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"Based on these findings, Peterson recommends junking the "elite culture-mass culture" distinction in favor of an "omnivore-univore" distinction. There is indeed a significant difference in the cultural tastes of high-status and low-status people; but it doesn't correspond to the elite-mass distinction previously postulated."
"To ask questions about how to live life, to question whether you should be doing what you are doing, is indeed admirable. But to conclude that a positive attitude can solve all problems is naive and denies the possibility to enact change, when necessary, on your circumstances."
Phil Yaffe thinks that the 7 percent rule is a pernicious myth. He debunks the notion that in an oral presentation, what you say is considerably less important than how you say it. He rejects the claim that content accounts for only 7 percent of the success of the presentation, while 93 percent of success is attributable to non-verbal factors, i.e. body language and vocal variety. The myth arises from a gross misinterpretation of a scientific experiment. It needs to be put to rest both for the benefit of presenters and the sake of scientific integrity.
David Graeber reflects on writing a big question book for a popular audience.
Why aren't there more pop-culture books about the internet by professional sociologists?
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The number of pop science/business/cultural studies books that have come out on the subject of the Internet in the past few years has been staggering. Off the top of my head, we’ve got Nick Carr’s The Shallows, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Evengy Morozov’s The Net Delusion, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, Johnathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet; and How to Stop It, Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and John Palfrey & Urs Gasser’s Born Digital.
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So where does this leave us? What can sociology contribute to the study of the Internet, and what can the Internet contribute to the sociological lexicon? We need new and better sociological concepts to deal with the contexts of virtuality. We need a new approach to text, one that treats it as something other than an inert data resource. We need a new approach to space and place, one that allows us to talk about these things without reference to geographic clustering. We need to rethink our privileging of face-to-face relationships in our research, and of methodologies that embed and perpetuate that privileging. But most importantly, we need to stop talking about what people do online as though it isn’t real.
Marketing for Scientists is a Facebook group, a blog, a workshop, and a book (coming out on Island Press in the fall of 2011) devoted to helping scientists learn these tools and adapt to changing times.
"LS: What's the difference between these two types of popularity?
AR: One type is "perceived popularity," which is who kids think is popular, and the other is "sociometric popularity," which is who the kids actually like. In today's schools, to be popular does not mean to be liked.
The in-crowd at most schools often falls into the "perceived popular" category. It turns out that students in this group are more likely to engage in risky behavior. They are often less likely to do well in school. They are more likely to conform, because they're more likely to feel pressure from their group to conform. Perceived popular students are much more likely to be involved in aggression, including relational aggression, which includes things like rumor-spreading, whispering, and eye-rolling. [The History of Human Aggression]
It's a very Machiavellian atmosphere to try to obtain and then retain popularity in schools today. What I'm saying is, it is not worth it. "
Popular culture - as opposed to the pop culture created by artists without academic training which is flooding our media - has always been a remix culture.
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There's the problem. People have grown up in a fair use zone where you could do anything with culture and they expect this to extend to their Internet living rooms, in which they typically converse with a few dozen friends. Funny Photoshop transformations of Brad Pitt's face? Lawyers at your door. Insert 'poops' into that Britney Spears song? Lawyers again. Lose your house paying your defence lawyer.
You see, lawyers have this fictional creature known as The Consumer. That's all of us, but stripped of any urge or ability to get creative. And then there is that other mythical monster called The Artist, who creates works from scratch - or gets hauled into courts for theft. Neither of these phantasms has anything to do with how human culture actually works. -
You have been muzzled.
This is why people are angry. Their normal modes of expression have been turned into a crime. They know they are only safe from prosecution because they are small fry - unless someone decides to make an example of you. Thus, any time you post some photoshoppery or a musical mash-up you risk having it summarily deleted and your account cancelled for criminal cultural activities.
Perhaps I do accept that there should be a way for creative artists to make a living with their craft, but if it comes at the cost of turning the rest of humanity into passive consumers, I say it is not worth it. We need a completely different way of showing our appreciation to artists.
Bill Wasik is an Internet instigator... Wasik is best known as the creator of flash mobs... he's analyzed how and why some stories became cultural phenomenons and others languish in the nursing home of online oblivion.
Now, in his new book "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture", Wasik sets out to explain what he's learned from all his Web mischievousness and also what our increasing addiction to the Internet indicates about us as a society. We now have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but Wasik suggests we find it hard to focus on issues that really matter because we're so consumed with myopic, ephemeral things.
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Absolutely. One of things that I find so depressing about the climate change conversation is the fact that we actually have succeeded in implanting climate change in a lot of people's minds as an important long-term challenge. But more often than not, the way that that happens in public discourse is seizing on these tiny, little, grabby ideas that are really, really short-term. So, Al Gore has a movie. That was the seminal moment in coming to an understanding about climate change in this country, where we could turn it into a little entertainment business piece. And I think your point about the economic crisis is right on too. We sat there and talked about the AIG bonuses for four days. It was very telling that we can only know the big problem these days by way of some tiny little piece of outrage or delight, through these little nanostories.
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I would say that for 90 percent of culture makers coming up today, your break is going to be online. And the way that you're going to know you had your break is going to be numbers. It isn't going to be a single person, like an established poet, or an established musician coming up to you after a show or responding to a piece of writing you sent them and saying, I really believe you can do it. Instead, it's like this giant hive mind will pluck out something that you've done and say, this we love, this we bestow the pleasure of 2 million hits on. From there on out, you're going to use those cues you get from this giant machine to tell you what to keep doing and to tell you what to stop doing. And that to me is potentially scary in all sorts of ways. The hive mind selects for a certain kind of thing, it selects for culture that is instantly digestible, it selects for culture that is sensational in a certain sort of way.
The "A-list" phenomenon, where a few sources with a large readership dominate the information flow on a topic, was particularly stark. Since the numbers of "following" and "followers" are visible, the usual steep ranking curve was immediately evident. A highly ranked person is free to attack anyone lower down the ranks, as there's no way for the wronged party to effectively reply to the same readers.
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