It is not uncommon for many Americans to believe that morality and order comes from God and religion.  A society without these elements would consequently be immoral and chaotic.   When Phil Zuckerman traveled to Scandinavia, however, where he would spend the next fourteen months, he found a stable and content nonbelieving population, who often have high scores on the “happiness index”, low crime and corruption rates, and efficient educational systems.   His book Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment (New York University Press, 2010)summarizes his qualitative research – mainly in the form of interviews – on the people of Scandinavia, and on their relationship to religion and society.  He found that many people he interviewed for example, consider themselves Christian in a cultural historic sense, but do not at all believe in the notion of God – a position that would baffle many Americans.  In addition, though many reject the notion of God, atheists in Scandinavia seem to be marked by indifference to religion overall – an indifference that would be unheard of in America, where religion is still significantly powerful enough to have protesters.   In this fascinating book, Zuckerman explores possible historical and cultural reasons why Scandinavia came to be the irreligious niche that it is today, and why it so differs from other countries who seem to be becoming more and more religious.  Most of all,  he uses his research to dispel the belief that a society needs to believe in God to thrive and prosper.  The secular nonbelievers in Scandinavia, it seems, are doing just fine.

The swiftness and sureness of this victory against this product is a testament to the value of the right language and one good image.  In case you haven’t caught on yet, finely textured beef is better known as ”pink slime.”  Between that nifty pejorative and the image below, which you probably saw, finely textured beef never had a chance.  This is  “mechanically separated chicken” (made with a similar but not identical process); it appears to have become synonymous with pink slime, correctly or no:

This is the power of framing.  The product at issue is not “slime,” it’s cow-part paste.  Of course, it’s not “beef” either, it’s cow-part paste.  Both are discursive frames; it’s a classic “he said, she said” social movement framing battle (along the lines of “life” vs. “choice”).  The outcome of the contest depended, in part, on which language captured the public’s imagination.  And… well… we saw how that went.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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What’s fascinating is how closely some of the arguments in it match rhetoric in the presidential debate today. There’s concern that the President’s programs — in this case, Medicare — will negatively affect the quality of medical care, inserting the federal government between patients and doctors:

And an association with Harvard advisors was worthy of scorn then, too:

Another accuses Kennedy of attacking business at the expense of dealing competently with external national security threats:

It’s an interesting reminder that many of the attacks we see against President Obama today aren’t new; there’s the newest round in an ongoing struggle about social policies and political priorities.

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The situation for the unemployed is a case in point.  We have a complex, but comparatively miserly, unemployment compensation system.

Workers are generally entitled to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits.  However, there are two programs that potentially extend the benefit period for the unemployed. The first is the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program, which was enacted in 2008 in response to the economic crisis.  As the table below shows, the EUC offers workers in states with high rates of unemployment up to 53 additional weeks of benefits.

Workers who exhaust both their regular unemployment insurance and EUC benefits can receive additional support through the second program, the permanent federal-state Extended Benefits (EB) program.  As the table above shows, that program offers a maximum of 20 extra weeks of benefits depending on state unemployment rate levels.  However, there is an additional provision to the EB program that is now coming into play with negative consequences.  

As Hanna Shaw, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explains: 

A state may offer additional weeks of UI benefits through EB if its unemployment rate reaches certain thresholds… and if this rate is at least 10 percent higher than it was in any of the three prior years.  But unemployment rates have remained so elevated for so long that most states no longer meet this latter criterion (referred to as the “three-year lookback”). 

Because of this lookback provision hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers are now losing benefits, not because conditions are improving but because they are not continuing to worsen. The table below highlights the 25 states that have been forced to stop providing EB benefits this year and the number of workers in each state that have been cut adrift as a result.  Look at California — more than 95,000 workers have lost their benefits so far this year despite the fact that the state unemployment rate is almost 11 percent.

This is no accidental outcome.  In fact, according to Shaw,

Policymakers could have addressed the “lookback” when they extended federal UI at the beginning of the year, but they didn’t.  Instead, Congress not only allowed EB payments to fade out, but it also made changes that over the course of the year will reduce the number of weeks of benefits available in the temporary Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program, which provides up to 53 additional weeks to the long-term unemployed based on the unemployment rate in their state.

How serious is the long term unemployment problem?  Check out the chart below.  As it shows, the share of the labor force that is unemployed for more than 26 weeks is higher than at any point in the last six decades.  Perhaps even more striking is the fact that 41.3 percent of the 12.5 million people who were unemployed in April 2012 had been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.

In terms of the master narrative, this is just another of the necessary adjustments required to stabilize the “system;” no need for alarm.  Makes you wonder about the aims of the system, doesn’t it?

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The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a survey collecting expert opinions on one a hot new(-ish) concept amongst the Silicon Valley digerati: gamification. The survey offers some interesting insights and features commentary from folks like danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, and Amber Case; it also cites me a bit talking playbor (play + labor) and weisure (work + leisure).

The survey shows that tech commentators are split on whether gamification is destined to become an ubiquitous feature of the Web (53% agree, 42% disagree). The subtext of these sorts of conversations—given that tech commentators overwhelmingly have backgrounds in business—is: How can we use gamification to make a killing. We shouldn’t be to suprised about all the excitement from those invested in the tech industry. After all, gamification is all about getting people to view labor (i.e., the production if value) as play. And, if workers don’t view work as work, they may just do it for free.

One notable shortcoming in the Pew report is that it doesn’t ever make mention of exploitation. It has section on “manipulation” that cites, for example, danah boyd saying that gamification is

a modern-day form of manipulation. And like all cognitive manipulation, it can help people and it can hurt people. And we will see both.

Boyd’s ambivalence about manipulation is pretty interesting, since manipulation seems to be such an affront to our democratic values; but, then, if MySpace taught us anything, it’s that we don’t always know what’s best for us (and other people) when it comes to creating stuff and interacting on the Web.

Exploitation, however, cannot be reduced to manipulation. Sure, companies have a long history of manipulating us through advertising into buying things we don’t need through—and “advertgaming” (or whatever we might call games built to push products [e.g., the recent Perfect Strangers flash game phenomenon]) certainly takes manipulation of consumers to new levels—but exploitation is about more than manipulation. In fact, exploitation doesn’t even require manipulation. Marx saw it as a product of raw economic coercion: Work for unfair wages or starve!

Exploitation is about people creating values through their activity and someone else coming along and seizing that value without offering fair compensation. Exploitation is a form of theft. This theft is legal and justified by the logic of capitalism when one person or group own the means of production that others are using. So, a gamified platform like, say, Foursquare, exploits it’s users because it cashes in on the value of the data created using the app without returning that value to the users who produced that data. This process doesn’t require any manipulation or trickery, it’s just an accepted practice in capitalist societies.

