Digest 2017
During 2017 I was lucky enough to be commissioned to write about a number of fascinating subjects and to be published in a range of places.
I thought I’d use this post to draw together some of the pieces I’ve been happiest with. So if you’re interested in how digital is affecting sociology, business, and culture, there might be some interesting takeaways for you:
Analog pockets in a digital world: Questioning the inevitability of digital disruption [view at ClickZ]
Digital is disrupting everything, right? So how come vinyl LPs are seeing a renaissance in the era of streaming? And Waterstones thrives in the era of Amazon? And Uber hasn’t reached Plymouth yet?
Here I look at analog pockets across ‘sectors with room for both,’ niche businesses, and connectivity variations between rural and urban areas.
Why you shouldn’t UX test by gender [view at What Users Do]
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a piece about UX testing and gender might have a narrow audience, but its themes are universal.
Fundamentally, psychographics are more trustworthy than demographics and when it comes to understanding why people behave on the internet as they do it’s important to understand this difference.
Pokémon Go and Plymouth: How games are impacting urban design [view at Ars Technica]
I began writing this back in 2016 at the height of the Pokemon Go phenomenon, but due to getting ill it never got finished. Ars Technica emailed me out of the blue the following summer asking to publish it anyway. So here it is.
I wanted to explore why Plymouth was (temporarily, at least) such a good place to play Pokemon Go and how digital culture can shape the physical real-world design of our cities. This was my first article to ever hit the Digg front page!
#CareForTheNHS — Cancer During Our Health Service’s Toughest Season [view at The Sociological Review]
I first published this here on Medium to tie-in with the Labour-led #carefortheNHS awareness day 2017. The response was overwhelming, with hundreds of reads and shares across Facebook and Twitter — the closest I’ve ever gotten to ‘going viral.’
The piece was later republished at The Sociological Review with some slight edits.
Automation and Healthcare: an interview with Helen Hester [view at Autonomy Institute]
I contacted Dr Helen Hester following a panel she was part of at 2017’s Take Back Control event in Plymouth (Zapoppin’ performed at the ‘after-party’).
Some of her insight was used in a piece about testicular cancer (not published in the public domain) but Dr Hester recently published the raw interview at Autonomy Institute which is fascinating even in this unedited form.
