Citings and Sightings

Just gotta find the gold one... Photo by takingthemoney via flickr.com

Here in the Citings & Sightings section at The Society Pages we strive to go beyond simply turning your attention to the social scientists getting their work and names in the news. We also aim to commend journalists who, in the pursuit of bringing depth and context to their pieces, reach out to social scientists and take advantage of the unique perspective and data they provide. Without further ado, we are proud to announce the winner of our  TSP Media Awards for Measured Social Science for the month of March 2012:

Stephanie Hegarty, “The myth of the eight-hour sleep.” BBC News, February 22, 2012.

As we discussed in our write up of the piece, this article uproots conceptions of “the way it has always been” by highlighting the implications of  historical research. Something as common as our nightly sleep patterns and how we understand “normal sleep” are challenged by Hegarty’s treatment of historians and sleep scientists in a rich and though-provoking manner.

We admit the selection process for this award isn’t exactly scientific or exhaustive, but we did, as a board, work hard to winnow down to our favorite bunch of nominees, and then debate more from there. We also don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer the winning journalists Stanley-Cup-sized trophies or cash prizes, but we hope our informal award offers both cheer and encouragement to continue the important work of bringing social scientistific knowledge to the broader public. Here’s to March’s best!

Cheers!

The Society Pages

Just gotta find the gold one... Photo by takingthemoney via flickr

One of the main goals of the Citings & Sightings section at The Society Pages goes beyond simply spotting social scientists and their work in the news to finding great uses of social scientific perspectives and findings in reporting on the issues of the day. To further highlight those journalists and outlets that are doing a top-notch job of giving their work nuance and scientific grounding by reaching out to well-spoken, approachable, and even daring social scientists, we are proud to announce the winners of our inaugural TSP Media Awards for Measured Social Science for the months of January and February 2012.

January 2012: Lauren Collins, “Brave New World: The Tao of Wifi.” New Yorker, December 5, 2011. As we wrote in our post on the piece, “It’d be easy to think that Georg Simmel hasn’t been the talk of the town since he took on Kant, but there he is, resplendent in the New Yorker’s front section.” In this article, Collins not only explores an interesting social phenomenon, but she asks an urban studies professor and draws on classic sociological work to consider something that could be easily overlooked, but turns out to be interesting, revealing, and even deeply funny.

February 2012: Greg Breining, “Higher Ed Leans Left. By Why? And So What?” Star Tribune, January 28, 2012. Written up for Citings & Sightings by Alex Casey, this op-ed goes beyond simply reporting Neil Gross and Solon Simmons’ findings on the political bent of the professorial ranks to seeking out social scientists to discuss why the ivory tower might lean left and whether it has any implications for the education provided at institutions of higher ed.

Now, just a note on process: with these informal awards, we hope to hand out some cheers, but we have no grand aspirations to offer cash prizes or trophies (though, oh, how we long to have gold-plated teaspoons to hand out to the lucky and deserving winners!), we simply wish to encourage journalism that engages social science. That said, we’re not being very scientific about the selection: there’s been no systematic review of all the newspapers (even Sarah Palin’s not up to reading all of them), nor have we performed any content analysis searching for “Weber” and “social capital.” Instead, we’ve talked—a lot—as a board, winnowed down our favorites to a set of nominees, and then talked some more. Each month, we’ll announce a new winner and encourage you to go read their piece. We think it’s worth your time!

All the best,

The Society Pages

Even in a publication seemingly devoted to the cultivation of erotic capital, you hardly expect to find the term bandied about—but there it is, on p. 75 of the January 2012 issue of Marie Claire magazine. In an article called “Celebrity Mistresses: The New Deal” (which bears the lede, “Meet the young generation of entrepreneurial ‘other women.’ They’re not ashamed, they’re not sorry, and they’re cashing in”) author Kiri Blakely compares celebrity dalliances of the past and present.

Blakely writes:

In the past, celebrity mistresses seemed less eager for the public’s attention. If their ultimate goal was fame and a payday, they were far more subtle about it… Back when mistresses could be depended on for discretion, famous cheaters had the upper hand. They got an extramarital roll in the sack, and, with their lovers hidden from view, they could still preserve their images as upstanding married men.