By making work fun, companies may be tricking users, though users may also be fully aware of the companies’ motives: Knowing that Foursquare sells my data doesn’t necessarily make it less fun. The deeper critique is exploitation. I guess I’m not surprised that Pew—or, more precisely, the experts it polled—ignored this critique. A critique of the exploitation that gamification facilitates also implies a critique of capitalism itself. And, as we have seen with Chris Anderson’s unwillingness to release (read: censorship of) venture capitalist Nick Hanauer’s TED Talk on income inequality, Silicon Valley’s tech gurus are too busy cashing in on technology to be critical of it.

This is Part III, see also:

• Part I: The Brick Era (1932-1977) and The Golden Era (1978-1988)
• Part II: Gender Ahoy! (1989-2003)

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2004-2011: Lean LEGO Fighting Machine

As discussed in Part II, between 1989 and 2003, LEGO had introduced a stream of lines aimed specifically at girls.  None were particularly successful and the company was in trouble.  So, what next?

Those of us who follow every move TLG makes are well familiar with the company’s near collapse in 2004 and subsequent renaissance. This is a really important moment for our story, because this is the year when TLG stopped being a family run business and brought in a non-Kristiansen CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. With Knudstorp’s arrival came a change in philosophy. Quoted from the DailyMail article linked above:

Instead of “nurturing the child” – as Knudstorp puts it – [employees'] primary goal now had to be, “I am here to make money for the company.”

I, like many LEGO fans, am very grateful for what Knudstorp did to save and revitalize the company. The post-2004 era has seen a flourishing of LEGO themes and sets aimed at advanced builders. The LEGO minifig has been injected with more personality and variety than ever before. However, part of TLG’s new strategy also involved abandoning efforts the girl market and focusing exclusively on boys.

Abandoning schlock like Belville and Clikits is not a bad thing, but the push toward conflict and hyper-masculinity in classic themes (and a whole host of new ones) made LEGOLAND inhospitable for femininity.  Here are a couple more telling quotes from the Daily Mail article:

As always with Lego, this [action-oriented theme] was developed at every stage… with the help of focus groups, mostly comprising boys aged between six and 12.

In this new world focused on profit, the company sees no shame in admitting that, like it or not, what most excites little boys is conflict.

Which is to say, LEGO City is not the tranquil place LEGO Town was.

Notice the substantial hike in the m/f ratio in 2007. This ratio had been gradually approaching 1 throughout the 90s, but jumped back up to 1992 levels in 2007 (male/female ratio = 8).

Girls also disappeared from LEGO commercials and marketing collateral. Take this awesome series of commercials encouraging fathers and sons to build together (the first is embedded below). The utter lack of anything similar for girls sends a clear message about who is expected to play with LEGO, it has entirely entered the masculine domain. With girls being actively excluded from TLG’s marketing efforts it’s no surprise that we see such a low percentage playing with them now.

In the final installment of this series, I’ll offer my perspective on the controversy over the new line aimed at girls, LEGO Friends.

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David Pickett is a social media marketer by day and a LEGO animator by night.  He is fanatical about LEGO and proud to be a nerd. Read more from David at Thinking Brickly.

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The politics of motherhood reared its head again last month when Hilary Rosen, who the news identified as a “Democratic strategist,” said that Ann Romney (Mrs. Mitt) had “never worked a day in her life.” (A NY Times article is here.)

“Worked” was a bad choice of words.  Raising kids and taking care of a home are work, maybe even if you can hire the kind of help that Mrs. Romney could afford.  Rosen’s comment implied that family work is not as worthwhile as work in the paid labor force.  That’s not such an unreasonable conclusion if you assume that we put our money where our values are and reward work in proportion to what we think it’s worth.  Mitt’s supporters use this value-to-society assumption to justify the huge payoffs Romney derived from those leveraged buyouts at Bain Capital.*

Even Mrs. Romney apparently felt that there must be some truth to the enviability of a career.   Why else would she refer to stay-at-home motherhood as a career?  “My career choice was to be a mother.”

Still, regardless of the truth of Rosen’s remark, it was insulting.**  Stay-at-home motherhood is work – a job.

But is it a good job?

A recent Gallup poll provides some more evidence as to why stay-at-home moms might be both envious or resentful of their employed counterparts.  Gallup asked women about the emotions, positive and negative, that they had felt “a lot” in the previous day.  Gallup then compared the stay-at-home moms, employed moms, and employed women who had no children at home.

The stay-at-home moms came in first on every negative emotion.  Some of the differences are small, but the Gallup sample was more than 60,000 so these differences are statistically significant.   The smallest difference was for Stress – no surprise there, since paid work can be stressful.  Worry and Anger too can be part of the workplace.  The largest differences were for Sadness and Depression.  Stay-home moms were 60% more likely to have been sad or depressed.

Gallup also asked about positive feelings (Thriving, Smiling or Laughing, Learning, Happiness, Enjoyment), and while the differences were smaller, they went the same way, with stay-at-home moms on the shorter end.  Still it’s encouraging that 86% of them had Experienced Happiness 86%; so had 91% of the employed moms.

Money matters.  As Rosen said,

This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice.

Gallup found a small interaction effect.  The stay-at-home mom-employed difference was greater for low-income women.

The Gallup poll does not offer much speculation about why stay-at-home moms have more sadness and less happiness. One in four experienced “a lot” of depression yesterday.  That number should be cause for concern.

Maybe women feel more uncertain and less able to control their lives when they depend on a man, especially one whose income is inadequate.  Maybe stay-at-home moms find themselves more isolated from other adults. Maybe they are at home not by choice but because they cannot find a decent-paying job. Or maybe money talks, and what it says to unpaid stay-at-home moms is society does not value your work.  Nor, in comparison with other wealthy countries, does US society or government provide much non-financial support to make motherhood easier.

The late Donna Summer sang,

She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right

But how right are we treating women who work hard for no money?

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* For example, Edward Conrad is a former partner of Romney.  In a recent article in the Times Magazine, Adam Davidson writes, “If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conrad says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefitted society.”

