by bmckernan A battle is looming within the video game industry between video game developers and video game retail outlets. Over the last decade, the trading in of used video games for store credit has become an increasingly popular activity for a significant portion of the gaming world. For many gamers, trading in their old games for store credit is the only way they can afford to continue to pursue their video game hobby, while on the retail side the...
by nathan jurgenson All over the news the past few days has been the outing of Facebook for changing its terms of service so that it could keep its user’s data for whatever it pleased for as long as it pleased. Even if the user deleted their account. Next came the vast uproar to this move followed by Facebook’s backtracking, arguing that the wording was harsher than what they would actually do in practice. Under continued pressure, however, Facebook backed...
nmccoy1 In the era of globalization, the predominant discourse emphasizes the subordination of nation states’ interests to transnational corporations and bodies. According to globalization scholars such as Philip McMichael, a virtual discursive space has been constructed in which responsibility for economic and political decisions and crises are not only shared but simultaneously avoided. The global economy has become the catchall culprit, hero, and future of any number of international and domestic incidents. In this context, the recent announcement by the...
by theoryforthemasses The killing of a young black man in Paris, Texas last September reignited racial tensions in the community, tensions which federal mediators have recently been dispatched to resolve. The victim, Brandon McClelland, was run over and dragged by a pickup truck driven by two white men with whom McClelland was friends. Despite this reported friendship, some community members remain suspicious. Paris has a longstanding history of racial violence and conflict, and the killing is reminiscent of the James...
Later this week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is scheduled to hold their 81st Academy Awards in Hollywood, California. While the Oscars is the premiere awards ceremony for the United States film industry, in recent years a variety of other awards ceremonies have begun to proliferate across the calendar to recognize members of the film industry in a variety of similar categories to the Oscars. Recently, sociologist Joel Best has written an article describing the proliferation of...
by Bookblogger Globalization by Frank J. Lechner Written in a lively and accessible style, this book shows how globalization affects everyday experience, creates new institutions, and presents new challenges. With many examples, Lechner describes how the process unfolds in a wide range of fields, from sports and media to law and religion. While sketching the outlines of a world society in the making, the book also demonstrates that globalization is inherently diverse and contentious. In this concise analysis of a...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRZyymYe-FQ] By linanne There is a long tradition of using gender and sexual dualism as marketing strategies in industries from technology to entertainment. Discourses in advertisements are often framed as “targeting at” whether male or female consumers. Products are also packaged in ways that are gendered according to certain sets of binary codes. Such dichotomous gender representations not only reproduce the existing social and cultural structures of gender segregation, but also inform individual and collective activities which oftentimes are responses...
by paulabowles Once again the emotive issue of teenage pregnancy has hit the headlines in the UK. The recent news that 13 year old Alfie, and his 15 year old girlfriend Chantelle have become parents, has sparked a frenzy occupying all branches of the media from the broadsheets to the tabloids and the BBC to YouTube, as well as attracting the attention of senior politicians. Although, very young, Alfie and Chantelle are by no means, the youngest children to...
by ishein1 Newly elected president, Barack Obama, held his first official press conference on Monday evening. This historically rich press conference on the surface was isomorphous with press conferences of the past. This fact was accentuated by the presence of Helen Thomas, currently a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. As she has done for the past four decades, and despite attempts by President Obama to lighten the moment, Thomas asked her usual critical and pertinent questions. Obama responded as most past...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imLOGgs9Qyk] by NickieWild There is perhaps no more frightening an image to today’s parents of pre-teen and teenage children in the U.S. than that of the internet predator. A lone adult man siting behind a computer screen in a darkened room lures the innocent child into an unsafe situation. But is this just an image – a bogeyman created by the media? Shows like NBC’s To Catch A Predator certainly increase concerns. Although old shows still continue to be aired,...
by bmckernan Towards the end of 2008, the PEW Internet & American Life Project released two studies on video games whose results were met with some shock by the mainstream media. The first PEW survey focused on youth and video games and found that 97% of the respondents (ages 12 to 17) play video games, including 99% of boys and 94% of girls. A few months later, the project followed this up with a second study which found that 53%...
by kiddingthecity … Is s/he British? Is this person happy? Intelligent? These are some of the strong questions participants were asked to cast their vote about when faced with the anonymous picture of a stranger in latest Christian Nold‘s provocative installation. Over 14,000 people in one month cast their vote in the ‘Community Metrics’ in Nottingham (UK) and decide ‘live’ who of the volunteers should be deported: a sort of ‘friendly fascism’, a dystopian version of Facebook, a tease out...
nmccoy1 In the midst of this economic “crisis” we might do well to (re)engage with the work of economic sociologist, Karl Polanyi. At the heart of his critique of market economies is the notion that an economic system that functions autonomously of political, social, and cultural intervention is essentially a utopian project. If the market could in fact operate fully disembedded from society, humans and nature would be destroyed. The market is not governed by its own internal laws but rather...
by theoryforthemasses In the past week considerable debate has emerged over the birth of a set of octuplets to a California woman. Controversy has surrounded both the doctors who facilitated the births as well as the mother herself, who is single, unemployed, and has six other children. The attention that is being paid to this family by both the media and ordinary people who are eager to share their opinions on fertility treatments and parental responsibility has created nothing short...
During the shooting of Terminator 4, actor Christian Bale was caught on tape verbally abusing the director of cinematology for allegedly messing up a shot. The internet is now buzzing with news stories, blogs, the actual audio tapes, as well as spoofs regarding the incident. Listening to the audio of the actual incident, cringing, I imagined myself on the set having to bear witness of such abuse. One has to wonder what variables play into an individual’s willingness to release all impulses and...
by nathan jurgenson Less Credit/Less Consumption Consumption is down. While this might be a momentary hiccup, it could very well be the case that Western societies will have to “reset” and pull back on consumption levels for a long time to come. Much of the consumption literature has pointed to Western conspicuous and hyper-consumption as an integral ethic of modern society. We have been consuming well beyond our means by relying on debt to fuel our consumer economy, an unsustainable...
Latest books
Child & Family Social Work
Governance
1540-6237/asset/SSSA_Logo-RGB.jpg?v=1&s=c337bd297fd542da89c4e342754f2e91c5d6302e){kind=logo}
Southwest Social Science Association
American Anthropological Association