content analysis

Holy god this is true (via whatisthewhat). I love Ira Glass like George Bush loves tax cuts for the wealthy.

Fascinating discovery of “uncontacted tribe” in Brazil, but don’t the photos look like Old Hollywood fakes?

The dumblest thing I’ve ever heard (via Sociological Images)

And finally, on what I suppose is a sentimental and vaguely moralistic note, I think that when you honestly notice something positive about someone, it is really important to be forthcoming with a compliment. It’s amazing how much it means to people to be reassured of their value by those around them.

slow news – May 28, 2008

An Op-Ed Need for Diverse Voices

By Deborah Howell (Washington Post)

The WP ombudsman, Deborah Howell, points out that of the WP’s 654 op-ed pieces so far this year, 575 were by men, 79 by women, and 80 by minorities.  I suppose this is something we’re all aware of, but it is truly startling to see the hard numbers.  And, of course, the Washington Post isn’t alone on this one (Nicholas Kristof “nervously” awaits comments about this issue).

For the record, I favor any proposal that might lead to less David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Kristof.

Drawing on the news that the NY City Transit may bring back double-decker buses on Fifth Avenue, NYT blog City Room asks readers what Old New York institutions they’d like to see make a return.

I loved comment #4: “Myself. When I could afford to live there.”

Momentum, according to the OED, is “the quantity of motion in a moving body, now expressed as the product of its mass and its velocity” or, figuratively, “continuing vigour resulting from an initial effort or expenditure of energy.” The avalanche gains momentum as it crashes toward the terrified skier. What begins with a bit of an ice block breaking off, soon gains in both mass (picking up snow and ice as it moves) and velocity as the growing wave of icy death hurdles down the mountainside. In the physical world, it’s a simple concept.

But what of its use in social terms? Anyone who saw Kobe Bryant’s performance in the second half of their West Conference finals game last night knows intuitively what the announcers meant when they said, “The Lakers now have all the momentum” despite facing a ten point deficit (for the bookish types among you, the Lakers overcame a 20 point deficit to win against one of the best defensive teams around, the evil San Antonio Spurs). Of course, there surely was a type of physicality to that momentum: as Kobe began to hoist more shots, he sharpened his stroke, storing data in his muscle memory. But the far more significant type of momentum was social. Down by twenty, Kobe dug deep, summoning his trademark killer instinct and played with an aggressiveness that said, “There’s no effing way I’m losing this game on my home court.” His intensity and confidence spread to his teammates and they began to read each other better. Pau Gasol displayed incredible athleticism in finishing off Kobe’s lobs and dishes. My beloved Sasha Vujacic, a 24 year-old kid from Slovenia who couldn’t crack the bench last year, took gutsy three pointers. In fact, the momentum was first and foremost social; it was borne of a willed confidence, greater communication with each other, and a willingness to defer to the leadership of a player with godlike talent. And like the snowball gaining in mass and velocity, each additional sunk basket contributed to more exuberance, more confidence, and a better belief in their ability to win if they work together.

Where else in the social world can we see momentum? To be sure, we’ve heard a lot about it during the everlasting Democratic Primary Race to the point where the concept has been largely discounted. But isn’t it true that a primary win can give a candidate more confidence and contribute to the sense among campaign supporters that there’s a enthused “movement” (since that’s what everybody’s calling it) growing? Didn’t Senator Obama’s surprise victory in Iowa raise his stature in the race? Didn’t Senator Clinton’s victory in NH revitalize her campaign? While we must not confuse the effect of victories in shaping media narratives with actual momentum, perhaps the media serves as an echo chamber in which the snowball can grow.

I think it’s also possible to think about how personal relationships gain momentum. Or how an ideology can gain momentum. If I had to definite social momentum, it might be something like, the growing acceptance that a belief or hope is, in fact, true. Maybe that’s why mentions of social momentum are so closely bound to the idea of confidence.

Ideas, readers?

slow news – May 21, 2008

The Giant Pool of Money

By Alex Bloomberg and Adam Davidson for This American Life

A can’t-be-missed, utterly fascinating examination of just how the housing finance crisis happened (put into baby words for the non-economists among us).  As always, TAL is able to put a human face on the issue.  One of the conclusions of the piece is the next few years are going to be a lot like the 1970s malaise era, but not quite the 1930s.  I fear this is optimistic.  After listening to this episode, I had the overwhelming feeling that the U.S. government is going to have to implement some kind of broad debt relief program.