** Hillary Clinton committed a similar gaffe twenty years ago in response to a reporter’s question about work and family “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life”

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Missy C. noticed that the manufacturer’s product description listed on Amazon for one of the Fisher Price Imaginext Sky Racers took for granted that the toy was for boys, not, say, “kids”:

Monica C., meanwhile, noticed another example of the association of girls with a diva-ish princess center-of-attention persona when looking at onesies for sale at My Habit. Options included “born fabulous,” “high maintenance,” “born to wear diamonds,” and “it’s all about me,” among others:

Similarly, Melanie J. saw some baby booties for sale at retail chain JR’s in North Carolina that reinforce the idea that boys are mischievous while girls are materialistic:

You can buy them gendered vitamins as well. Nathan, who writes at 1115, sent in this photo he took at Target:

Pete & Emily in Norwich, UK, noticed that you can now allow your hamsters to inhabit gendered worlds too, if you’d like; they sent us this photo they took at a pet store:

But we do have two counter-examples this time! Jackie H. took a photo of a kitchen set she saw for sale at Meijer, which shows both a boy and a girl using it:

And Isabeau P.S., Jesse W., and Anne Sofie B. all sent in images from the catalog for Swedish toy maker Leklust (two of the images were discussed at Mommyish):

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Bobby and Reggie, from "We are the Other." © Wing Young Huie, 2012.

The photo shows two men, Bobby and Reggie, according to the title, sitting in a kitchen. Save the fact that the men are of different races and the haunting self-consciousness of the unnamed man on the right, I didn’t immediately understand the significance of this image, let alone its relation to debt. One could see it as a photo of a neighborly chat, a family gathering, or a work break. But then Wing shared the story behind the image.

The kitchen is Bobby’s and his house is just down the street from Wing in South Minneapolis.  One of nine children, Bobby has lived in the same house since his mother bought it in 1968. On February 17th, 2012, Bobby’s house was the center of a block party called the “Foreclosure Free Fest.” Turns out Bobby, a proud 57-year-old plasterer and former Marine, had fallen behind on his mortgage after a series of health problems. This picture was taken that evening.

The event drew 300 supporters throughout the night, with a line-up of well-known local musicians who performed in his small living room and on a stage in Bobby’s front lawn. Bobby didn’t know everyone who came that night, but one person he did know was Reggie. They grew up together in South Minneapolis and met in the 7th grade “We ran the neighborhood,” says Bobby. “We fought each other and fought everyone else. But that’s the way it was, you beat someone up. and they end up your best friend.”

With coverage from ABC News and the Huffington Post, as well as the support of his friends, neighbors, and those in the Occupy movement, Bobby was able to get the Bank of America to offer a mortgage modification that will allow him to keep his home. The support seems miraculous to Bobby: “It’s like I fell in the mud and can now come up for clean air all the time.”

Bobby is, of course, one of thousands, even millions of Americans struggling with debt and foreclosure—each one with a story, each one with some friends and neighbors and support, and yet each one with little media coverage that can lead to real help or assistance as they struggle to maintain the piece of the American Dream they thought they’d already achieved.

Word Cloud generated using Wordle.net

We talk a lot about the public value of social scientific research, but sometimes it seems we’re either preaching to the choir or our sermons are falling on deaf ears. Perhaps what we really need is ongoing dialog and debate between the true believers and the skeptics. For a piece that could help push toward that kind of exchange, check out this recent New York Times “Opinionator” piece from Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame.

As the title suggests, Gutting’s piece poses the question of how reliable social scientific research is when it comes to informing real-world, public policy. Not as much as we might think or wish. Part of the problem is that we often fail to distinguish between early, preliminary tests and more definitive studies. Far more problematic is that fact that the knowledge and information in the social sciences is not as reliable as we might hope. Worse, prediction is where the social sciences really struggle. At the root of our inability to guide and predict from our research, according to Gutting, is the fact that the social world is so complex it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of randomized, controlled experimentation that is the hallmark of so much of the best research in the natural and physical sciences.

These ideas are inspired and informed by a new book called Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi. While I haven’t read the book yet (and am a bit skeptical about trying to imitate the natural science model), I’m especially interested to see what my editorial partner Chris Uggen thinks. Chris is, after all, constantly pushing the value of controlled and/or randomized experiments in our field.

Anyway, since that is to come, I’ll give the last word for the moment, to Gutting, in the hope that it will be the first step to further reflection and exchange:

My conclusion is not that our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research. We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions. But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results. Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.

To summarize, the “I want______” social media analysis finds that people desire immediate gratification. In particular, 80% of the time when people “want” something, it turns out to be food. Looking at the top 10 status update wants, phones and cars are the only inedible desires. In contrast, the survey question elicited responses that were primarily financially based, with 50% of participants expressing a desire for money. Of the top 10 wants, non-monetary items included health, sex, and peace and quiet.

Two interesting and interrelated things are going on here. First, we can juxtapose the kinds of desires that Facebook users share via status updates versus the kinds of desires that participants express in response to the survey question. Second, we can look at the ways in which the architecture of a communication platform shapes how we express and define ourselves.

As seen in the infographic, NetBase.com juxtaposes the ostensibly “logical” responses from the Harris survey to “emotional” responses from Facebook. I think this differentiation is somewhat off. Rather than logic versus emotion, the responses seem to differ on the dimension of temporality. Specifically, Facebook status updates are about what people want right now, while the Harris responses tend towards desires with more long term benefits. Spontaneously, we want to gratify our immediate needs. Long term, we want to be able to gratify whatever need may arise. So even though right now I want a calorie-filled, frozen, whipped-topped coffee drink and a blueberry muffin (seriously, my stomach is grumbling) long term, I want to have the financial resources to purchase these coffee-shop treats without dire consequences for my bank account,  and the bodily health to consume these treats without dire consequences for my well-being.

So what leads us to express these different kinds of desires in different contexts? The most obvious difference between the Harris survey and the social media analysis is the spontaneity of the latter versus the elicitation of the former.

The architecture of a communication medium necessarily shapes how we communicate. When the medium is explicitly identity-based (like social network sites and personal interactive homepages), the medium also shapes who we are. Facebook prompts us with a fill-in-the-blank architecture, and invites us to literally update our statuses. We are prompted to share where we are, what we are doing, and what we are thinking RIGHT NOW. As such, we talk about the here and now, and present ourselves as here-and-now versions. We present ourselves in process. Our desires, in this context, are the kind that can be immediately satisfied, moving us out of the current status, and requiring a new, here and now update.

We're always connected, whether we're connecting or not.

Last month at TtW2012, a panel titled “Logging off and Disconnection” considered how and why some people choose to restrict (or even terminate) their participation in digital social life—and in doing so raised the question, is it truly possible to log off? Taken together, the four talks by Jenny Davis (@Jup83), Jessica Roberts, Laura Portwood-Stacer (@lportwoodstacer), and Jessica Vitak (@jvitak) suggested that, while most people express some degree of ambivalence about social media and other digital social technologies, the majority of digital social technology users find the burdens and anxieties of participating in digital social life to be vastly preferable to the burdens and anxieties that accompany not participating. The implied answer is therefore NO: though whether to use social media and digital social technologies remains a choice (in theory), the choice not to use these technologies is no longer a practicable option for number of people.

