take-away cooking, there’s military and hospital and other public service cooking. Then there are various practices involved in the manufacture, distribution, marketing and selling of cooking oils that differ according to the practices in which the cooking oil is intended for use. All of these practices may differ across different regions of the world. In home cooking in the UK, for example, the use of oil is loaded with a range of different values and meanings by virtue of how cooking is connected to other practices, including eating, caring for one’s family, being healthy, getting sick, growing older, being in a rush, going to work, and so on and so forth. Your iGEM project might produce a cooking oil that disrupts some of the values and meanings that are embedded in these practices or that implies the adoption of new values and meanings that weren’t a part of these practices previously.

Imagine something as small and seemingly inconsequential as the cooking oil being a slightly different colour. The meanings of the colour might be quite important as part of these practices of cooking, eating and so on. For example in how the colour yellow of most oils has been connected to sunshine, blooming fields and farms, good and bad health, and so forth in their marketing or contestation.

Or imagine if it tastes a bit different. Practices of cooking and eating embed practices of taste. What tastes good and why is complex and not simply a biological phenomenon. In the UK at least there is also the phenomenon of ‘good’ and ‘bad taste’, having to do not only with the flavour of the food but also with what kinds of flavours that different groups of society associate with their lifestyles. So to have good taste is part of being seen as a competent member of the social group and forms a part of one’s expertise as a member of that group. Good taste is very much affected by class, ethnicity, and age. What counts as good taste in a working class, white household in urban London might be quite different to a middle class, Afro-Caribbean household in rural Kent. So what might be acceptable as a change in the colour or taste of cooking oil for these families might be quite different because the kinds of flavours and ways of cooking that the oil is involved in might differ. Moreover, cooking for one’s family is rife with important values that are embedded in how we live and organise our relationships with each other. How we use food might be different in the context of being a new father tasked with taking care of a child’s health, or in working at a hospital canteen trying to keep people happy and letting them still have their own choices, or in a mother appeasing a bossy teenager going through adolescence. People might have a problem with a GM cooking oil for reasons that have nothing to do with not ‘understanding the science’ and everything to do with their very detailed, situated and embodied understandings of health, taste, family, care and so on. Publics are multifarious and complex because practices are multifarious and complex. How we make sense of people’s reactions to scientific developments has to take into consideration the expertise that these people use in their practices and how this shapes the values and meanings placed on scientific change.

Much of the time, scientists of most varieties spend their time developing more and more specialised knowledge about a number of topics and so becoming far more expert in a smaller number of practices. Just like most professionals. Good lawyers, chefs, teachers, pilots, mothers, fathers, hairdressers, doctors, painters and decorators all become experts in sets of practices that affect the way that they think about the world. Our values and perspectives are tied to the practices in which we live and in which we have become expert. And when scientists seek to change something about our practices, like introducing a new product into the practice, there are many features to how we make sense of this proposed change that have very little to do with a knowledge deficit in molecular biology and more to do with our differences in expertise.

Talking to publics, then, has to be about understanding the human practices that are involved with the kinds of products that you’re envisioning in your iGEM work. Although you’re experts in science and in iGEM you might well be novices in growing crops, selling farm produce, distribution, marketing, managing a retail chain, cooking, being a parent, feeding a family, being a Buddhist, and so on and so forth. You’ll need lots of methods and concepts that don’t exist in synthetic biology in order to be able to understand these forms of expertise and relate them to your work. Human practices is about exploring these worlds and practices and trying to make sense of how your products and envisaged changes to the world will be made sense of. Investigating the human practices bound up with your proposed innovations should help you to critically think about and so possibly change how you design and construct those innovations. In this regard, human practices should be about your knowledge deficit, and not that of ‘the public’.

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In a future post I’ll begin to discuss some of the methods that you might use to do human practices in a way that is more conducive to this kind of analysis and that goes beyond outreach and public understanding.

Why ‘Practices’?

This is the second in a series of posts I’m writing about human practices. They are specifically targeted at undergraduate iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine competition) teams currently working on summer projects to create novel microorganisms.

Much work across academic disciplines has sought to describe and explain human life at two levels, emphasising either: natural laws, group life and social structures; or individual behaviour and personal life. When natural laws and social structure is emphasised we tend to see individual actions and meanings as being primarily determined by forces outside of individual control. On the other hand, when individual behaviour is emphasised, we tend to focus on how people make up their lives through their own free will, creatively negotiating interactions with each other in everyday spaces to maintain social organisation and order.

