technology

This weekend the Calgary Herald reported on a new study about the effects of the internet on social relationships. 

…A new Statistics Canada study has found that far from promoting social isolation, the Internet is enhancing relationships with family and friends. The study delves into the social and civic uses of the Internet in Canada, with one of its authors, Statistics Canada analyst Ben Veenhof, calling the results a “two sided tale of how social cohesion is being transformed through technology.”

This two sided tale suggests that heavy internet users spend less time with family and friends in person, but that the internet can also serve as a ‘social device,’ meaning that participation in social organizations and involvement with community members can also be a benefit of web use. 

Meanwhile, a University of Toronto professor of sociology, who is one of the authors of the study, says research knocks down the myth that people are living their lives only on the Internet. “We find that very, very few people are online only,” Barry Wellman said. “Almost always it’s a mixed relationship –that they’re making arrangements or talking with their friends in between actually seeing them face-to-face.”

Wellman said almost all relationships people have online are with those they already know. In fact, he says, it’s generally more social people who are greater Internet users.

Read more.

The Boston Globe reported this weekend on a study from University of Chicago sociologist James Evans about the booming number of readily accessible journal articles online. The Globe notes that this has enabled academics and other researchers to find materials they might not otherwise have access to, but that there may be downsides to this trend as well.

A recent study suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a “narrowing” effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet’s influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost – the opposite of the Internet’s promise.

“Winners are inadvertently picked,” says Evans. “It drives out diversity.”

Evans’ study contributes to a growning concern over the neutrality of web-based search tools, which most often privilege the popular and new. But these conclusions have been controversial, even in the academic community.

Yet there is vigorous debate over the Internet’s effects, and the Evans research has proved controversial. A University of Quebec researcher, Vincent Lariviere, has coauthored a forthcoming paper that challenges some of its conclusions. (Evans plans to publish a rebuttal.) Another researcher, Carol Tenopir at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, says that she has not studied citations, but that her surveys of reading patterns show the reverse of a narrowing effect.

“Electronic journals, I can say with confidence, have broadened reading,” says Tenopir.

Delve into the fray, here.

lhc-fondUSA Today reports this morning about fears surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, a $6 billion experiment in particle physics, which was launched in early October with phenomenal proton-smashing results. The collider made it through nine days of operations before shutting down due to technical difficulties. USA Today writes, “The collider — a 16.6-mile underground race track that will smash protons together in an attempt to re-create conditions from the beginnings of the universe — is the most recent example of a scientific experiment that taps into the public’s deep reserve of doomsday fears.”

Only a sociologist can sort this out…

There is something in the human psyche that makes us view some innovations or research with great suspicion, fearing that careless scientists will blow us all to kingdom come, says sociologist Robert Bartholomew, author of the 2001 book Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. “People see what they expect to see in a search for certainty, especially during times of crisis, as they attempt to confirm their worst fears and greatest hopes.”

Lack of understanding, “combined with anxiety, has been responsible for scares of all sorts over the centuries,” he notes, ranging from witchcraft trials to UFO sightings. Scares often arise from such anxieties as war jitters, including the phantom zeppelin sightings that convulsed Great Britain before World War I.

After describing a number of different ‘scientific nightmares’ from the last century, sociologist Robert Bartholomew claims that the Large Hadron Collider has joined the ranks…

“I believe this is a social delusion with legs,” Bartholomew says. After all, the actual collisions of protons at the lab won’t start again until spring, when he believes fears will resurface that the colliding protons will create black holes in the same way that imploding stars do in space.

“In the case of the ‘Collider Calamity,’ believers are likely to redouble their efforts to stop the experiments, and their numbers are likely to grow in the short term,” Bartholomew says. “Most ‘believers’ seem to think Armageddon will happen when the experiments become more sophisticated.”

Read the full story.

The latest installment from the video podcast ‘Meet the Bloggers‘ (from Friday, October 24th), examines the role of race in the presidential election and features commentary from sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield. Watch the podcast below.

Also take a look at Wingfield’s recent post on the Racism Review blog, ‘How White Privilege Works.’

The November issue of The Atlantic has an article by psychologist Paul Bloom called, ‘First Person Plural.’ In the piece Bloom explores a number of new ideas about ‘the self.’ He writes, “An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?”

In the piece Bloom draws upon work by sociologist Sherry Turkle about online avatars:

Sometimes we get pleasure from sampling alternative selves. Again, you can see the phenomenon in young children, who get a kick out of temporarily adopting the identity of a soldier or a lion. Adults get the same sort of kick; exploring alternative identities seems to be what the Internet was invented for. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment. She describes how one 16-year-old girl with an abusive father tried out multiple characters online—a 16-year-old boy, a stronger, more assertive girl—to try to work out what to do in the real world. But often the shift in identity is purely for pleasure. A man can have an alternate identity as a woman; a heterosexual can explore homosexuality; a shy person can try being the life of the party.

