Tagged: fear

Sociology of Culture

Fear: What is it good for?

November is here, which means the season of ghosts and goblins has come to pass. As an enthusiast of all-things-haunted, I filled the month of October with scary movie nights, Halloween costume parties, visits to a haunted house and Phantom Fright Nights at my local amusement park, and even an outing that involved shooting paintballs at zombies. As any good graduate student in the social sciences might do, I pondered the sociological aspects of these activities throughout the month. What...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Crime as a Mechanism for Governing

Whether flipping through channels, listening to the radio, or reading the newspaper, it is evident that crime has secured a mainstay position in today’s media. In order to achieve high ratings, television networks and news outlets must fill their allotted time slots with only those headlines sure to popular attention (see Best, 2004). Oftentimes, those stories and reports are generated by sensationalizing criminal events. However, the seemingly overrepresentation of crime and delinquency is not the focus for this essay. Rather,...

Science & Technology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

The Mask is the Meaning

by kiddingthecity (on bank holiday weekend) Lately, I performed a browser’s search for “surgical mask”, and I came up with many (more than I expected) interesting fictions. For instance, I learned that in parts of Asia, especially in Japan, it is quite a common thing, and it makes you a good citizen, the preoccupation not to infect your neighbour if you ever feel poor. Or that surgical mask happens to be a designer’s stuff, a fashionable item, with a lot...