There are also those theories that try to make sense of both sides of the coin, individual creative freedom and social determination. Such theories try to understand how forces outside of individual control shape the patterns of social life whilst also maintaining the importance of individual differences and spontaneity. How such theories try to do this varies considerably. Indeed, within some of the social science disciplines, like sociology and anthropology, there are a wealth of approaches that can be used to think about the links between individual and group behaviour.

‘Practice theory’ is one such approach. Since around 1970 a number of scholars in sociology, anthropology and related disciplines have tried to develop accounts of how social structures shape individual behaviours whilst also attending to how those individual behaviours help to create the very structures that shape them. In this regard these thinkers have tried to explain how both levels reciprocally construct each other: how individual action and group patterns are made of the same kind of stuff. In short, it is ‘practices’ that make up the world for this approach. We can roughly understand practices to be things that individuals and groups routinely do in the world. Practices are patterns of actions that for most participants are just second nature.
Like driving a car. Indeed, although what counts as a practice is quite varied, examples often emphasise things we clearly do with our bodies, like riding a bicycle, but also extends to less clearly bodily-oriented actions, like talking to a doctor, reprimanding an infant, singing a hymn in church, buying groceries, taking a shower and so on and so forth.

Given some initial training, whether formally (through parents or teachers, for example) or informally through every day participation in group life, practices become part of how we do our lives day-to-day. So part of learning a new practice involves learning the rules so that it becomes second nature to do things in one way and not another. We rarely question the rules of how we do everyday life. Imagine if you were constantly challenging how to greet each other, eat, work or sleep. You would be hungry, unemployed and exhausted, and people would quickly get annoyed with you.  Many practices come with quite clearly legitimate and illegitimate ways of doing the practice. Like the rules of the iGEM competition that enforce how you should use the standard biological parts and how to submit your parts to the library. These rules help to shape how people do the practice and most iGEM teams don’t think to question them because they’re just essential to how iGEM is currently done.

http://2011.igem.org/Team:Potsdam_Bioware/Safety_Ethics

Theories of practices often place an emphasis on how skilful people are in their everyday encounters with each other and with the world. We seem to get by without much problem once we have learnt how to do something, even when practices are very complex, like flying an aeroplane. So theories of practice emphasise skilful routine and habit. As an iGEM team member you will become or will have already become very skilful at a whole bunch of different practices that are relatively new to you. Think about what it was like early on in your lab experiences to pipette very small amounts of fluids, at speed, from one tube to another, mixing them in appropriate quantities, in order to follow a protocol. By the end of iGEM many of you will have become so skilled at doing this that you will not need the protocols anymore, and may not even have to think about how much of the different substances you need to mix, in what order, for how long, and so on. You’ll also be far more dextrous with your pipetting.

The knowledge and skill you are acquiring is ‘embodied’ – it is knowledge that is habituated in your body through situated training. A mini-prep has likely become part of your routine and habitual behaviour. Because the knowledge involved in practices is tied up with embodied abilities, these routines and habits become part of our background or ‘tacit’ knowledge, and it is very difficult to explain exactly where that knowledge is or what it is that you know in order to be able to do it. A classic example involves trying to communicate how it is that you ride a bicycle so that someone who hasn’t ridden a bicycle can then get on one and ride around based on what you’ve told them. It is extremely difficult – and some argue impossible – to tell someone how to ride a bike without actually getting them on a bike and showing them, and indeed guiding them as they learn practically how to do it. When we are riding a bicycle there a lots of techniques that we are unconsciously using through embodied skills that can be described mathematically, having to do with how we balance and so on. But most of us would be completely incapable of producing those equations, and yet many of us can still ride a bicycle.  So the emphasis in practices is on how everyday, taken for granted skilled actions, knowledge and meanings are practical – they only make sense and can be communicated within the doing of the practice.

Putting these two last points together, we can say that some of the rules of a practice are tacit too, so we cannot always easily identify why things are done in the way that they there are, and why they have the meanings that they do, even when we are proficient in the practices in question. Mostly we don’t learn the rules of a practice by sitting down and memorising them, instead we learn by doing it ourselves and watching others do it. Just like we learn language from being within practices of using language from birth.