In the three-part essay to follow, I first extend this argument by considering that it may be technically impossible for anyone, even social media rejecters and abstainers, to disconnect completely from social media and other digital social technologies (to which I will refer throughout simply as ‘digital social technologies’). Even if we choose not to connect directly to digital social technologies, we remain connected to them through our ‘conventional’ or ‘analogue’ social networks. Consequently, decisions about our presence and participation in digital social life are made not only by us, but also by an expanding network of others. In the second section, I examine two prevailing discourses of privacy, and explore the ways in which each fails to account for the contingencies of life in augmented realities. Though these discourses are in some ways diametrically opposed, each serves to reinforce not only radical individualist framings of privacy, but also existing inequalities and norms of visibility. In the final section, I argue that current notions of both “privacy” and “choice” need to be reconceptualized in ways that adequately take into account the increasing digital augmentation of everyday life. We need to see privacy both as a collective condition and as a collective responsibility, something that must be honored and respected as much as guarded and protected.

Part I: Distributed Agency and the Myth of Autonomy                

For the skeptical reader in particular, I want to begin by highlighting that the effects of neither participation nor non-participation in digital sociality are uniform or determined, and that both are likely to vary considerably across different social positions and contexts. An illustrative (if somewhat extreme) example is the elderly: Alexandra Samuels caricatures the absurdity of fretting over seniors who refuse online engagement, and my own socially active but offline-only grandmother makes a great case study in successful living without digital social technology. Though 84 years old, my grandmother is healthy and can get around independently; she lives in a seniors-only community of a few thousand adults (nearly all of whom are offline-only as well), and a number of her neighbors have become her good friends. She has several children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who live less than an hour away, and who call and visit regularly. As a financially stable retiree, she can say with confidence that there will be no job-hunting in her future; her surviving siblings still send letters, and her adult children print out digital family photos to show her. For these reasons and others, it would be hard to make the case that either she or any one of her similarly situated friends suffers from digital deprivation.

In contrast, the “Logging Off and Disconnection” panel highlights how the picture of offline-only living shifts if some of the other factors I list above change. Whereas my grandmother has a number of friends with whom she spends time (and who, like her, do not use digital social technologies), Davis describes the isolation that digital abstainers experience when many of the friends with whom they spend time do use digital social technologies. Much to their dismay, non-participating friends of social media enthusiasts in particular can find themselves excluded from both offline and online interaction within their own social groups. Similarly, Roberts finds that even 24 hours of “logging off” can be impossible for students if their close friends, family members, or significant others expect them to be constantly (digitally) available. In these contexts, it becomes difficult to refuse digital engagement without seeming also to refuse obligations of care. Nor is what I will call abstention-related atrophy limited to relationships with friends and family members; professional relationships and even career trajectories can suffer as well. Vitak points out that, for job-seekers, the much-maligned proliferation of ‘weak ties’ that social media has been accused of fostering is a greater asset for gaining employment than is a smaller assortment of ‘strong ties.’ Modern life has become sufficiently saturated with social media to support use of what Portwood-Stacer calls its “conspicuous non-consumption” as a status marker: in the United States, where 96.7 percent of households have at least one television, “I’m not on Facebook” is the new “I don’t even own a TV.” That even a few people read the purposeful rejection of social media as a privilege signifier implicitly demonstrates the high cost of abstaining from social media.

You can opt-out, but you can't make your friends opt-out.

Conversations about logging off or disconnecting have continued in the weeks since TtW2012. Most recently, PJ Rey (@pjrey) makes the case that social media is a non-optional system; because societies and technologies are always informing and affecting each other, “we can’t escape social media any more than we can escape society itself.” This means that the extent to which we can opt-out is limited; we can choose not to use Facebook, for example, but we can no longer choose to live in a world in which no one else uses Facebook (whether for planning parties or organizing protests). As does Davis, Rey argues that “conscientious objectors of the digital age” therefore risk losing social capital in a number of ways. I would like to suggest, however, that even those who are “secure enough” to quit social media and other digital social technologies can not separate from them fully, nor can so-called “Facebook virgins” remain pure abstainers. Rejecters and abstainers continue to live within the same socio-technical system as adopters and everyone else, and therefore continue to affect and to be affected by digital social technology indirectly; they also continue to leave digital traces through the actions of other people. As I elaborate below, not connecting and not being connected are two very different things; we are always connected to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting to them or not. A number of digital social technology companies capitalize on this fact, and in so doing amplify the extent to which digital agency is increasingly distributed rather than individualized.

In this section, I use Facebook as a familiar example to illustrate the near-impossibility of erasing digital traces of one’s self most generally. Many of the surveillance practices that follow here are not unique to Facebook, but the difficulty of achieving a full disengagement from Facebook can serve as an indicator of how much more difficult a full disengagement from all digital social technology would be. First, consider some of the issues that face people who actually have Facebook accounts (at minimum a username and password). Facebook has tracked its users’ web behavior even when they are logged out of Facebook; the “fixed” version of the site’s cookies still track potentially identifying information after users log out, and these same cookies are deployed whenever anyone (even a non-user) views a Facebook page. Last year, a 24-year-old law student named Max Schrems discovered that Facebook retains a wide array of user profile data that users themselves have deleted; Schrems subsequently launched 22 unique complaints, started an initiative called Europe vs. Facebook, and earned Facebook’s Ireland offices an audit.

Are you my shadow profile?

In one particular complaint, Schrems alleges that Facebook not only retains data it should have deleted, but also builds “shadow profiles” of both users and non-users. These shadow profiles contain information that the profiled individuals themselves did not choose to share with Facebook. For a Facebook user, a shadow profile could include information about any pages she has viewed that have “Like” buttons on them, whether she has ever “Liked” anything or not. User and non-user shadow profiles alike contain what I call second-hand data, or information obtained about individuals through other individuals’ interactions with an app or website. Facebook harvests second-hand data about users’ friends, acquaintances, and associates when users synchronize their phones with Facebook, import their contact lists from other email or messaging accounts, or simply search Facebook for individual names or email addresses. In each case, Facebook acquires and curates information that pertains to individuals other than those from whom the information is obtained.