But, she goes on, “Today’s ‘other women’ know how to get media outlets on the line, lawyer up, and negotiate like fortune 500 CEOs… You have to wonder: who is using whom in these affairs?”

Blakely closes her article with a quick summary of one of the mechanisms at work in these high-profile romps:

If, as sociologist Catherin Hakim writes in her book Erotic Capital, men and feminists have conspired to trick women into giving away their sexuality for free, then these women have renegotiated the payoff. And stars like Kutcher are left with the consequences.

As it turns out, other “lady mags” have taken up the topic of erotic capital (look no further than Elle ["Eros in the Office," June 2011]), but so have the “lad mags” (see Men’s Health’s “Spark Her Sex Drive,” which tries to help readers “invest in” and “bank” their own erotic capital). No matter how it’s being used, it’s always interesting to watch a piece of a academic jargon make its way into the mainstream. Perhaps it’s just a faster process when the term’s a bit titillating!

A forgery of the 95 Theses in the Penn Libraries Collection

We often hear how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media contribute to protests and demonstrations by allowing activists to express their views or coordinate their actions. Social media were a big part of Arab Spring, but they were also a large part of the Reformation, says an article from The Economist. Nearly 500 years ago, Martin Luther went viral by circulating pamphlets, woodcuts, and other social media of that day in order to spread the message of religious reform.

The start of the Reformation is generally explained as a three-step process: 1. Martin Luther gets fed up with members of the Catholic Church asking for money to free souls, 2. Luther pins a list of 95 Theses (in Latin) to the Church door, and 3. The Reformation has begun. But, a closer look reveals Martin Luther spent more time thinking about social media:

The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation.

While it sounds pretty different (imagine communicating through woodcuts!), the media environment Luther circulated in shared some similarities with today. It was a decentralized system in which participants distributed messages through sharing—Luther passed the text of a pamphlet to a friendly printer, who could print the small text in a day or two.  Copies of this first edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, spread through the town they were printed in, being picked up by traveling merchants, preachers, or traders, and spread across the country. Local printers would then reprint their own editions, much like Facebook “shares” or Twitter “retweets.”

And, as with collective action in the 21st century, social media could  be dangerous during the Reformation:

In the early years of the Reformation expressing support for Luther’s views, through preaching, recommending a pamphlet or singing a news ballad directed at the pope, was dangerous. By stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring. The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, she argues, survived for as long as they did because although many people deeply disliked those regimes, they could not be sure others felt the same way. Amid the outbreaks of unrest in early 2011, however, social-media websites enabled lots of people to signal their preferences en masse to their peers very quickly, in an “informational cascade” that created momentum for further action.

Something very similar happened in the Reformation. A1523-24 surge in reform-pamphlet popularity (including those written by Luther and many others) served as a collective signaling mechanism of Luther’s support. Luther had been declared a heretic, but, because of his supporters, he was able to escape execution, and the Reformation became established in much of Germany. The power of social media is anything but new.

Photo by Joe Wolf via flickr.com

The most recent marital meltdown making headlines involves the rapid “I don’t” of entrepreneur Kim Kardashian and pro basketball player Kris Humphries. While their split’s every detail is dissected everywhere from tabloids to 24 hour news networks, the Des Moines Resister took a different angle on the issue: they talked to some sociologists.

Susan Stewart, associate professor of sociology at Iowa State University, and Tony Paik, associate professor the University of Iowa’s Department of Sociology, helped explain some of the broader societal issues affecting early divorce and how we perceive flame-out marriages. Stewart maintains that although people generally don’t talk about their own divorces, it’s fair game to critique others’. This appears to especially be true for the nearly 1 in 4  U.S. marriages that end within the first 5 years.

“We are fascinated when people crash and burn,” Stewart said. “It’s a way to work through [our own issues]: ‘They are way worse off than I am.’ ”

Stewart believes age is often a determining factor in early divorce, but short engagement periods and contrasting religious or family backgrounds also come into play. And Paik presents data showing that earlier intercourse, surprisingly, may also be a determinant of short-lived marriages: according to Paik’s analysis, of those who remain abstinent until age 18, only 15 percent will divorce within the first 5 years of marriage. Those who have sex before 18 are shown to divorce at at rate of 31 percent.