Moreover, there are lots of rules that shape our basic movement through the world and how we relate to each other and organise social space. Think about the rules involved in choosing a seat on the bus. It can tell us quite a lot about some of those more invisible, tacit rules of everyday living in the world. Why do you go for one seat and not another? There are variety of rules that people seem to use to make a decision that only really become visible when they’re broken. The rule that roughly goes “don’t sit immediately next to someone if there is no one else on the bus” is an important one. Imagine how the person would react! We just seem to know these rules from having been brought up within the culture that we live within. They’re just part of the accepted practices for doing life in our culture. But some of these basic rules change from culture to culture and can help explain why we do life differently in different countries. Americans, for example, are often bemoaned by British people, because although we share much of the same rules about social space, many Americans are more comfortable with physical intimacy and cheeriness in their greetings than are British people. This is clearly an embodied norm of social interaction and when these two different forms of greeting conflict it feels palpable to the participants. British people experience discomfort and Americans presumably experience rejection or offence when a warm proffered American hug is met with a frosty British handshake. But this practice is currently changing and hugging seems to be more acceptable and frequent here in the UK than it used to be. At the same time, gender norms around doing masculinity and femininity seem to be changing. There may well be connections between these shifting practices, so how men hug each other might be changing in response to or alongside changes in what it means to be a man and how doing manliness is understood. So we can begin to see how practices are connected and how changes in some practices might result in changes elsewhere. It is also true that some practices are difficult to change because of their connections to other practices.

In the context of iGEM there are a whole bunch of practices, from the lab to the wiki to the jamboree and the competition itself. In the lab, practices include doing a PCR or running a gel, designing a BioBrick or cleaning a work surface. On the wiki they involve presenting the team, describing the research in a particular way, and so on. The jamboree involves lots of practices around celebration and cheerleading. Of course the competition has all of its practices, involving presentations, judging, awarding prizes, congratulating and so forth. And these are changing slowly, so what was expected of a team to be able to earn a gold, silver or bronze medal shifted over the years that the competition has been running. The judging practices are in flux and this shapes some of the lab practices that teams engage in across the world.

In my last post I described how the meanings of human life are myriad and complex and why human behaviour is so difficult to explain. In this post I hope it is clear that these meanings are helpfully understood from within a practice theory perspective. It helps us orient our thinking to what people are trying to do, skilfully, within a given situation. So ‘human practices’ in iGEM should be about understanding the meaningfulness of human life from within the practices in which we are all engaged. Remembering, of course, that iGEM and synthetic biology are themselves human practices, too. They are made up of smaller practices, and themselves contribute to broader human practices of doing science and making knowledge and training people and so on and so on. So human practices work in iGEM can be about how iGEM practices are taught, stabilised, change or are challenged. In my next two posts I’ll begin to identify how a human practices approach to iGEM work in synthetic biology can be a powerful way to think beyond the often used notions of ‘public understanding’ and ‘social and ethical implications’. Using a human practices approach we’ll be able to ask different kinds of questions and so provide different kinds of answers to the common concerns that scientists have about how their work is understood and judged.

 

What’s “Human” about Human Practices?

This is the first in a series of posts I’m writing over the next couple of months about human practices. They are specifically targeted at undergraduate iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) teams currently working on summer projects to create novel microorganisms.

Human beings live within cultures, and have social relationships with family, friends, acquaintances, and indeed with strangers. How we each live with these relationships and how they change over our lifetimes is an inescapable dimension of social life, so that how we view ourselves and others similarly shifts as these connections change and develop. Imagine how strange it would be to think of your friends in the same way now as you did as a toddler. In this regard, we are ‘socialised’ into the cultures in which we grow up, so that how we learn to relate to each other (through more or less formal social norms, rules, laws and so on) is culturally specific by virtue of how we are taught to do this. Whilst the family unit and friendship group might seem natural for many readers of English, how we conceptualise family and friendship changes from culture to culture, and over time. These elements of our lives thus only seem ‘natural’ to us because that is how we were taught to think and relate to each other. And indeed, what constitutes a family in America, Europe and elsewhere is currently contested.

