content analysis

Last night, The Colbert Report did a special episode on the growing water crisis.  After pissing off the curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s special exhibition on Water, Colbert (in his guise as a conservative pundit as always) discussed how usable drinking water is disappearing.

The social inequalities on this issue are staggering.  According to experts, the minimum amount of water per day needed to survive (for drinking, cooking, and hygiene) is 5 gallons.  Most people in developing nations routinely live on less than 1.3 gallons.  The average American uses between 60 and 90 gallons daily!  Even Europeans use about half as much water per capita.  As guest Dean Kamen made clear, North Americans are able to consume so much water because we are not paying the full cost of replacing the water we use with other purified water.

At the same time, bottled water waste is becoming a serious issue.  According to the director of the Container Recycling Institute, 40 million plastic water bottles head to landfills every day.  As of this morning, 30.1 billion (with a “b”) beverage containers had been sent to landfills so far in 2008.

What to do?  Well, Kamen is doing his part with a machine that can turn anything (even a barrel of human waste or, say, Doritos) into usable drinking water and, at the same time, works as a power generator.  It seems clear that we all need to do our part to cut down on water consumption and container waste.  I used a water consumption calculator and discovered I’m using 78 gallons daily.  So, I’m going to make a concerted effort to cut back on my indulgent showers and start using a reusable water bottle.

But thinking about this issue sociologically, little can be accomplish by isolated people making a decision to behave better.  We need to push for a Bottle Bill to create greater incentives to recycle and find systematic ways of promoting reusable containers.  New technologies like efficient toilets and shower heads can curb our overconsumption of water.  The most essential change is for consumers to start to pay the real cost of the water we use.  That may be a hard pill to swallow for millions of Americans already paying big water bills, but it’s perhaps the only way we can deal with this crisis.

As Kamen pointed out, the oil crisis pales in comparison to the water crisis.

Sudhir Venkatesh (Gang Leader for a Day) was on The Colbert Report last night. And, man, did he make sociology look bad.

SV: Poor people wouldn’t answer my questions.
SC: Poor people wouldn’t answer your questions? Did you try offering them money? Because I understand that’s something poor people need a lot of.
SV: I tried! But I didn’t give them enough and I gave them bad questions like, “How does it feel to be black and poor?”
SC: Really? But they were too “in it” to really get a sense of it?
SV: Well, yeah. But I gave them choices! “Very Bad, Bad, Good,” you know …
SC: Seriously? [riffed on the absurdity of offering multiple choices]
SV: Well, that’s what sociologists do.

Actually, not all sociologist use questions that ridiculous.  Or response categories that bad.  Not all sociologists use survey methods.

Many people have voiced their concerns with Venkatesh’s research.  But he did nothing in this public forum to mention that what he did was out of keeping with what most sociologists do.  Pretty annoying.  Colbert was good at pointing out several problems with the research though.