Abo46n2's Favorite Links on sociology from Diigo

Women and the World @ Kansas State University

Sun, 11 May 2008 06:24:28 -0000

Tags: sociology kstate education anthropology

Posted by: abo46n2

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Sat, 03 May 2008 21:06:51 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

Tags: clayshirky technology sociology

Posted by: abo46n2

Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:56:05 -0000

Tags: foucault sociology power

Posted by: abo46n2

Plan 9 From Cyberspace: The Implications of the Internet for Personality and Social Psychology

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:38:48 -0000

Just as with most other communication breakthroughs before it, the initial media and popular reaction to the Internet has been largely negative, if not apocalyptic. For example, it has been described as "awash in pornography", and more recently as making people "sad and lonely." Yet, counter to the initial and widely publi cized claim that Internet use causes depression and social isolation, the body of ev idence (even in the initial study on which the claim was based) is mainly to the con trary. More than this, however, it is argued that like the telephone and television before it, the Internet by itself is not a main effect cause of anything, and that psy chology must move beyond this notion to an informed analysis of how social iden tity, social interaction, and relationship formation may be different on the Internet than in real life. Four major differences and their implications for self and identity, social interaction, and relationships are identified: one's greater anonymity, the greatly reduced importance of physical appearance and physical distance as "gating features" to relationship development, and one's greater control over the time and pace of interactions. Existing research is reviewed along these lines and some promising directions for future research are described.

Tags: internet psychology research sociology

Posted by: abo46n2

Beat them or ban them: The characteristics and social functions of anger and contempt

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:35:25 -0000

This article reports 3 studies in which the authors examined (a) the distinctive characteristics of anger and contempt responses and (b) the interpersonal causes and effects of both emotions. In the 1st study, the authors examined the distinction between the 2 emotions; in the 2nd study, the authors tested whether contempt could be predicted from previous anger incidents with the same person; and in the 3rd study, the authors examined the effects of type of relationship on anger and contempt reactions. The results of the 3 studies show that anger and contempt often occur together but that there are clear distinctions between the 2 emotions: Anger is characterized more by short-term attack responses but long-term reconciliation, whereas contempt is characterized by rejection and social exclusion of the other person, both in the short-term and in the long-term. The authors also found that contempt may develop out of previously experienced anger and that a lack of intimacy with and perceived control over the behavior of the other person, as well as negative dispositional attributions about the other person, predicted the emergence of contempt.

Tags: anger psychology research sociology

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Author Struggles to Stay Removed from Slave Trade : NPR

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:49:22 -0000

With $50 and a plane ticket to Haiti, one can buy a slave. This was just one of the difficult lessons writer Benjamin Skinner learned while researching his book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.

Tags: anthropology economics haiti slavery sociology

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The Self-Concept, Viktor Gecas

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:24:19 -0000

Tags: identity sociology

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The Looking Glass Self: An Empirical Test and Elaboration

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:22:00 -0000

Tags: cooley identity sociology

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The Roots of Social Knowledge, by Charles Horton Cooley

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:16:35 -0000

Tags: cooley identity sociology

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The Network Paradigm: Social Formations in the Age of Information

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 06:20:22 -0000

Tags: Stalder media sociology

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Toward a Sociology of the Network Society

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 04:16:43 -0000

Tags: castells sociology

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Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkans

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:53:07 -0000

Tags: communities economics sociology web

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On "The Consumer's World: Place as Context" by Robert Sack

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:35:57 -0000

Tags: media sociology

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Stability and Change in Self: A Structural Symbolic Interactionist Explanation

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:47:49 -0000

Tags: identity psychology sociology

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The Three Faces of Social Psychology

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:46:05 -0000

Tags: psychology sociology

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A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory With Social Identity Theory

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:44:41 -0000

Tags: identity sociology

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The Many Faces of Social Identity: Implications for Political Psychology

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 05:51:50 -0000

Tags: identity psychology sociology

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Computer-Mediated Communication and Social Information: Status Salience and Status Differences

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:52:49 -0000

Tags: communication computers research sociology

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On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data - New York Times

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:50:34 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being.

An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said.

Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleaned from Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook is largely based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses.

Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace.

Tags: anthropology facebook research sociology

Posted by: abo46n2

Pierre Bourdieu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:53:26 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

ymbolic violence is in some senses much more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the vision of the legitimacy of the social order.

Tags: anthropology bourdieu ksudigg sociology

Posted by: abo46n2