We are also embedded in networks or webs of materials, including such things as trees, atoms of oxygen, food, trains, genes, pharmaceuticals, bodies, oceans, and an ever expanding number of consumer goods. The list of things involved in human life is already incomprehensibly long and we’ve only just got going. Just think about how many things you can now buy in a large supermarket store and how all of those things have to be constructed from other materials, which have to be mined or manufactured themselves. The chains of connection between various materials in our lives help to organise how we do everyday life so much so that they can often become essential to how we view the world and each other: what would life be like now without computers? But materials and technologies are also shaped by existing structures and practices of everyday life. We can see this, for example, in how designers of mobile phones have sought to better mimic co-presence between speakers – as would normally occur in everyday life conversations – by improving sound quality, introducing the use of emoticons and pictures in text, and by the addition of video cameras.

Moreover, because we ourselves are material bodies we’ve got feelings and emotions, psychological and physical states, as well as habits, routines, reflexes and so on, all of which are essential to our experience. These too are socialised so that how people experience love and anger, how they taste and eat food, how they sleep and so forth all differ according to their positions within culture and across cultures. For example, how women are taught to experience love and anger may be quite different from how men are taught to experience these dimensions of life. Moreover, some of these differences may now be partly because of differences in the kinds of materials that we surround ourselves with and make sense of ourselves through. So the equipment we use to cook and eat food, the kinds of clothing we wear, and the arrangement of rooms in houses differs from culture to culture.

In the mix of these cultural relations and material chains there are thoughts, ideas, concepts, stories, books, advertisements, news reports, TV shows, films and a plethora of other textual and visual features to everyday life. These texts help us to describe and organise our everyday lives but they also serve to shape them. When President Barack Obama campaigned with the slogan “Yes we can!” he wasn’t only trying to describe a state of affairs but actually trying to bring about the situation through which the imagined social change might become possible. In the same way, promises made by synthetic biologists about how the future will be driven by a biological industrial revolution are not just descriptions they are part of how we try to bring about those situations that we imagine.

Then there are a whole bunch of different structures of social life that bring together these cultural and material relationships into stable patterns. This is one of the ways in which the ‘practices’ element of human practices becomes important. One example of a complex set of human practices that show some stability would be the assemblage of trained professionals, friendships, rivalries, family traditions, rules and tactics, bodies and exercise, habits and creativity, food production and consumption, entertainment reporting, and advertisements that all have to be orchestrated together to make up the individual games of football[1] in a local, national or international tournament. At the same time as these orchestrated assemblages of relationships, texts and materials are shaped into a game of football, so too does the game of football shape the meanings of individual actions within the game and its appreciation.

When a player makes a ‘dive’ to claim an undeserved penalty, the meanings of that dive to the player, her team mates and opponents, the supporters, the referee and managers and so on is informed by their role or position within the whole orchestration. And so how they subsequently feel about and act in relation to the dive will differ. In this regard, single actions only make sense as part of larger projects of social practices and will have different meanings for participants given their position within the network of relationships assembled into the ongoing project. For the referee the dive is just one more instance of a game gone sour, for the player it’s a calculated risk, whilst for the fans of the opposing team it is a travesty of quite epic proportions. So the referee sighs and holds up a yellow card, whilst the player feels a swell of satisfaction and relief, as the opposing fans growl, shout and chant in disgust.

We humans are thus powerfully complex. The meanings of our whole lives and everyday individual actions are interwoven with relationships, materials, bodies, texts and social practices. So much so that they are impossible to disentangle. Add to this the dimension of social change, so that the meaning of a given action, material or text might change over time, and we have a picture of human life that truly boggles the mind.

All this means that when we talk of human practices we have to remember that there is all of this going on for the human beings we’re referring to, whether they’re scientists, politicians, football players, members of ‘the public’[2] or whatever. So in order to appreciate how synthetic biology might figure amongst all of this we have to take synthetic biology to be just one amongst many ongoing projects in the lives of all of the humans involved. What it means to envisage, create, produce, use or contest the development of an engineered microorganism will be shaped by the complex of other ongoing human practices involved for the many different people brought together to make these practices of imagination, creation, production, use and contestation possible.