Second-hand data collection on and through Facebook is not limited to the creation of shadow profiles, however. As a recent article elaborated, Facebook’s current photo tagging system enables and encourages users to disclose a wealth of information not only about themselves, but also about the people they tag in posted photos. (Though not mentioned in the piece, the “tag suggestions” provided by Facebook’s facial recognition software have made photo tagging nearly effortless for users who post photos, while removing tags now involves a cumbersome five-click process per each tag that a pictured user wants removed.) Recall, too, that other companies collect second-hand data through Facebook each time a Facebook user authorizes a third party app; by default, the third-party app can ‘see’ everything the user who authorized it can see, on each of that user’s friends’ profiles (the same holds true for games and for websites that allow users to log-in with their Facebook accounts). Those users who dig through Facebook’s privacy settings can prevent apps from accessing some of their information by repeating the tedious, time-consuming process required to block a specific app for each and every app that any one of their Facebook ‘friends’ might have authorized (though the irritation-price of doing so clearly aims to guide users away from this sort of behavior). Certain pieces of information, however—a user’s name, profile picture, gender, network memberships, username, user id, and ‘friends’ list—remain accessible to Facebook apps, no matter what; Facebook states that this makes one’s friends’ experiences on the site (if not one’s own) “better and more social.” Users do have the ‘nuclear option’ of turning off all apps, though this action means they cannot use apps themselves; their information also still remains available for collection through their friends’ other Facebook-related activities.

Facebook representatives have denied any wrongdoing, denied the existence of shadow profiles per se, and maintained that there is nothing non-standard about the company’s data collection practices. Nonetheless, even the possibility of shadow profiles raises a complicated question about where to draw the line between information that individuals ‘choose willingly’ to share (and are therefore responsible for assuming it will end up on the Internet), and “information that accumulates simply by existing.” The difficulty of making this determination reflects not only the tensions between prevailing privacy discourses, but also the growing ruptures between the ways in which we conceptualize privacy and the increasingly augmented world in which we live.

Your privacy is your friends' privacy--and vice versa.

As a headline in The Atlantic put it recently, “On Facebook, Your Privacy is Your Friends’ Privacy”—but what does that mean? How should we weigh which of our friends’ desires against which of our own? How are we to anticipate the choices our friends might make, and on whom does the responsibility fall to choose correctly? The problem is that we tend to think of privacy as a matter of individual control and concern, even though privacy—however we define it—is now (and has always been) both enhanced and eroded by networks of others. In a society that places so much emphasis on radical individualism, we are ill-prepared to grapple with the rippling and often unintended consequences that our actions can have for others; we are similarly disinclined to look beyond the level of individual actions in asking why such consequences play out in the ways that they do.

‘Simply existing’ does generate more information than it did two generations ago, in part because so many different corporations and institutions are attempting to capitalize on the potentials for targeted data collection afforded by a growing number of digital technologies. At the same time, surveillance of individual behavior for commercial purposes is nothing new, and Facebook is hardly the only company building data profiles to which the profiled individuals themselves have incomplete access (if any access at all). What is comparatively new about Facebook-style surveillance in social media is the degree to which disclosure of our personal information has become a product not only of choices we make (knowingly or unknowingly), but also of choices made by our family members, friends, acquaintances, or professional contacts. Put less eloquently: if Facebook were an STI, it would be one that you contract whenever any of your old classmates have unprotected sex. Even one’s own abstinence is no longer effective protection against catching another so-called ‘data double’ or “data self,” yet we still think about privacy and disclosure as matters of individual choice and responsibility. If your desire is to disconnect completely, the onus is on you to keep any and all information about yourself—even your name—from anyone who uses Facebook, or who might use anything like Facebook in the future.

If we dispense with digital dualism—the idea that the ‘virtual,’ ‘digital,’ or ‘online’ world is somehow separate and distinct from the ‘real,’ ‘physical,’ or ‘face to face’ world—it becomes apparent that not connecting to digital social technologies and not being connected to digital social technologies are two different things. Whether as a show of conspicuous non-consumption, an act of atonement and catharsis (as portrayed in Kelsey Brannan’s [@KelsBran] film Over & Out), or for other reasons entirely, we can choose to accept the social risks of deleting our social media profiles, dispensing with our gadgetry, and no longer connecting to others through digital means. Yet whether we feel liberated, isolated, or smugly self-satisfied in doing so, we have not exited the ‘virtual world’; we remain situated within the same augmented reality, connected to each other and to the only world available through flows that are both physical and digital. I email photographs, my mother prints them out, and my grandmother hangs them in frames on her wall; a social media refuser meets her own searchable reflection in traces of book reviews, grant awards, department listings, and RateMyProfessors.com; a nearby friend sees you check-in early at your office, and drops by to surprise you with much needed coffee. A news story is broken and researched via Twitter, circulated in a newspaper, amplified by a TV documentary, and referenced in a book that someone writes about on a blog. Whether the interface at which we connect is screen, skin, or something else, the digital and physical spaces in which we live are always already enmeshed. Ceasing to connect at one particular type of interface does not change this.

Even Houdini can't escape digital social technology.

In stating that connection is inescapable, I do not mean to suggest that all patterns of connection are equitable or equivalent in form, function, or impact. Connection does not operate independent of variables such as race, class, gender, ability, or sexual orientation; digital augmentation is not a panacea for oppression, and neither has nor will magically eliminate social and structural inequality to birth a technoutopian future. My intent here in focusing on broader themes is not to diminish the importance of these differences, but to highlight three key points about digital social technology in an augmented world:

1.)   First, our individual choices to use or reject particular digital social technologies are structured not only by cultural, economic, and technological factors, but also by our social, emotional, and professional ties to other people;

2.)   Second, regardless of how much or how little we choose to use digital social technology, there are more digital traces of us than we are able to access or to remove;

3.)   Third, even if we choose not to participate in digital social life ourselves, the participation of people we know still leaves digital traces of us. We are always connected to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting through them or not.

Next week, I’ll continue the conversation by examining the ways that this inescapable connection serves to complicate two prevailing discourses of privacy, both of which assume autonomous individuals as subjects and, in so doing, mask larger issues of power and inequality.

Whitney Erin Boesel (@phenatypical) is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Performance image by Neil Girling, http://www.theblight.net. Used with permission.

