Category: Social Movements / Social Change
by bmckernan A while back, the NY Times published an extended article on the reception of American cultural products in the Gaza. In some significant ways, the article mirrors many of the arguments recently put forward by social scientists who have become increasingly unsatisfied with the cultural imperialism thesis. Among this academic group includes recent work by the sociologist Ronald Jacobs as well as the anthropologist Daniel Miller. Both assert that while there is insight to gain from the cultural...
by kiddingthecity To what extent, I have been thinking recently, can we feel, understand, and represent the suffering of other people? Is it reasonable to argue that the continuous exposure to images of the atrocity of the war – most notably children – has rendered those atrocities a media spectacle and “Us” a privileged passive audience? Would this prevalent opinion make any difference to the crude ‘reality’ of the conflicts? Or, on the other hand, if we maintain that “We”...
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...
by kiddingthecity Jeff Wall is famous for grand tableaux, which he shoots in sections over several months before stitching together the final image using computer montage. He has been known to spend almost two years on a single picture, with actors and crew to shoot scenes of the everyday. He teases out the myth of reality outside perception to the point that he is able to re-create in studio the ‘decisive moment’ of Cartier-Besson, in which the elements of an...
by ishein1 As the current economic crisis necessitates consumer frugality, various companies are attempting to reap additional revenue by innovative means of selling their brand. Internet cultures and networking sites are expanding at a meteoric rate providing a spate of opportunity for celebrities and companies to capitalize materially from this virtual medium. The company Virtual Greats, based out of California, is utilizing this opportunity by representing celebrities and brands that are being sold in virtual worlds. These sop virtual goods...
by NickieWild After Hillary Clinton’s loss in the race to be the Democratic nominee and Sarah Palin’s loss as vice presidential candidate, the role of women in leadership positions is more salient than ever. However, one question that does not always get asked is, what (if any) is the role of men in furthering feminist goals? Clearly, one such goal is the attainment of more powerful leadership positions in the United States. One way that men in leadership positions can...
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...
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...
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,...
Feminist advocates have spent years working to define rape as a social problem. These advocates have worked as claims-makers in this regard and have engaged in various framing processes along the way. Sociologists and criminologists have entered the conversation along the way offering a variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical investigations to help understand rape and sexual assault more fully. Despite these efforts, rape remains one of the most underreported crimes with an even more dismal prosecution and conviction rates....
by ishein1 Two years ago, Google paid a copious, $1.65 billion to acquire the incipiently profitless Web site, YouTube. This video sharing website’s meteoric rise was in part due to its software’s facileness and accessibility. In this light, anyone with access to a computer and some gumption could post their own video. In an effort to transform their costly addition into a revenue-producing agent, Google announced that it would begin selling space to advertisers on YouTube’s search results pages. As...
[youtube=http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=ot3dgm95CVE] By linanne10 While most of the discussions on equality and political change occur around the presidential election in United States last week, events of civil rights movement are not limited to the US continent. A student-led protest for the freedom of speech and assembly is burning through out the island of Formosa. On November 3rd, the representative from China’s Association of Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), Chen Yunlin, came to visit Taiwan and met with the Taiwanese current...
By rbobbitt Children in Tijuana, Mexico went about their normal morning routine on a school day only to be confronted with twelve dead bodies dumped in the field directly across from their school. At other times, students have had to flee school in a panic as gunfights have broken out between police and drug traffickers. In Tijuana alone, 99 bodies have been discovered since September 26th in a rash of violence that has a death toll higher than that of...
(by kiddingthecity) The other day I came across a great piece of ruin, an other fragment of this incredible city: a London based charity invites people sleeping rough to author a ‘Homeless City Guide’ by drawing listed signs on the wall in order ‘to help others to read the city’. By scrolling down the list of symbols, I felt a sense of hollowness reading tags like ‘an attack happened here’, or ‘strong police presence’, and ‘unfriendly place’. Risk is a...
by paulabowles It has recently been noted that there appears to be ‘an increasing sense of nostalgia for communism’ among many Germans. Although, this may in part be connected to wider global financial concerns, this on its own does not explain the attraction for many younger people. Indeed, it is suggested that many of these were born after Germany’s reunification, with no experience of the reality of living under communism. In an effort to tackle these concerns, the East German...
by ishein1 After the complications arising from the 2000 election the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002. States in an attempt to follow the guidelines of this act have found themselves in a precarious position. The provisions have created the unintended consequences of tens of thousands of potential voters being purged from voting rolls in nine states, six of which are key battleground swing states. As a result, federal law has been violated in two ways: voters have...
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