Category: Social Psychology & Lifecourse

Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Typification of School Shootings

by socanonymous A recent school shooting in Winnenden, Germany by a 17 year old teen (Tim Kretschmer) left 15 people dead and many others shaken.  Initial media reports focused on the teen’s psychological depression, use of violent computer games, and access to handguns as possible explanations.  Investigators prematurely categorized Kretschmer as “a classic case of a conflicted young man who wreaked havoc in real life after savoring imaginary violence in the digital world.” The chief of police, Erwin Hetger of...

Social Psychology & Lifecourse

Rethinking Childhood Gambling

by theoryforthemasses A recent article in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine suggests that children who display impulsive behavior in kindergarten are more likely to engage in gambling at a young age. Researchers asked kindergarten teachers to rate their students’ inattentiveness, distractibility, and hyperactivity; six years later the students were asked to report the frequency with which they participated in activities such as buying lottery tickets and placing bets at sporting events. The researchers identified a positive relationship between...

Political & Economic Sociology / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Social Psychology & Lifecourse

"British jobs for British workers"

by socanonymous Negative immigrant sentiments seem to appear in public discourse during various times of national concern. Host attitudes toward immigrants seem to be concerned most with access to scarce economic resources and competition for jobs. It would seem logical then that during times of economic turbulence, attitudes toward immigrants would be on the rise. A study by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that contrary to popular belief, foreign migrant workers do not pose a harmful threat to...

Class & Stratification / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Media & Communication

‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’

                                                                                                       by paulabowles Once again the emotive issue of teenage pregnancy has hit the headlines in the UK. The recent news that 13 year old Alfie, and his 15 year old girlfriend Chantelle have become parents, has sparked a frenzy occupying all branches of the media from the broadsheets to the tabloids and the BBC to YouTube, as well as attracting the attention of senior politicians. Although, very young, Alfie and Chantelle are by no means, the youngest children to...

Gender & Sexuality / Science & Technology / Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Transphotography

by kiddingthecity Transsexual people are willing to become invisible, international acclaimed photographer and researcher Sara Davidmann maintains, in order to be accepted in the social norm, which wants a strict binary distinction between genders.  The issue of safety in public space here, I guess, is crucial – hence, the urge to comply to the visual stereotype of the male or of the female. As it is the issue of ‘medicalization’, that is, the tendency of western culture to push ‘deviance’...

Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

prosumers of the world unite

by nathan jurgenson Lately, we have been doing lots of work, for others. For free. Millions of users of sites like Facebook and MySpace are clicking away at their profiles, adding detailed information about themselves and others. “We” are uploading content to sites like Flickr, YouTube, the microblogging service Twitter and many others, and our labor creates vast databases about ourselves –what I previously described as a sort of mass exhibitionism. Facebook’s profit model is built upon an ownership of...

Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture

The Danger of Effervescence

nmccoy1   Recently, CNN reported on the case of a woman in Papa New Guinea being burned alive for witchcraft (see below).  Aside from the echoes to our own history of witch hunts, this case also highlights the collective effervescence, specifically religious, of which Durkheim was interested.  According to Durkheim, group energies can culminate in a kind of frenetic moment and can itself construct a collective reality.  This effervescence marks the delineation of the space between a heightened collective experience...

Class & Stratification / Gender & Sexuality / Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

the (post-structural) new-media digital-divide

by nathan jurgenson A major study (.pdf) on the way teens use social networking sites suggests that, “…their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.” [quote is from this article’s coverage] Parents can no longer view MySpace as just a waste of time. In fact, so important are the skills...

Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture

Capitalism's meltdown and the Body

by kiddingthecity My barber doesn’t bother at all: “Hair -he told me last week – will always grow on people’s head!”. The phantasmagorical numbers of the capitalist crisis do not mean anything at all to him (do they mean anything to most of us, by the way?). He carries on as he can, as he has almost always done, a coffee and a cigarette here and there, a joke quite often. He made me think that everyday’s life is a...

Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

facebook, youtube, twitter: mass exhibitionism online

By nathan jurgenson Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder and CEO) said recently at the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit: “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.” The Web 2.0 summit discusses the user-generated web, and of sociological interest here is that when people are given tools to share information about themselves online, they do,...