Category: Opinion

Opinion

The 40th Anniversary of the Violence at Kent State – a gap in our historical memory?

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Not long ago,  I looked out at my large section of a social problems course and asked if anyone could explain the events that took place at Kent State on May 4th, 1970. I wondered, in the silence following, how a lack of knowledge about this tragedy could exist. I rephrased my question…to no avail. This event is part of American History and is taught as such. And yet, when...

Opinion

Imaginary Numbers

Article one, section two of the United States Constitution states “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons,…The actual Enumeration shall be made …within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.” Thus, every decade an arguably rudimentary head count is taken across the country...

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

Editor’s Highlights: Social Context vs. Research

Looking at sex offender laws, Kelly M. Socia, Jr. and Janet P. Stamatel identify the unintended consequences of policies that are context driven rather than research driven.  Responding to a frightened public, legislatures across the US passed laws requiring sex offender registration, community notification, and residence restrictions.  Socia and Stamatel study the enactment of legislation, the ways these laws reflect assumptions or evidence, and research on the effectiveness of these laws in their article in the January 2010 edition of the Crime...

Opinion

Less is More: Political Ideology and the Paralysis of Progress

On March 13, CNN covered the genesis of another grassroots political movement in the United States. The Coffee Party –an obvious play on the vocal Tea Party which found its way into the headlines last summer- touts itself as a group of concerned citizens who are tired of being divided and anxious to be heard. CNN reported that leaders of the movement, which began on Facebook, held between 350 and 400 events on the 13th. For now the members seem...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality / Opinion

wikipedia and the gender neutral voice

I recently came across a tool that has been around for a couple of years. GenderAnalyzer claims that it can determine the gender of the author of any text that you point it to. It learns to do this by looking at thousands of blogs and the corresponding gender of the author. Give it a try: genderanalyzer.com As of today, it looks like it has a 63% success rate; not impressive but better than chance. Leaving aside how serious we...

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

Editor's Highlights: Immigrant youths negotiating conflicting norms

Living in and between two normative contexts, second generation immigrant youths experience normative conflict.  In the February 2010 edition of Sociology Compass, Giguère, Lalonde and Lou explore how second generation immigrant youth of Canada respond to normative conflict regarding their intimate relationships. Actions of immigrant youths occur within two normative frameworks: the heritage culture and the mainstream culture.  Recent immigrants to Canada tend to be from Eastern cultures that reject individualism, which can conflict with the mainstream Western culture.  Norm...

Opinion

myth: physical books promote deep learning

by nathan jurgenson The New York Times gathered experts to discuss the disappearance of the physical book, especially important in light of the announcement of the iPad media consumption device. The predictable narrative throughout the article is that the digital is trivial and the physical has more “depth.” I’m interested here in troubling this narrative. It goes well beyond this article. Bring up Twitter in certain circles and people will laugh, calling it trivial. Talk to someone over thirty about...

Opinion

the iPad favors passive consumers not active prosumers

by nathan jurgenson I’ve written many posts on this blog about the implosion of the spheres of production and consumption indicating the rise of prosumption. This trend has exploded online with the rise of user-generated content. We both produce and consume the content on Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube and so on. And it is from this lens that I describe Apple’s latest creation announced yesterday: the iPad. The observation I want to make is that the iPad is not indicative...

Opinion

Ignoring secondary consequences: the case of climate change

By Dena T. Smith Global warming is a term we hear batted around, to the point that it has become almost trite, but this is an issue vitally important to discuss on the political scene. The issues at the center of the debate tend to be about whether or not climate change is actually occurring and, secondly, if we accept that climate change is occurring, whether human beings and human societies are really affecting the changes in weather patterns and...

Opinion

Reality television and the valorization of "rowdy, raunchy women"

In a recent LA Times diatribe, writer David Kronke instantly reveals his disgust for women within the current slew of reality programming. He writes, “It has become a ubiquitous formula: Round up a gaggle of pert and perky girls who haven’t spent much time considering the world around them and who don’t play well with others, and follow their antics with camera crews. Invariably, they’ll say tings that betray a hilariously stunted worldview. Invariably, they’ll offend anyone with a modicum...

Opinion

facebook's message of empowerment

Users logged into Facebook this week to find various messages from the company telling them of changes in the way they will share their information. While the company frames all of this as putting users in “control” of their own data, it strikes me that this is more about empowering the company than the users. Users are given more opportunity to share more information with more people, creating more of the data that Facebook profits from. Whether you care if...

Opinion

George Ritzer Guest Post – Consuming America: What Have We Done to Ourselves?

By: George Ritzer Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland (Note: The Following comments were prepared for a symposium sponsored by the Center on Religion and Culture, September 15, 2009.) Let me begin by quarreling with the title of this discussion. I think it is certainly a good idea to focus on consumption because: (1) of its enormous importance in the developed world; (2) it is not going away even with the current recession; and (3) it reflects a willingness to...

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...

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...