Paik hasn’t determined why this might be, but he speculates that sex at a young age may lead to other possible divorce determinants, including premarital pregnancy, permissiveness toward non-marital sex, and premarital cohabitation–each of which seems to lose relevance over time, particularly when it comes to the Kardashian-Humphries union, which, so far as the prurient public knows, included none of these factors.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are in full swing across the nation, and reporters are doing their best to navigate and explain the growing, and sometimes ambiguous, movement. Not surprisingly, sociologists are helping journalists make sense of the phenomenon for viewers and readers. To help shed light on the Occupy Boston protests, FOX 25 Boston turned to Tufts University sociology professor Sarah Sobieraj. In a relatively short TV interview, Sobieraj was asked to cover a lot of territory, including explaining reasons for the movement’s popularity, addressing the breadth of its message, and identifying connections to other famous American protests.

These are all topics Sobieraj should feel pretty comfortable speaking on—after all, she wrote the book on media and protest (Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism). However, she isn’t the only academic with something to say about the Occupy protests. For instance, CUNY professor Héctor Cordero-Guzmán was asked by OWS itself to analyze the characteristics of occupywallst.org visitors and saw his results picked up by The New Yorker’s Rational Irrationality blog, while Columbia’s Todd Gitlin wrote about the difference between Tea Party and OWS protests in the New York Times and discussed the movement with National Public Radio’s Marketplace. These scholars are working as ambassadors for the discipline and proving to the broader public that sociological research can be timely and relevant for parsing current events. Let us know if you spot any particularly edifying articles in your daily news review.

In a recent editorial in the Huffington Post, Abby Ferber, Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Ethnic Studies, uses the recent coverage of  Arnold Schwarzenegger’s child from an affair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a woman in NYC as an opportunity to examine often ignored elements of heterosexual privilege.

As Ferber reminds us, this is not the first time men in positions of power have been accused of sexual activity not befitting a married (or unmarried) man.

Another news cycle focused on powerful men’s inappropriate and abusive sexual behavior…Before Arnold, it was Tiger Woods, and John Edwards, and ______ (fill in the blank with one of the many other names that might pop into your mind at this point).
We have heard it all before. The flurry of newspaper and tabloid articles rehash the same old issues.

However, one accusation that is absent in the glut of sensationalist coverage, is that these men are destroying marriage itself. Instead, Ferber explains, we reserve that accusation for gay and lesbian couples seeking the right to marry.

The actions of individual heterosexual men are never used against all heterosexuals. One of the central benefits of being part of a privileged social identity group is that your own behavior is never taken as representing that of your entire group. No matter how many stories we hear about heterosexual men committing adultery and destroying their marriages, why is it that we continue to hear that it is LGBT people that are the greatest threat to the institution of marriage?

The privilege extends beyond the marital walls to negative stereotypes about deviant sexual desires and lack of self-control.

And what about the stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous, or as pedophiles? Here heterosexual men have gay men beat as well, and there is no dearth of public examples…And yet again it is gay men that our society stereotypes as pedophiles.

Ferber’s brief, but powerful, op-ed shows the importance of not only looking at what is said, but also what is not said. Sometimes it is the questions not asked, and generalizations not made, that reveal the benefits of positions of power.

That is what heterosexual privilege does, it allows individual heterosexual men to behave badly without anyone assuming it says something about all heterosexuals. And the point is not to assume that it does, but to ask why so many are willing to quickly make these assumptions about those who do not share the benefits of heterosexual privilege.

In a recent opinion column in the Star Tribune, John Rash points to the absence of religion as a major theme in shows on the national television networks.

The absence is all the more surprising considering that 80% of Americans reported to Gallup that religion plays a ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ important role in their lives.