Imagine how much meaning and complexity there is going to be at the 2014 jamboree when people from all around the world, from many different cultures, speaking many different languages, and familiar with many different practices, come together with their individual life histories and recent team experiences in order to compete for a range of trophies in the assemblage of people, relationships, materials, bodies, texts and social structures that make up the iGEM competition!

And, finally, let’s think about how complicated things would get if even just a few of the projects that teams bring to the competition are taken forward in some way and developed into novel technological and social changes. How might those future projects be made up of relations, materials, texts, structures and so forth? How will these technical developments borrow from or change existing patterns of social life? How will we all, scientists, politicians, football players and members of the public alike, make sense of all of this change and with what consequences for how we do things in our everyday lives?

If iGEM teams are going to start making human practices into something that can be more about the human of human practices then we need to take seriously all of these dimensions of what being a human is about when we are considering our synthetic biology innovations. We need to be adventurous in how we use social research methods, how teams collaborate, how we imagine what synthetic biology can be, who it can work for, and how we might try to change social relations for the better through it and with it.

In a series of posts, of which this is the first, I’ll be writing accessibly about some of the dimensions of human practices work in the context of iGEM and synthetic biology. My hope is to be able to help some iGEM teams to think a bit more broadly about what human practices could be about and what they might do as part of their own human practices work. Some of the information might help to inspire teams to think creatively about how their proposed technical innovations might be shaped by existing social forces, and also in what ways they might think about the possible futures in which their proposed innovations might play a role.

Suggestions of topics that you’d like to see me cover are very welcome – though no promises.

[1] Or soccer, for our American friends.

[2] I’ll come to this term in a later post I’m hopefully going to write: What’s “public” about ‘public understanding’?

Social Media, Emotions and Deception [Part 2]

In my previous post about Facebook’s experiment with users’ newsfeeds I focused on how the outrage at recent publication of the data perhaps related to the more longstanding relationship that we have to companies as regards our emotions. In this post I want to think a little about why the study doesn’t tell us very much about emotions and how we might transmit, circulate or transfer affective or emotional states.

As regards how we conceptualise emotions and affect, it is notable that the research uses an impoverished account of emotions, specifically as regards its two primary concepts: ‘emotional state’ and ‘emotional contagion’. The paper’s ultimate conclusion is that they have found “the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.” So the concept of contagion is just as important to their work as is the idea of an emotional state itself.

In terms of emotional state the study uses a simple measure of whether the expressed emotional content was ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. They classified statements according to whether they contained ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ words defined by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Software. This is a problem because much meaning derived from expressions is indexical and implicated. The (emotional) meaning of something is often irreducibly tied to its context of expression. So, during the week in January 2012 when the experiment on Facebook users took place, people could have decided to share and comment on the Daily Mail’s characteristically superficial report on some findings that 1 in 4 office workers is chronically bored.

Let’s imagine someone makes a status update about the article saying “I’m too bored to even read it!” This could only be understood in context and might actually imply, contrary to the surface meaning, that the person was far from bored and in fact quite interested enough to have created a joke based on the article. Indeed, it being a joke would be impossible to capture through the automated system judging the statements according to positive and negative words. So the affective and emotional dimensions of its construction – which might involve laughter or anger, for instance – might be completely misclassified. The fact is that our emotional expressions are indexical too and they can be complicated, conflicting, ongoing or transient all at the same time. Indeed, the idea of a discrete emotional state, as implied by the article, is a problem. Rarely do we feel a single emotion for any length of time, save for in psychiatric conditions characterised by such persistence. Instead, we have multiple emotional states depending on what’s going on for us at the time. I might be miserable about something I’m reading on Facebook whilst only a moment later find myself laughing at something on the TV in the background, all the while  I’m bound up with feelings of stress and boredom from trying to plough through a difficult piece of work. So if we take seriously the way in which emotions are described through situated language and the complexity of their embodied and situated interrelations then there isn’t much hope for the measure of individual ‘emotional states’ as adopted in the paper.

The idea of emotional contagion is similarly problematic and needs critical engagement if we are going to begin to understand how emotions circulate. The article asserts that “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading them to experience the same emotions as those around them.” Some of the problems here are to do with the metaphor of ‘contagion’, which implies that we ‘catch’ or are infected by emotions from others and then spread those emotions to others. Other problems are about the assumption that when others behave in a similar way to us, for example by posting ‘negative’ comments on Facebook, that they are “experiencing the same emotions” as those around them.

