A lot of how we think about AI comes from disciplines that study the individual mind. AIs are already social and plural, however, and only becoming increasingly so. Can sociology provide models for Artificial Social Intelligence ? That’s the topic of my grad seminar next year.

And a summary:

The full paper is here (open access):.📰 Urban Referencing Styles and Networks: How Cultural Domination and Local Interests Shape Policy Discourse.By Keidar & Silver.

Policy mobility has a semiotic layer. Cities aren’t just moving ideas around. They’re constructing meaning through patterned citation. In that sense, model cities are made by their audiences.

Even iconic cities like NYC, Paris, or Chicago are referenced in different ways depending on who’s doing the citing. They are interpretive resources that others draw on for their own purposes.

The main finding is that referencing cities shape discourse more than referenced ones. This goes against the standard top-down diffusion model, where central cities impose meaning from above.

We highlight five main referencing styles. Three are general (economic growth, cultural atmosphere, investment in the arts). Two are specific (program design, artwork location). Most citations are in the particularizing mode.

We collected ~150 public art policy documents from 26 large anglophone cities. Then we mapped who cites whom, and how. References aren’t all the same: some are generalizing ("NYC is a global leader"), others are particularizing ("Seattle integrates art into light rail").

Cities don’t just make policy. They position themselves. In policy documents, a city like Toronto might cite New York or Chicago, not just to borrow a model, but to highlight a certain vision of urban modernity.

New paper with Noga Keidar, out in Socius!. Urban Referencing Styles and Networks.We analyze how cities cite one another in public art policy, and what those citations reveal about symbolic hierarchies and discursive agency.

That is a false choice. Boredom and interest are part of a single complex. The interesting and the boring together constitute a kind of evaluative matrix by which any thought or action can be judged. Its analogies would be complexes such as shameful-honorable or sinful-saintly.

So now life is interesting. Is this what we wanted? Consider the alternative: boredom. Would you choose a return to boredom, if that meant escape from the never-ending cycle of outrage? If so, emptiness and malaise would be the price for exiting the attention wars.

Today, it seems like life could not be more interesting. Every day, some new outrage occurs. There is some line crossed that seemed impassable. In turn, there is some boundary defended. I won’t list the specific boundaries and crossings. There are too many, and you know them all.

If there is such a thing as social capital then it would only make sense within a specific form of social production, social capitalism. Oddly, social capital research more or less completely ignores this.

The attention economy never existed