Tagged: internet

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture

Why are we obsessed with what teens are doing on social media?

‘They’, we are told, are prime movers we can observe to spot future trends; like rejecting Facebook. ‘They’ have too much agency because they are doing something problematic or exotic: different to ‘us’. For example, sexting or hacking. Or ‘they’ have too little agency because they are addicted, being brainwashed or radicalised by the Internet. ‘They’ are teenagers. We are not similarly fixated by other social groups in this way. What lies behind our obsession with teenagers online?

Class & Stratification / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

The Internet of Things: some implications for sociology

This week BBC News asked “can wearable tech make us more productive?”  The news package covered a research project which has the broader purpose of investigating impact of wearable connected tech on every aspect of our lives. The umbrella term that (albeit loosely) confederates connected technology is the ‘Internet of Things’. Its advocates believe the Internet of Things is one of the most compelling ideas of the twenty first century.  The original definition of the Internet of Things referred to...

Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Is THAT Cheating?

Last week, a survey of 1,300 incoming freshman at Harvard University found that 42 percent of respondents had cheated on a homework assignment or problem set before starting at Harvard. This study lead to countless editorial pieces with provocative titles such as “Welcome to Harvard, Cheaters of 2017” and “More Incoming Harvard Students Have Cheated On Their Homework Than Had Sex.” However, what the study and related articles did not discuss was how “cheating” was defined both for those conducting...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

American Public Libraries: A Forgotten Social Institution?

Last week, NPR ran a series on American public libraries.  The series immediately filled me with a sentimental wave of nostalgia.  One of my earliest memories is packing up my teddy bear and a sack lunch and driving to the Lincoln Township Public Library for their annual Teddy Bear Picnic.  I also remember taking a writing workshop at the library in second or third grade, which lead to my first publication, “Friends of the Sea.”  As an undergraduate, I spent...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Representing Nude Bodies

In the past weeks, I’ve focused on the normative beauty expectations that govern women’s bodies and bodily habits. I was excited to see a recent article at the Huffington Post on one Minneapolis photographer’s attempt to challenge those norms. Matthew Blum, assisted by his wife/partner, has begun the Nu Project (warning: website NSFW), a multipart photography project in North and South America, in which he attempts to document real women’s nude bodies. All volunteers, the “models” represent a spectrum of bodies—different...

Class & Stratification / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Kansas City Getting Wired: Google Fiber and the Digital Divide

Google is a behemoth of an organization. Most everyone is familiar with its search engine (to the point where “Google” is a now a verb), and of the top 25 most-visited web sites in the world 6 are Google-branded, including YouTube. The company makes much of its money by selling targeted advertisements through its AdWords service, and has been wildly successful doing so. But Google has been busy with some interesting projects that fall outside its traditional role as search...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

The Attack on Anita Sarkeesian: From Media Analysis to Anti-Feminism and Online Harassment

AUTHOR’S WARNING: This post, and especially the links leading from it, contains images and language that some readers may find offensive or unsettling. Anita Sarkeesian is clever, eloquent, and seemingly fearless, but the recent fame she has achieved is not entirely pleasant. With a B.A. in communications from California State University, Northridge and a Master’s degree in social and political thought from York University, Sarkeesian is thoroughly knowledgeable and aptly qualified for her role as media critic and feminist activist....

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

Facebook Fatigue and Privacy Panic: Has the Golden Age of Social Media Ended?

For years, we have been deluged with stories about the dangers of online social media.  But in the last several months, a new kind of story has suddenly swept the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike.  This new type of story highlights burgeoning discontent amongst the user-base of social media sites and, at least implicitly, questions whether mass exhibitionism on social media is just a faddish blip on the cultural radar. For example, recent articles discuss how high school students...

Class & Stratification / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Social Media: Documentation as Stratification

The new norms of exhibitionism and copious self-documentation have been regular talking points on Sociology Lens over the past year.  Consider Nathan Jurgenson’s posts, our digital culture of narcissism and facebook, youtube, twitter: mass exhibitionism online, as well as my own recent post, The Queer Politics of Chatroulette. It now seems truer than ever for many social media users (particularly, teenagers and young adults) that “If you’re not on MySpace [and/or other social media sites], you don’t exist.” Moreover, the...

Opinion

web 1.5: the web is not getting flatter

As media became truly massive in the middle of the 20th century, many theorists discussed the degree to which individuals are powerless -e.g., McLuhan’s famous “the medium is the message.” In the last decades, the pendulum of dystopian versus utopian thinking about technology has swung far into the other direction. Now, we hear much about the power of the individual, how “information wants to be free” and, opposed to powerful media structures, how the world has become “flat.” The story...

Opinion

The DeMcDonaldization of the Internet

On this blog, I typically discuss the intersection of social theory and the changing nature of the Internet (e.g., using Marx, Bourdieu, Goffman, Bauman, DeBord and so on). In a chapter of the new third edition of the McDonaldization Reader edited by George Ritzer, I argue that what we are seeing is a general trend towards the deMcDonaldization of the Internet. The shift from a top-down centrally conceived and controlled “Web 1.0” to a more user-generated and social “Web 2.0”...

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

Liquid Charity

by pj.rey In the ten days following the earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital, Americans used text messaging to donate over $30 million.  Text messaging has been prominent in the news as of late.  Candidate Obama shocked supporters by announcing his vice presidential pick using this new medium.  In 2008, Nielson reported that the average teen sends a whopping 2,272 messages a month.  A new term, “sexting,” entered popular usage following several high profile cases of teens being expelled or even...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Where's the Money in Prosumption: Predictions for 2010

by pj.rey A recent article in the New York Times, “Experts Predict 2010 the Year for Social Media ROI” summarizes a Trendspotting.com report entitled “TrendsSpotting’s 2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters.”  The Trendspotting.com post identifies six trends to look out for in social media over the coming year: “Mobile, Location, Transparency, Measurement, ROI, [and] Privacy.”  The Times article focuses, particularly, on return on investment.  The articles reports three strategies for garnering profit from user-generated content (i.e.,...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Don't blame the Internet: Reevaluating the decline in American journalism

By Rachael Liberman In a recent article from The Nation, heavyweight media scholars John Nichols and Robert McChesney remind readers that the current crisis in American journalism does not necessarily mean that the industry is fated to fail. Rather, Nichols and McChesney optimistically open the article with the news that the Federal Trade Commission is planning to hold (they are holding it right now) a hearing to “assess the radical downsizing and outright elimination of newspaper newsrooms and to consider...

Opinion

information wants to be expensive

My previous post centered on the implications of Google’s dominance in internet search. However, subsequent major news provides the possibility of a major restructuring of the internet search market. It also has implications on how “flat” and “open” the web really is. One of the basic things all users of the internet do is search. Search is what makes the abundance of information usable. We assume that our search engine has access to the relevant information on the web. Most...

Class & Stratification / Gender & Sexuality / Political & Economic Sociology / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Science & Technology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Cyborg Systems: Sociology's Proper Unit of Analysis

The increasing centrality of the Internet in our daily lives has precipitated a spate of theorizing about how we – as humans and as a society – are changing (or not) due to the constant technological mediation of our most basic interactions and activities.  Let’s face it: This sort of theorizing is populated mostly by men of considerable privilege (with some very notable exceptions).  A cynic might hold that the problems concerning human techno-social interactions are relatively insignificant compared to...