The term emotional contagion is most famously used by scholars in the first decades of the 1900s to make sense of crowd and collective behaviour. Gustav Le Bon is most regularly attributed the questionable honour of its invention but others including sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Gabriel Tarde and Herbert Blumer have made use of it to examine the emotional behaviours they felt were exhibited in crowds. The concept was appealing to them because it helped to explain why seemingly rational people could be co-opted into irrational behaviour. In this regard, it was particularly the cases of racist, xenophobic, fascist and far-right politics that they hoped to explain away. So the concept has had a politics itself from its first uses in social science. Some of its use today is similarly political, as scholars have sought to understand rioting behaviour, terrorism and contemporary far-right politics through the assumption that emotional contagion is involved in the transition from rational to irrational behaviours in crowd and collective contexts.

However, I think that the term is more of a hindrance than a help if the metaphor stops at its most immediate implications of a 1:many transmission, without critical scrutiny, from body to body. But this simplifies how people respond to the observation of emotions in others, how they feel emotions themselves, how emotions relate to spaces, and of how people are recruited to or resist recruitment to collective affective activity. Indeed, to take just one of these examples, people regularly do resist the emotions that appear to be spreading through a crowd. Take the riots in England in 2011. Plenty of people were ‘recruited’ the emotional behaviours involved in the rioting, but plenty of people nearby the riots were not. What made the difference between the people who were engaged by the spectrum of emotions of the various rioting actions across the country and those who were not?

Drawing on a number of more contemporary theories of affect and emotion, Margaret Wetherell (2012) has argued that:

“any particular instance of the circulation of affect, whether occurring in consulting rooms, parliamentary committees, football stadiums or in the message boards of the Internet, involves understanding a raft of processes: body capacities to re-enact the actions of others; the developmental infrastructure of inter-subjectivity; the power of words; the affective-discursive genres personal and social histories provide which channel communal affect; inter-subjective negotiations; consideration of the cultural and social limits on identification and empathy; and exploration of practices of authorisation, legitimation and resistance, not to mention analyses of the containing institutions, spaces and media circulation.”

It is this vast list of features that is implicated in how emotions and their circulation is situated. Consideration of how emotions might circulate from one person to another or to many others cannot be captured by the classification of emotional states according to ‘negative’ and ‘positive’. And even if emotions could be easily classified in such a way, the finding that a greater percentage of Facebook statements were negative when users were presented with more negative statements would tell us very little about how emotional states circulate through social networks.

We need to situate emotional circulations and not de-socialise the body in order to argue for a virus like process of dumb replication. Indeed, even a little expansion of the contagion metaphor would help show how inadequate to the task the emphasis on 1:many body-to-body transfer is. For a start, people have immune systems and so regularly are able to resist transmission of infections. The immune system is made of various processes that interact in complex ways with each other, with other bodily systems and with other bodies and the environment, so that at any given point in time a person may be more or less susceptible to a particular infective agent than at any other. Repeated exposure to infectious agents often increases this resistance. Our immune systems are individual and change over time, they are inherited and evolved and can be supplemented or compromised by various technological interventions. And so on and so forth.

To understand how emotions are circulated we have to think more broadly about what emotions are and how we can know about them, and do so from within a socialised account of embodied, ongoing, habituated and yet spontaneous, contextual and situated intersubjective life. The concepts of negative/positive emotional states and emotional contagion will not do very much for this line of thinking.

 

Social Media, Emotions and Deception: The Facebook Experiment [Part 1]

The recent response to the Facebook experiment with user’s newsfeeds can tell us something about how people understand three topics that are of interest to me. First, the way in which social media figure in human relations; second, how emotions and affect are conceptualised; and third how we understand lies and deceptions as part of everyday life. In this post I’ll mostly be dealing with the social media issue and emotions, and will be getting back to lying and deception in future posts.