What think you, readers?

Americans live in a state of abject cell phone poverty.  Of course, there are much worse kinds of poverty: economic, moral, spiritual.   However, I think that this state of affairs speaks volumes about the kind of society we live and the risks it faces in the future.

As I noted in “cell phone meets world, pt. 1″ yesterday, the developing world is embracing the cell phone and quickly adopting and developing a wide variety of new ways to use them.  In nearly all parts of the post-industrial world other than the U.S. (most particularly Europe and Japan), the mobile phone is (and has been for years) essentially a mini-computer.  It is capable of advanced word-processing, playing video and images, surfing the internet, and nearly everything else a real computer does.  Text messaging is normal part of everyday professional and personal life.  They can be linked to one’s bank account and swiped at stores (like a debit card).  They have built-in camera as good as some single function cameras.  They travel between countries with no problem.  And the look cool, really cool.  Whereas Americans use mobile phones essentially as phone with a few bonuses, people in other countries carry around multi-purpose, tiny computers.  Probably most irritating to your average American locked into a 75 year Verizon contract costing $100 a month, is that cell phones aren’t costing anybody else nearly as much.

There are many reasons for this disparity.  First, American cell phone companies use antiquated network technology and lock consumers into using one phone on one service (for more on the technical issues, read here).  Second, though the U.S. cell phone market is highly competitive, the fact that companies lock consumers into monthly plans and multi-year contracts essentially gives one company a monopoly over the individual.  By contrast, in Europe, consumers pay the actual cost of a phone, buy pay-as-you-go cards at fairly affordable rates, and can switch between companies at anytime.  This results in far more competitive pay-as-you-go rates.  (Additionally, Europeans don’t pay for incoming calls, unlike us stateside dopes).

Because the cell service companies have such a stranglehold on marketplace and even the models of the phones, they have kept many new technologies from coming out on the U.S. market.  Cell phone makers like Nokia, LG, Samsung, and others are currently producing a wide variety of cool phone technologies that Americans don’t have because Verizon, At&T, and Cingular require very specific specs for their network-specific models of each phone.

This free market disaster — in which Americans don’t have access to the best available technologies because of the capacity of companies to control the availability in an unregulated fashion — is typical of the kind of society we have today.  Because of the unwillingness of political elites to intervene, regulate, and encourage good behavior among corporations, we see American slipping behind the rest of the developed world.  The same is true of environmental technologies like wind power.  Unlike so many European nations, the U.S. government has done very, very little to encourage the development of such technologies or to help companies make environmental options (like residential solar products) consumer-friendly.

Our free market dogmatism — a resistance to regulating in pro-consumer ways — has undoubtedly left us in the dust of Europe and Japan in the realm of cell phone technology.  The same pigheadedness could have far more serious repercussions in other domains.

One of the most informative articles I’ve read recently appeared in the New York Times magazine and focused on the work of Jan Chipchase. Chipchase is a sort of applied anthropologist for cell phone maker Nokia (he calls himself a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist”). He travels the world studying cell phone usage in an effort to give designers better information on how to improve the product. However, unlike most market researchers, Chipchase’s findings can tell us a lot about global inequalities and how the world is changing.Below, I will give three examples of his findings:

1. A cell phone is the first phone many people will use. As people in a society where the telephone (landline and otherwise) is such an importance part of commerce, personal relationships, and nearly every aspect of everyday life, it seems like a stunning revelation that until very recently, much of the world could not communicate instantaneously.  In the rest of the world, there has been little way (and often little reason) to quickly communicate over great distances. The introduction of cell phone, which requires much less infrastructure than landlines and which offers affordable modes of communicating like the text message, now allows people in undeveloped nations to communicate in new ways.  Doctors can send reminders to patients to take medications.  Or as the article says, “farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale.” The potential to advance commerce, health, and relief efforts after natural disasters are tremendous.  At the same time, the great potential for drug cartels, gun-runners, and warlords to exploit the technology for destructive ends is quite troubling.

2. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people keep their cell phones in plastic bags to protect from “pummeling rains.” People who do not have the basics of modern life as we know it – electricity, shelter protected from the weather, running water – now own cell phones (Chipchase uses this information to suggest remedies such as water-proof features). What astonishes me about this is the capacity for change if westerners are motivated. Because there is a commercial incentive for western cell phone makers to sell to people in developing nations, we see 3.3 billion cell phone users worldwide. At the same time, since there is little incentive to improve housing for these people, the people with cell phones in the Dharavi slum have pools of water in their homes.