Modernized Rockwell image by William George Wadman, from http://fadedandblurred.com/blog/great-art-for-a-great-cause/

Shadow image by yalayama, from http://braingasmic.tumblr.com/post/22348601967/how-pcbs-promote-dendrite-growth-may-increase-autism

Kids image from http://www.eyesonbullying.org/about.html

Houdini image from http://www.thestar.com/article/914083–houdini-s-inescapable-influence

So, the story isn’t quite as dire as we might think.  This may be little consolation, though, for my students who walked across the stage yesterday.  Congrats, Seniors! :)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Last week, the Census Bureau announced that as of July 1, 2011, for the first time the majority (50.4%) of babies under age 1 in the U.S. were not non-Hispanic Whites. Animal New York posted a video by Jay Smooth discussing the reactions to and implications of this news:

You can see the NYT article Jay Smooth parodies here, but note that the graph is mislabeled. The line labeled “White” actually only represents the data for non-Hispanic Whites, while the line labeled “Non-White” includes births to White Hispanics, so the terminology they used doesn’t accurately reflect what the graph illustrates.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

If you like Office Hours, you probably already love Contexts magazine and now you’ve got another great podcast to subscribe to with the Contexts Podcast. So head over to contexts.org to subscribe and while you’re there, check out the new Spring 2012 issue of Contexts!

Download Office Hours #52!

Just over half of the sample had a full-time job; 12% were un- or underemployed and looking for full-time work.

The recession appears to have depressed earnings by about $3,000. Pre-recession grads were making, on average, $30,000, while post-recession grads took in $27,000:

A third of students (35%) reported that their first job out of college was “not at all related” or “not very closely related” to their major. Almost half saw their first job as temporary and just “to get you by” (though this would drop to 36% when asked about their current job). Only half thought that their first job required a college degree.

A significant proportion of students felt that they’d had to sacrifice something important to secure their job: 27% reported that they were working below their level of education, 24% took a job that paid less than they expected to earn, and 23% were working outside of their interests and training:

Many graduates would have done things differently. Notably a third said they would have re-thought their choice of major:

And most of them would have been more likely to have chosen a professional major (e.g., education or nursing) or one in a “STEM” field (e.g., science, technology, engineering, or math).

Recession-era grads are much more likely to be getting help from their parents, compared to pre-recession grads:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Film “Caine’s Arcade” © 2012 Caine’s Arcade/Nivan Mullick)

but after Nirvan organized a smartmob using the Hidden LA Facebook page and Reddit, Caine now has lots of customers. The coverage for Caine’s Arcade has been phenomenal. News sites and websites have all lauded his arcade. Caine was invited to bring his arcade to MakerFaire™ at the Exploratorium (Makers are individuals who create) for their Make day for trash. Caine was invited to visit the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to learn about rockets. Caine’s Arcade has gone on the road to participate in Art celebrations around L.A., and Caine recently received the Latino Spirit Award. These have all great opportunities for what seems to be a nice young man with a curious mind. It’s great that people have reached out to offer him opportunities to learn and grow. Many have donated to a scholarship fund for Caine and a foundation has been established to help other young makers. The Goldhirsch foundation will match dollar-for-dollar donations contributed to Caine up to $250K.

The video of Caine’s Arcade inspired other children to create cardboard things of their own. This pinball machine by Ezra was featured on the @cainesarcade Twitter feed:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Film “Ezra’s Pinball Machine” © Ezra via makedoTV)

and a version of Caine’s Arcade showed up at the HandmadeHK faire in Hong Kong:

A cardboard arcade in China © @lantaumama

Within all of this (Web-driven) coverage, one of the most striking things, though largely unspoken, is the fact that Caine’s Arcade is analog. Caine is not glued to a Gameboy™ or some other device–he’s actively building something inherently non-digital. Caine has also created a 3D interactive experience to share with others.

In the not too distant past, a 9 year old making a cardboard arcade would not be considered unusual. Kids have always been resourceful and creative with materials, play and imagination.

As we’ve moved into a computing age, the making of that past shifted. As people began to use the computer as a new tool for making, they bumped up against limitations, mostly consisting of what kind of software was available for them to make with. Initially, word processing was the “creation” tool of choice for people to make things with their computers without having to program. Documents, fliers, graphic designs, signs and 2D art were easily created and shared with others via print or by showing someone the art on a computer screen.

As more software became available and hardware developed interoperability, people gained capabilities to make things in the world and capture their productions with digital mediums such as photo, audio and video. The interoperability enabled them to put those “captures” into the computer where they could use the network to share them with others. (This in part, is the capability that Nirvan utilized when he made and uploaded the Caine’s arcade video to YouTube.)

However, documenting, sharing, and creating flat objects on a computer does not completely satisfy people’s desire to make in three dimensions, and/or to create shared experiences with other people in the world.

There is a limitation to what can be made in the world in three dimensions using the computer. Tools have evolved from 2D text to interoperability with photo, video and audio, but 3D interaction outside the machine, created with the machine has largely been elusive.

For the most part, there haven’t been many tools for us to use to do this and many lack the skills or knowledge to fasten their own. Kinect hackers (those modifying the Microsoft Kinect to be open for experimental input and play) have made a start:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Film “Juggle Kinect Video” © Shakinfree)

3D printers such as the RepRap or Makerbot, enable 3D objects to be created but those type of printers require some specialized skills and knowledge and can be expensive–especially for a kid.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Film “3D Printing a chess pawn with my RepRap” © Erikdb)

3D printers make plastic modeled objects, not necessarily interactive experiences in three dimensions. Also, to print a single 3D object can take a long time.

Thus, there is a shortage: people have access to 3D tools, but many have limited knowledge of how to work with those tools, and the tools themselves are either the limited in creating and generating 3D shared experiences in the world, or too expensive. Many people lack funds and skills for 3D printing and 3D printed objects can be time consuming, solitary and innate.

Lego Mindstorms, Arduinos and others have been a good first start to controlling 3D objects and creating the potential for shared experiences. They have some drawbacks:  specialized knowledge of electronics, special hardware, and perhaps a computer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Film “Arduino Light Game” © phokur)

If someone wants to share 3D experiences with other people and they are 9 years old and don’t have access to much money or a computer, electronics knowledge, a 3D printer, and/or other things like how to program, they’ll build something themselves. Out of whatever is at hand. In Caine’s case, cardboard:

Caine has studio space to make © 2012 Caine's Arcade/Nirvan Mullick

People need room to make and create. Caine is fortunate in that he has more room to make in his dad, George’s East LA shop than many who are wealthier than he is. He has the space to create–studio space. George’s business, Smart Parts Aftermarket, sells used auto parts. Since Smart Parts has mostly moved online, the front counter and lobby space were vacant and Caine was able to recycle the space for his arcade.

In modern apartment buildings or condos there is little space to “make” and as a result, it seems that people have stopped making. Housing developments often have rules and deposits. Some may prohibit painting or the use of glue or hammers at random times: there are noise restrictions and odor restrictions and damage fines and nowhere to store things or to work outside. Many have carports and not garages and inside they are carpeted or otherwise set up for “living and consuming” rather than making.