The Facebook experiment, conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of California and Cornell, was designed in order to understand whether emotional states could be transmitted by ‘emotional contagion’. The site removed either positive or negative stories from a sample of user’s feeds, which meant that some people were shown an unusually high number of positive or negative stories. The site didn’t invent or add any material, they just changed how items were selected from the pool of possible newsfeed stories. They then monitored those user’s own posts and determined whether they were more likely to post positive or negative stories as a result of this subtraction from their feeds. The results show a small but significant effect of 0.001, meaning that an increase in positive newsfeed items led to an increase in user’s own positive statements on Facebook and vice-versa. The significance of the effect is perhaps misleading and when viewed in light of the scale of Facebook it certainly looks more note-worthy, as the authors point out: “…given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences… an effect size of d = 0.001 at Facebook’s scale is not negligible: In early 2013, this would have corresponded to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.” So it seems that the results do show something, though what exactly I’ll get to in a later post. For now, let’s focus on the way in which the experiment has been received and what this might tell us about how we feel about advertising and social media.

It is unsurprising to find social networking websites are interested in the degree to which they can shape human emotions and self-expression. Indeed, individuals regularly go about trying to do this to each other in everyday life. But it’s obviously a different issue when we’re talking about one of the most powerful corporations in the world experimenting with how we feel about ourselves and others.

Of course, the advertising presented on Facebook is already targeted to an individual’s expressed interests and the kinds of topics that they post about, like, share and so on. I suspect that most people already know this. One only has to note how having looked at some pages for upcoming gigs in an area suddenly increases the number of ads you are shown about bands you like. In one case I briefly flirted with the idea of buying a juicer, and then having decided they were too expensive and I was unlikely to really use it, found that Facebook was quite insistent that I’d made the wrong choice and proceeded to show me juicers of various kinds for at least a week afterwards. So people may not be familiar with the technical details or aware of the scale of data involved, but they probably do have the sense that ads are being targeted to them. I think that this is all part of the contemporary neoliberal contract online. We know that we get a plethora of information and can make choices about consumption in new ways at the expense of that information being shaped by our previous choices, expressed interests and social relationships. However, the experiment has caused significant consternation online.

I think this tells us that people placed some degree of trust in Facebook not to be manipulating how they feel in a negative way. Indeed, much of the backlash seems to have been about how Facebook could make us feel bad about ourselves and the world around us. Some have pointed out that the research didn’t take ethics terribly seriously, and I agree. Most significantly, people were selected to be part of the trial randomly, and so there is a strong chance that at least some of the ~155,000 people subject to the feeds skewed to negative statements were vulnerable in one way or another. Seeing a ‘negative’ news story on Facebook can seriously affect my day, particularly if some god-awful politician has said something vainglorious, homophobic, racist, sexist, and so on and so on. Which they do on a practically hourly basis. Fortunately, I’m reasonably stable as regards my emotions but some people may not be and the study should have at least reflected on the importance of this.

But why do we trust Facebook with our emotions at all? I think part of it has to do with what we’re already willing to allow companies to do and what we expect them not to be doing. Most of us notice that the newsfeed changes when you look at it repeatedly throughout the day, and so we understand that some kind of computer-based selection process and prioritisation is probably going on. But I think we largely assume that this is based on selecting content that is most interesting to us. So we all end up with cat videos clogging the page. And we’re mostly fine with that. But we clearly have been surprised to find that the algorithm is not only capable of doing more than this but that it has actively been used to test out how changes to our newsfeeds might affect us personally. In this regard, we have balked not at Facebook trying to alter the items we see on our newsfeeds but at their actively trying to alter how this makes us feel about ourselves. And, as I’ve said, it is the negative side of this manipulation that has caused most distress.

The ostensible neoliberal contract with advertisers is that they make us feel good about ourselves in order to try and get us to buy stuff. Of course, we recognise that in some ways advertising is bad for us, particularly when it comes to body image. But more often than not, and particularly with video advertisements, the message is about how wonderful we are, how great the world is, how brilliant this product is, and how we should buy it to make sure we keep feeling so wonderful all the time. People are savvy about this and we can generally see how advertisers are trying to manipulate us. For example, there’s nothing hidden in how Fosters tries to appeal to contemporary notions of masculinity and male comradery. But we don’t expect Fosters to try and make us feel shit about ourselves in order to sell us beer. That’s not on. And in this regard, Facebook broke the deal and now we’re angry about it. So the answer certainly seems to be that yes, changing our newsfeeds can change our emotions, but perhaps not in the way they expected. The backlash against Facebook offers an excellent case from which to begin to unpick how we understand our emotional lives and how this figures in the organisation of contemporary economic exchange.