Read the full story.

A new study from Northwestern University scholars Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko suggests that “men are more likely to share their creative work online than women despite the fact that women and men engage in creative activities at essentially equal rates.”

This new research found that nearly two-thirds of men reported posting their work online, while only about half of the women in the study reported doing so.

“Because sharing information on the Internet today is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that tells us men’s voices are being disproportionately heard,” says Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.

When co-authors Hargittai and Walejko controlled for ‘self-reported digital literacy’ and ‘Web know-how,’ they found that men and women were posting their material at equal rates.

“This suggests that the Internet is not an equal playing field for men and women since those with more online abilities — whether perceived or actual — are more likely to contribute online content,” says Hargittai.

Read more.

A recent story in the Boston Globe addresses the persistent absence of women in fields such as science and engineering. The significant gender gap in these careers is often blamed on science and math classes in schools, apparent differences in aptitude, as well as potentially sexist companies. Although women make up nearly half of those participating in the paid labor market, they hold only a small proportion of careers requiring high-qualifications and receiving high earnings. Women make up only 20% of our country’s engineers, less than 30% of chemists, and only about 25% of those specializing in computing and mathematics.

The Globe reports:

“Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.”

“Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women – highly qualified for the work – stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.”

“One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other ‘hard’ sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.”

Read more.

Well-know sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University has written for Slate Magazine on Grand Theft Auto 4. Venkatesh’s article “Unjustifiable Carnage, Easy Alliances, and Lots of Self-Doubt: What Grand Theft Auto IV Gets Right About Gangland and Illegal Economies” draws connections between ‘Liberty City,’ the setting of the game, and Chicago’s South Side.

Venkatesh writes,

“If you are a fan of the new Grand Theft Auto video game, I have just the neighborhood for you. The setting of GTA IV, Liberty City, is an amped-up version of the New York metro area. If you want a slice of the real thing, however, I’d recommend Chicago’s South Side. The last time I visited Chicago, I stopped by 59th Street, near Washington Park (and only a few short blocks from the picturesque University of Chicago). Two of the local gangs were fighting each other in full view for control of a prime sales spot, a hotel. For a monthly fee, the proprietor had promised to allow one gang to turn the place into a bordello—drugs, prostitution, stolen merchandise. For the gangs, winning meant more than simply getting rid of their enemy. Neither controlled the area surrounding the hotel. Anyone bringing drugs (or women, or guns, etc.) to the hotel would have to run the gantlet formed by other enemy gangs, who would be at the ready to shoot down the transporter.”

friendonphone.jpgMike Nizza, author of the New York Times blog The Lede, recently reported on a new study from physicist Cesar Hidalgo of the University of Notre Dame and Calros Rodriguez-Sickert from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile on the persistence of relationships within the cell phone network.

Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert used data from almost two million people and eight million phone calls over the course of the year. They found that the leading cause of a persistent relationship was reciprocity – one friend returning another’s call.

PhysOrg.com interviewed Hidalgo:

“‘One result that I thought was somehow not so intuitive was the trade-off between the degree (number of links) of a person and the persistence of its ties,’ Hidalgo told PhysOrg.com. ‘It has been known for a long time that some people are much more connected than others, yet it was not known whether these highly connected individuals also had a larger number of strong connections. While time constraints may force people with more ties to be less persistent on average, the data also showed that, in absolute terms, people with more ties also have a greater number of persistent ties than those less connected. Highly connected individuals are not trading quality for quantity; rather, they appear to be more socially expressed in both the numbers of links and the persistence or strength of them.'”

computer.jpgA new report from the Crimes Against Children Center at the University of New Hampshire debunks previous stereotypes about internet sex offenders as “adults who target young children by posing as another youth, luring children to meetings, and then abducting or forcibly raping them” according to the APA. Instead, the authors of the study suggest that “most online sex offenders are adults who target teens and seduce victims into sexual relationships. They take time to develop the trust and confidence of victims, so that the youth see these relationships as romances or sexual adventures.”

Sociologist and lead author Janis Wolak argues, “most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who are open about their interest in sex. The offenders use instant messages, e-mail and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with their victims. In most of the cases, the victims are aware that they are talking online with adults. A majority of the offenders are charged with crimes such as statutory rape, that involve non-forcible sexual activity with adolescent victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults.”