Tagged: marx

Gender & Sexuality / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture

The Division of Society into Two Classes Transforms into the Sexual Differentiation of Space

(Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Marxism#/media/File:Flickr_-_NewsPhoto!_-_Marxisme_festival_Amsterdam.jpg) The economist Karl Marx believed for society to change, there was a need for an uprising, and an overthrowing of the ruling class; the bourgeoisie. To Marx, no person would truly be free unless this rebellion would occur. Marx is known for his theories about the economy, workers, and social life. One concept, of his, that appeals to my attention is the division of society into two classes. However, what Marx failed to realize, was by this division, he,...

Class & Stratification / Political & Economic Sociology

Middle-Class Poverty

“Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.”  Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, made this statement on a talk show a few weeks ago.   Bloggers ridiculed the comment as nonsensical.  I admit I too was tempted to just call Romney an idiot (again) and move on.  But, as I’ve been watching politicians in a society of growing inequality and high unemployment struggle with the concept of class while desperately trying not to...

Opinion

what if facebook paid us?

A wildly improbable thought experiment: what if Facebook moved to a micropayment model and gave users, say, $1 for contributing value to their site? This would be a raise, of course, because we are currently paid $0 in wages. However, I’ll argue that if Facebook paid its users there would be a user-revolt. First, Facebook makes money. That you diligently provide them with your personal data makes you an unpaid worker in their digital goldmine. In the traditional Marxist framework,...

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”...

Opinion

conference summary part 2: the internet as playground and factory

Following PJ Rey’s excellent summary of the Internet as Playground and Factory yesterday, I offer a few additional observations from the conference this past weekend, focusing on Web 2.0 capitalism, and Google as the primary target. The roughly 100 presenters were not joined by Google, as the company said that the conference content seemed “slightly anti-capitalist.” Much of the content, indeed, took the corporate ownership of our productive labor online to task. A common theme was how to discuss Marx’s...

Opinion

the prosumer and intimate profit

by nathanjurgenson Recently, this blog has focused on the labor of the crowds. I have posted that the “prosumers of the world should unite” and have continued to write on the topic. Bmckernan expertly handled the topic when discussing “light” capitalism and more recently pj.rey convincingly demonstrated that prosumption is a structural force at play in the death of old media. This post is driven by the recent announcement that Facebook, now nearly the size of the United States, has...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture

Space: Capitalism’s Final Frontier?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rST0vXYK2hY]by NickieWild On June 19th, a groundbreaking ceremony in the town of Upham, New Mexico was held for the world’s first commercial spaceport, “Spaceport America.” British company Virgin Galactic received $200 million in taxpayer incentives to fund the project that will take space tourists on a short flight above the atmosphere for $200,000 dollars. The ceremony included actors dressed as Spanish Conquistadors, who once explored and conquered in the area, symbolic of the link between trailblazers of the past and...

Class & Stratification / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

George Ritzer Guest Post: Are Today’s Globalized Cathedrals of Consumption Tomorrow’s Global Dinosaurs?

By: George Ritzer Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland A decade ago I wrote a book dealing with what I called the “cathedrals of consumption”. These are consumption settings that had, in the main, come into existence in the United States in the post-WWII era. Of particular interest were the most grandiose of these consumption settings including major indoor shopping malls, mega-malls (e.g. Mall of America), theme parks (especially Disneyland and Disney World), cruise ships, and above all the themed...

Political & Economic Sociology / Science & Technology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

britannica is putting customers to work

by nathan jurgenson The very idea of Wikipedia -the open-source encyclopedia that anyone with an internet connection can edit- has sparked many discussions about knowledge construction, such as the politics behind truth, the social construction of knowledge, the tyranny of epistemic expertism or populism, and so on. In these discussions, the Encyclopedia Britannica is often posed as the antithesis to Wikipedia. So it came as big news earlier this year that the Encyclopedia Britannica, the model of old-school expertism, is...

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...