And as Rash reminds readers, religion continues to maintain a very visible presence in other popular culture:

Topping the bestseller list is “Heaven is for Real,” about a boy witnessing the afterlife following a near-death experience.
The hottest Broadway show is “The Book of Mormon,” a satire (and grudging admiration) of the faith from the creators of “South Park.”
The highest-grossing R-rated film ever isn’t a gross-out comedy, Quentin Tarantino-style nihilistic violence, or even a sexual coming-of-age story, but “The Passion of the Christ.”

To help understand the absence, Rash turns to academia. Professor Jeanne Halgren Kilde, director of religious studies at the University of Minnesota, explains that even though network television rarely features explicitly religious themes, it is engaging in many of the same debates.

“Questions about good and evil, justice, personal destiny, love, about relationships — these are the narratives we see on TV that are the same questions religion has been asking, and answering, forever. So TV becomes in some senses a kind of superseding of what had been the religious context of discussing, to a more secular context of answering these questions.”

And, while the major religions are rarely a central theme in popular television, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of shows with spiritual and paranormal themes.

Hitting its peak around 2006, this trend inverted media maven Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: This time, the message was the mediums — as well as the psychics, ghost hunters and clairvoyant crimefighters who populated prime-time in shows like “Medium,” “Supernatural” and “Ghost Whisperer.”

Penny Edgell, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota provides context to the rise.

“Network prime time is responding to a trend,” said Penny Edgell “And thus it’s perpetuating and popularizing that trend of people thinking about spiritual things, but drawing on a different kind of repertoire that’s more about relationships and flexible personal contacts that might shape your own life that don’t have anything to do with a doctrine or a church. There’s a lot of the supernatural on TV, but not a lot of organized religion. And that mirrors trends in how people are thinking about their spirituality; it mirrors a rise of a discourse that emphasized spirituality of something that’s distinct from, but not always in opposition to, organized religion.”

Rash does make note of one of the few shows where religion is discussed – America’s longest running cartoon, The Simpsons.

Even the Catholic Church’s official newspaper, Osservatore Ramono, honed in on Homer, saying he “finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong.”

Whether or not the misadventures of America’s favorite animated family is the appropriate venue for a national discussion of religion remains up for debate.

The recent ending of several long-running daytime soap operas has social scientists discussing the reasons for this TV genre’s decline and its legacy. According to the Christian Science Monitor:

Soap operas, that staple of the daytime television schedule, have taken it on the chin lately. Two titans of the genre – “Guiding Light” and “As the World Turns,” ended impressive runs in the past year. “World,” which went dark Sept. 17, wrapped 54 years of fictional history for the folks of Oakdale, Ill. And “Light,” which began as a radio show in the 1930s, spanned nearly three-quarters of a century by the time it was dropped a year ago. These departures leave only six daytime “soaps” on the three broadcast TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), down from nearly two dozen at the height of demand for the daily serials.

One factor could be the move of more women into work outside the home.

The daily, quick serialized story, born and sponsored on radio by soap companies primarily to sell laundry products to housewives at home during the day, has evolved in lock step with the changing lives of that target female audience, says sociologist Lee Harrington from Miami University. “Serialized storytelling has been around for thousands of years but this particular, endless world of people, who could almost be your real neighbors they feel so temporal and all present, is disappearing,” she says, as women have moved into the workplace and out of the home during the day.

Adds a professor in communication studies:

These prime-time shows have incorporated the focus on character and emotion that endeared the soap operas to women, says Villanova University’s Susan Mackey-Kallis. But, she adds, just as women’s interests have expanded beyond the home to incorporate careers and public lives, “their taste in entertainment has expanded to include more interweaving of character with traditional plot-driven stories.”

But other experts are quick to acknowledge the debt owed to daytime soaps by other forms of television entertainment.

The handwriting began appearing on the wall as prime-time storytellers began to adapt the techniques of the daily soap to weekly evening dramas, which were predominantly episodic and plot-driven, says media expert Robert Thompson, founder of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. Seminal shows from “Hill Street Blues” through “The Sopranos” owe a debt to the character-heavy, serialized storytelling techniques of the soap opera genre, he adds.

“The daytime soaps really gave birth to the great narrative elements we now see in the highly developed prime-time dramas,” he points out.