3. In Bangladesh, people have found informal ways to transfer money using phones. In many small towns, a “phone lady” will have a cell phone which she lets people use for the cost of the minutes plus a small fee. If someone working in the city wants to transfer money to his mother in a small village, s/he would buy cell minutes give the “phone lady” the access code and then the “phone lady” would give the mother cash (minus a small fee). We are living through a moment when our technologies have greater potential than our minds can currently envision. For quite some time to come, we will sudden bursts of creativity as people discover ways to change facets of society using existing technology. These “backdoor” money transfers will almost certainly give way to official, regulated money transfers. More automated text messaging will become available. Soon farmers will not call or text grocers to give prices, but will simply maintain live data (on something like a cell phone web page) that a variety of grocers can check.

These advancements will come from developing nations and be refined and institutionalized in western nations. And on all these advancements, Americans will be the last to know (see part 2 tomorrow). That’s because only in places with no alternatives will people find ways to make do. In a country gluttonous with landlines, cell phones, radios, satellite radio, BlackBerrys, WiFi, television, a trillion web sites, we can choose to ignore the potential of each technology. In places without this communicative wealth, they need to get the most of out what they have.

CA continues to follow the globalization of basketball.  Here’s a Times story on soccer’s influence on basketball.

slow news – May 13, 2008

Clinton’s Universal Bargaining Chip

By Katharine Q. Seelye (NYT Web Only)

I try to steer clear of pure political posts on slow news, but, sweet jesus, I hope this is true.  Healthcare has been an issue where I felt great ambivalence over Senator Obama.

Over the past several months, I have heard (both directly and indirectly) several stories of manuscripts coming back from journals with the judgment that they are methodological sound and very interesting, but just not sociological enough. This criticism annoys the hell out of me. First, disciplinary turf defending is an unproductive intellectual practice. We all will give lip service to the importance of the disciplines having an open discourse and exchanging our various ideas. However, too many scholars are eager to distinguish between what counts as sociology and what doesn’t. It’s especially ironic given that this kind of “othering” is exactly the sort of thing that we’re supposed to be mindful of (it puts me in mind of the Antinomian Controversy of 1636 described in Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans).

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, I’m not sure it’s fair to be calling work unsociological when nobody freakin’ knows what sociology is. And I’m not talking about Aunt Mildred who always needs you to explain it at Thanksgiving dinner. I mean that most sociologists don’t have a common definition. I’ve been conducting an informal poll over the past few days, asking various sociologists how they define sociology or what sociological means. Invariably, the first answer was “I don’t know, man. Leave me alone.” However, upon reflection, I received several different answers:

“the study of social life, focusing on behavior and interactions”
“the empirical study of human institutions and relationships”
“the systematic study of social structure and its impact on the individual”
“the study of the ways human behavior is shaped by seen or unseen social forces”

My own definition would be that to think sociologically is to consider context when examining people and institutions. After asking, I shared with my respondents that I’ve always felt an anxiety when trying to distinguish between anthropology and sociology or political sociology and political science for students. Nearly all of them agreed that disciplinary boundaries are porous and drawing distinctions is silly. Nonetheless, if forced to distinguish, I usually say something like, “Anthropology is closely tied to qualitative methodologies and tends to focus on the culture of specific society (sometimes comparing several societies), whereas sociologists do whatever the hell we feel like.” Okay, maybe I don’t say that last part. But I more or less think it’s true. As The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology notes, a common criticism of sociology is that it is “a hybrid discipline that can never aspire to the status of a social science or a coherent body of knowledge.”

The ODS goes on to define sociology as having three purposes (I paraphrase loosely here): a) to analyze social structure and the relationships that result from it, b) to understand “meanings” or ways of cognitively organizing the world, and c) to understand social action or agency (essentially, how the individual can change stuff). However, given this broad definition – allowing for massive flexibility in methods, theory, subject of study — sociology can either be seen as the “queen of the social sciences” or as cannibalizing all of the others.

Since we, as sociologists, have grabbed such a large space as our potential intellectual playground and many of us see our diversity as a strength, can’t we all agree to cut it out with this “not sociological enough” B.S.? If a manuscript is methodologically sound, interesting, and tells us something about people or human institutions, shouldn’t that be good enough?

What do you think, reader(s)? When is distinguishing between sociology and not sociology useful?