"Condo Carport" © Grand Harbor Vero Beach)

In Life, Inc., Douglas Rushkoff suggested that post war housing communities in the United States were planned so that people would not borrow or share tools and would take pride of ownership in consumption—of owning their own. This was a sinister step in urban planning: no space for creating or creativity.

I’d argue that for some time, making has been slowly conditioned out of us as a society, and architecture has influenced this trend.  Now that people want to make again, there are more shared maker spaces for them to do so–and more things are being made as a result.

Caine’s Arcade inspires much discussion: entrepreneurship, creativity, parenting, education, making, documentaries, power of social media, sociability, imagination, play, gaming, cooperation, nostalgia, innovation, etc..

For me, the highlight of Caine’s Arcade is the positive response from people all over the world for a low-cost, innovative, creative, analog 3D grounded reality experience, made by someone who is passionate about making, a master of his materials, and dedicated to play.

Caine in his Arcade © 2012 Caine's Arcade/Nirvan Mullick

Click here to view the embedded video.

Just a quick post this Saturday about Twitter partnering with NASCAR to cover the Pocono 400. Via Mashable:

The Pocono 400 partnership will revolve around the #NASCAR hashtag, according to a joint press conference Twitter and NASCAR held Friday.

“During the race, we’ll curate accounts from the NASCAR universe and surface the best Tweets and photos from the drivers, their families, commentators, celebrities and other fans when you search #NASCAR on Twitter.com,” reads a post to the official company blog.

Full disclosure: I know next-to-nothing about NASCAR. The most idiosyncratic thing I know about NASCAR is that the headlights are painted on, and not real. Other than that, someone could tell me that you get extra points (less points?) if the car crash looks really cool, and I would believe them. But let’s blackbox the sport for a moment and take a look at the role Twitter plays in public events.

Social networking sites have been co-hosting election coverage since 2006. This makes sense, since Americans have been going to the Internet for their news for a while now. But why has it taken this long to get a social media company to recognize sports? Sure you can “Like” the Super Bowl on Facebook or follow North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Women’s Soccer team on twitter, but there’s no Pinterest-sponsored Indy Race car team and the Brazilian Football league isn’t covered in Orkut banners.  The domain host Go Daddy has objectified Danica Patrick for some time now (double sports points for doing it during the Super Bowl) but they aren’t a social media company.

Here’s my theory on social media’s mum stance on sports: Most sports teams are geographically based, and you do not want to pledge an allegiance to one team and lose the loyalty of other areas. These are global public spaces and to align yourself with something even the size of a country, means preferring one geographically bound community over another. Why doesn’t this apply to other companies? Well, it does- but selling trucks, bandwidth, and Doritios is a different beast than social media. Social media is public space, and public space is meant to facilitate and enable communication, not take sides in it. (Unless, of course, the ability of your customers to engage in communication is up for debate.) Twitter’s move into NASCAR keeps with my theory. NASCAR teams are not geography based, and Twitter is covering the whole race, not a single team. Just like a presidential debate, Twitter will be taking on the role of curator, not partisan.

Secondly, consider sports franchises as the first social media: Companies who look to draw in large crowds and sell their eyeballs to advertisers. They do not need these young bucks running around claiming that information wants to be free: the NBA, MLB, and NFL all have proprietary paywall systems and are doing just fine. I’ll leave the last word to a good friend of mine that works at ESPN/ He had this much to say on the matter:

@DA_Banks Short answer sports make too much money for FB and twitter to break in right now. Monday Night football cost ESPN $15.2 billion

2012/05/18 20:38:02 via web

altonncf

altonncf

@DA_Banks Long answer social media and twitter particularly functions as additional and more specialized commentary to games

2012/05/18 20:35:58 via web

altonncf

altonncf

@DA_Banks CBS did use FB to hose their streaming March Madness last year, but they charge for it now

2012/05/18 20:31:52 via web

altonncf

altonncf

@DA_Banks Baseball and basketball both have streaming services you have to pay for. Not sure if NBC's SNF cast has a facebook platform

2012/05/18 20:32:42 via web

altonncf

altonncf

@altonncf can I use this in a post?

2012/05/18 23:32:05 via Twitter for iPhone

db

DA_Banks

@DA_Banks Sure

2012/05/18 23:36:40 via web

altonncf

altonncf

You can follow david on twitter, wherein he will almost never talk about sports: @da_banks

Get it!  Because you use “i.e.” to mean “what I mean to say is” and you use “e.g.” to mean “for example.”  Cute.

From Learn Something New Every Day.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Though the overwhelming majority of the total population of the United States reported only one race, among those who reported multiple races, White and Black formed the largest multiple-race combination. Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and Alaska Natives were more likely than other racial groups to report multiple races. People who identified as White were the most likely to report only one race. Hispanics identified themselves predominately as either White or “some other race,” comprising 97 percent of those identifying with the latter category.

Since 2000, growth in the Hispanic population has been mostly due to birth and immigration; for Asians it was due, in large part, to higher levels of immigration relative to other groups. The Black population, the second-largest racial group, experienced growth over the decade, but at a slower rate than all other race groups except for White.

A prominent psychiatrist had argued that the categorization of depressive disorders should include symptoms of sadness after the loss of a loved one even after just a few weeks. While the DSM taskforce rejected the proposal, controversies such these are becoming more common as diagnostic categories have come to encompass less severe symptoms and normal “problems in living.”

Likely to appear in DSM-5 is a new depression diagnosis called “Mixed Anxiety/Depression,” combining symptoms of anxiety and depression, and “Pre-menstrual Dysphoric Disorder” (PMDD), which includes the monthly symptoms like fatigue, sadness, and bloating that most women experience.

Who really benefits from these expanded diagnostic criteria? In their 2007 book The Loss of Sadness, sociologist Allan Horwitz of Rutgers University and co-author Jerry Wakefield suggested that depressive disorder increasingly encompasses “normal sadness.” Horwitz warns that the trend of expanding diagnostic criteria is “creating a massive amount of pathology without [offering] corresponding benefits to those who truly need treatment.”

Though patients who could not afford, or would not have been offered, treatment may receive it, as less severe problems become part of disorder categories and are potentially covered by health insurance, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals will be able to treat more people than ever before.

Psychiatry will reap the rewards as the field claims more authority over everyday problems. As those with less severe symptoms will be targeted for new and existing medications, pharmaceutical companies will certainly gain. Antidepressants are already the most prescribed drugs in the US; their use may expand even more.

