Latest articles from sociology lens

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Moving "Inception" from lucid dreams to constructed reality

By Rachael Liberman As box office numbers for Christoher Nolan’s Inception continue to rise  – right now, Variety reports that the film has grossed $6M ($149M total) – so do the number of individuals that are confronted with the question: What if someone could control my thoughts through my dreams? Inception successfully conceptualizes this ability; Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team of “experts” use unexplained technology to enter dreams and plant “ideas” into the subconscious that will, according to their...

Peace, War & Social Conflict / Social Psychology & Lifecourse

The truths of the war in Afghanistan : does visibility decrease support?

On Monday, Wikileaks, a website devoted to exposing the underbelly of the political and corporate world, revealed thousands of documents that, in a nutshell, depict the complications, perils and pitfalls of the war in Afghanistan. One piece of alarming information is that terrorist organizations in Afghanistan are clearly being supported by Pakistan. Another is solid evidence of the corruption of Hamid Karzai (though this has been suspected for quite some time). The force with which this story hit the news...

Opinion

Invitation to Sociology Editors Forum 2010 at this year's ASA

Wiley-Blackwell will host a Sociological Editors Forum at ASA in Atlanta and a community site has been created to complement the event. The Forum will give journal editors an opportunity to discuss hot topics in sociology publishing with peers. Please visit the community site for more information and valuable resources – http://asaeditorsforum.wordpress.com. If you are a journal editor and would like to attend the event, please email scanney@wiley.com. We look forward to seeing journal editors in Atlanta and/or on the...

Opinion

Social Media Fear-Baiting: The Immortality of Digital Content

The New York Times recently ran a story about how “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” It describes a digital age in which our careless mass exhibitionism creates digital documents that will live on forever. The article is chock full of scary stories about how ill-advised status updates can ruin your future life. These sorts of scare-tactic stories serve a purpose: they provide caution and give pause regarding how we craft our digital personas. Those most vulnerable should be...

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture

Legislation and identity politics: The case of France versus Muslim women and the facial veil

By Rachael Liberman As any respectful Western feminist knows, meddling in the affairs of non-Western women is a theoretical faux pas. Concerns, of course, are one thing, but condemnation outside of historical and cultural contexts, or “border crossing” has been ruled as downright oppressive (see Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak and Uma Narayan, among others). Issues such as genital mutilation have been fiercely debated among feminists, focusing more on the matter of Western normalizing judgment than the act itself. Discussion over...

Social Psychology & Lifecourse

Are we informing ourselves into inaction? How much information is too much?

What does an overload of information do to our decision-making process? This question becomes, at least in part, an issue of simplicity v. complexity, so I am reminded of Durkheim’s classic argument about social integration and regulation. Too much or too little of each causes problems – for him, various types of suicide emerge because of an overbearing or under-restricting/engaging society.  Simmel’s conflict over the freedom, yet overwhelming choices of the metropolis also comes to mind. In each of these...

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,...

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

Replacing rhetoric with praxis: Australia's stand against negative body image

By Rachael Liberman As endless rhetoric surrounding youth and body image continues to proliferate both in and outside of the academy, it appears that ephemeral panic has taken the place of organized action. The profitable persistence of homogenized and suggestive messages/imagery coupled with the lack of media (and sex) education in the United States has resulted in a version of empty empathy: a fleeting visceral response unsupported by contextual comprehension (E. Ann Kaplan). While Americans are becoming increasingly “empathetic” to...

Opinion

Event Clusters and Social Change – Women in Positions of Political Power

Hillary Clinton ran to be the democratic nominee for president. Sarah Palin ran to be the vice president. There are more women than ever before running for governor (e.g. Whitman, Haley, Hutchison and Brewer, to name a few), for the senate, and for all levels of political office. Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a supreme court justice and this week, Elena Kagan may become the fourth woman to sit on the supreme court. Surely, over the last several decades, women...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Facebook and the new language of "friendship"

By Rachael Liberman While it’s no secret that Facebook is renegotiating human interaction, the evidence is stacking up that this social media/networking site is redefining terms such as “community” and “friendship.” While many factors – including age, conflict and proximity – act as intervening variables when it comes to physical, face-to-face friendship and community, new factors – such as digital access, online activity and noteworthy status updates – are now influencing the degree to which someone is a (digital) “friend”...

Opinion

What about the boys? Solutions to violence against women.

I was recently in a heated conversation about how to address sexual violence against women. During this chat, I was reminded that girls are almost always the focus in these kinds of discussions.  Increased attention has been paid in the last several decades to men who commit crimes against women, particularly rapists, (most of the public discourse is about heterosexual relationships) and yet, when it comes to solutions, there is very little talk about boys and men. While we tell...

Opinion

publicity implies privacy: why teens are more private on facebook

Some were surprised to learn that young Facebook users -the folks who are most implicated in the game of “mass exhibitionism” and living in public- are also the ones who are most involved with privacy online. Some have described this as contradictory and counter-intuitive – are kids exhibitionists or not? The findings are not contradictory and the larger point goes well beyond kids, but indicates a general rule of privacy and publicity: the degree to which one is involved in...

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

OkCupid Grants Special Privileges to Attractive Users

Before you ask: I did not make this picture up.  It is a screenshot taken directly from my email.  And, yeah, this is probably a bit of inexcusable narcissism. I, like millions of other Americans (OkCupid has 500,000 active users, eHarmony has had more than 20 million registered users in its history, and Match.com sees more than 20,000 users register each day), have turned to the enigmatic world of online dating.  Being a less than affluent Ph.D. student, I naturally...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Media framing and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill: What's really going on in Louisiana?

By Rachael Liberman As a projectile oil spill continues to plague the Gulf of Mexico, most US mainstream media outlets are reacting to this relentless tragedy with a “blame BP” and/or “blame Obama” campaign that fails to capture the entire story. Q1: What about the Gulf residents and their reactions? Q2: What about the unreported organized and grassroots efforts to save the environment and wildlife? In other words, as Fox News and David Brooks of The New York Times, for...

Science & Technology / Social Psychology & Lifecourse

Oil gushes into the Gulf of Mexico, who has the expertise to stop it?

Oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for over a month as a result of an explosion atop a rig that was extracting crude from a 5,000-foot-deep well owned by British Petroleum. The horrific event, which killed 11 men working on that rig, set off a leak that experts say is pumping anywhere between 5,000 and 18,000 barrels of oil a day; that’s anywhere from 210,000 to 756,000 gallons of crude oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico...

Opinion

trade your facebook in for a fakebook

Today, while speaking to WYPR (Baltimore’s NPR affiliate) about the latest iteration of Facebook privacy concerns, I brought up the idea of not using your real name on Facebook -that is, having a “Fakebook.” We live within a cultural dynamic that both encourages us to live in public and punishes us for doing the same. Teens, who are more involved with their Facebook privacy than adults, have reacted by using fake names on Facebook so they have less to worry...