In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of ‘liveness’, exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in ‘live methods’ I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of being in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, for the potential it offers sociology to deploy methods reflexively in more than one medium, contrasting the methods of making distributive middles to the methods of establishing measures of representativeness, and exploring the opportunities and pitfalls of participation, or being in the middle.
AgambenG., (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2.
AsurS. and HubermanB. A., (2009), ‘Predicting the future with social media’, available at: Arxiv.org/abs/1003.5699v1.
3.
BackL., (2007), The Art of Listening, Oxford: Berg.
4.
BatesonG., (1987), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, San Francisco: Chandler.
5.
BurawoyM., (2005), ‘For public sociology’, American Sociological Review, 70 (1): 4–28.
6.
BusbeaL., (2007), Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
7.
ChatêletG., (2006), ‘Interlacing the singularity, the diagram and the metaphor’, in DuffyS. (ed.), Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, 31–45. Manchester: Clinamen Press.
8.
ChunW.KyongHui, (2010), Programmed Visions, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
9.
DesorisièresA., (1998), The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. NaishC., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
10.
EspositoE., (2004), ‘The arts of contingency’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (1): 7–25.
11.
FenvesP., (2001), Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
12.
FishA.MurilloL. F. R.NguyenL.PanofskyA. and KeltyC. M., (2011), ‘Birds of the Internet’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 4 (2): 157–187.
13.
GerlitzC. and HelmondA., ‘The like economy – social buttons and the data-intensive web’, unpublished paper.
14.
GuyerJ., (2004), Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
15.
HalpernO., (forthcoming), The Eye of Time: Histories of Representation, Perception, and Archiving in Cybernetic Thought, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
16.
LatourB., (1987), Science in Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
17.
LatourB., (2000), ‘On the partial existence of existing and nonexisting objects’, in DalstonLorraine (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects, 247–269, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
18.
LatourB., (2010), ‘Tarde's idea of quantification’, in CandeaM. (ed.), The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, 145–162, Abingdon: Routledge.
19.
LatourB. and WeibelP., (2005), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20.
LenoirT., (2008), ‘Foreword: Machinic Bodies, Ghosts and Para-Selves: Confronting the Singularity with Brian Rotman’, in RotmanB., Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
21.
LettvinJ. Y.MaturanaH. R.McCullochW. S. and PittsW. H., (1959), ‘What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain’, Proceedings of the IRE, 47 (11): 1940–1959.
22.
Re-published in McCullochW. S., (1965) Embodiments of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 230–255.
23.
Levi-StraussC., (1973 [1955]), Tristes Tropiques, New York: Atheneum.
24.
LuhmannN., (1992), ‘The form of writing’, Stanford Literature Review, 9: 25–42.
25.
LuryC.ParisiL. and TerranovaT., (forthcoming), ‘The becoming topological of culture’, Theory Culture and Society, Double Special Issue, forthcoming.
26.
PeirceC. S., (1931–35), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1–6, ed. HartsorhenC. and WeissP., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
27.
RheinbergerH-J., (1997), Toward a History of Epistemic Things, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
28.
RogersR. and MarresN., (2002), ‘French scandals on the Web, and on the streets: Stretching the limits of reported reality’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 30 (2): 339–353.
29.
RuppertE. and SavageM., (forthcoming), ‘Transactional politics’, in AdkinsL. and LuryC. (eds), Measure and Value, Sociological Review Special Issue.
30.
SloterdijkP., (2009), Terror from the Air, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
31.
ThriftN., (2004), ‘Movement-space: The changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness’, Economy and Society, 33 (4): 582–604.
UprichardE., (forthcoming), ‘Dirty data: Longitudinal classification systems – York Food Retail Outlets’, in AdkinsL. and LuryC. (eds), Measure and Value, Sociological Review Special Issue.
34.
UricchioW., (2005), ‘Television's next generation: Technology/interface culture / flow’, in SpigelL. and OlssonJ. (eds), Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