Journalist Thomas B. Edsall, in his new book, The Age of Austerity, argues that a zero-sum politics has taken hold as Democrats and Republicans scramble to maintain their share of what they see as a shrinking economic pie. Neither side, however, presents themselves as the “party of the rich” or the “party of the poor”; both claim to represent the middle class.

The vast majority of Americans count themselves as middle class. While today’s imagined class boundaries fall along occupational, regional, and (most importantly) racial lines, what remains consistent is an “us”— comprised of the moral middle class — and a “them”— comprised of the morally inferior rich and morally inferior poor (which may include disloyal or naïve members of the middle class, as well).

For many Americans, class is a moral identity. Americans tend to believe that the poor deserve their fate, and that the rich do not deserve their wealth. They superimpose the moral order of the lazy, the hardworking, and the greedy onto the poor, middle class, and rich.

As long as Americans sort their fellow citizens into moral categories, we’re unlikely to see class struggle in any Marxist sense. But that doesn’t mean we won’t hear the term “class war” used repeatedly from now until November.

Several features in this issue focus on the ways in which intimate life choices and experiences are shaped by economics and power. In our cover story, Sharmila Rudrappa follows women in Bangalore as they transition from the brutal conditions of work in the garment industry to another form of assembly line production: baby making. For these women, the intimate use of the body as a means of earning a living is not only a more lucrative form of labor, it is also at times more lucrative form of labor, it is also at times more self-fulfilling. Julia A. Ericksen explores bodily intimacy in an entirely different milieu, the world of Latin dance. The “body project” these dancers engage in demonstrates the interplay Irvine reports on a recent survey of sexuality researchers and their experiences with Institutional Review Boards. Her evidence suggests troubling trends in the ways that IRBs evaluate the ethics of sexuality research based on uninformed and negative stereotypes of sexuality and the body. Each of these feature articles invites further discussion on the shifting role of bodies and intimacy as forms of self-awareness and social capital.

The Viewpoints symposium in this issue continues the theme of intimate inequalities with a focus on Occupy Wall Street. In this dynamic movement, activists are literally using their bodies as a vehicle of protest as they move onto the sites of occupation. We asked several well-known social analysts to comment on this innovative form of embodied social protest and to speculate on its implications.

Pedagogies editor Gary K. Perry reflects on the disruption of intimate lives that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He interviews Michael Mizell-Nelson, founder of the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. The survival experiences stored in the HDMB began as a way for concerned friends and families to communicate with one another in the days immediately following the hurricane, and now serve as powerful reminders of the scope of this disaster and its impact on the everyday lives of the socio-economically disadvantaged. This theme is also evident in Mediations and Trends, which include commentary on the stark distinction between media images of “the help” and the lived experiences of domestic workers; the sexualization of pre-teens in contemporary media; sleeping on the couches of strangers as a popular new mode of travel; and the contested role of animal testing in medical research. Finally, our photo essay explores the nooks and crannies of the infamous military prison at Guantanamo Bay. These pictures provide a behind-the-scenes look into the environment in which the inhabitants spend their days.

This issue provides fresh perspectives and new insights for deciphering intimate inequalities as they occur locally, nationally and globally, in contexts of survival, pleasure, research, imprisonment and more. We invite you delve in for a deeper, richer understanding of social issues — the hallmark of Contexts.

by Gabriela Molina (gabrielamolina.com)

Robin I. M. Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist and primate behavior specialist, addresses this question in a neuro-cognitive theory known as “the social brain hypothesis.” Dunbar has found a positive correlation between the size of different primate species’ neocortex (the part of the brain responsible for consciousness and reasoning) and the size of their social networks.

He suggests that the brain has a limited capacity for keeping track of social relations beyond a certain number. For humans, the mean number, he says, is 150—now known as “Dunbar’s number.”

The average internet user who “follows” individuals on Twitter, “friends” people on Facebook, and gets “LinkedIn” with other professionals, “knows” many people. According to the June 2011 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the average American social network site user has 636 social ties, and those numbers are only going up. Nielsen Media Research reports an increase from 2010 to 2011 in social networking activity in every internet-connected demographic group studied, around the globe.

By pushing our cognitive limits, Dunbar’s theory suggests, social ties may become more diffuse; social relationships may grow increasingly casual and less bounded by reciprocity and commitment.

Some sociologists say there’s little cause for alarm. Writing in the British Journal of Psychology last year, Barry Wellman, a leading authority in social network analysis, suggests that human social networks are too complex and comprised of too many kinds of social relations to be characterized by one number. It is also possible that our brains may further develop to accommodate these enlarged networks.

Or we may succumb to Facebook fatigue, cancel our accounts and return to more “personalized” modes of interaction.

“Yet here I am today. I carried those twin babies for nine months and gave them up.” Living in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, married at 18, and with two young children of her own, she had delivered twins a month earlier for a Tamil couple in the United States.

I met Indirani when she was still pregnant and living in a dormitory run by Creative Options Trust for Women, Bangalore’s only surrogacy agency at the time. COTW works with infertility specialists who rely on the Trust to recruit, house, care for, and monitor surrogate mothers for their clients. Straight and gay couples arrive from all over India and throughout the world to avail themselves of Bangalore’s expertise in building biological families. Indirani and other mothers introduced me to 70 other surrogates they had gotten to know through their line of work. Some of them, including Indirani herself, double as recruiting agents, bringing new laborers into Bangalore’s reproductive assembly line.

India is emerging as a key site for transnational surrogacy, with industry profits projected to reach $6 billion in the next few years, according to the Indian Council for Medical Research. In 2007, the Oprah show featured Dr. Nayna Patel in the central Indian town of Anand, Gujarat, who was harnessing the bodies of rural Gujarati women to produce babies for American couples. Subsequent newspaper articles and TV shows, as well as blogs by users of surrogacy, popularized the nation as a surrogacy destination for couples from the United States, United States, England, Israel, Australia and to a lesser extent Italy, Germany, and Japan.

A mother shows a photograph of her surrogate baby with his biological father (right), next to her own husband and child (left). Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Indirani’s life typifies that of other women in Bangalore’s garment factories. Paid low wages, she works intermittently in one of the city’s many garment factories. She quit when she became pregnant, and joined the line again when her two children attended school, taking time away when she was sick, or to care for sick family members. Bangalore’s reproduction industry affords women like her the possibility of extracting greater value from their bodies once they have been deemed unproductive workers in garment factories. Because of its life affirming character, Indiriani and others see surrogacy, however exploitative, as a more meaningful and creative option than factory work.

Disposable Workers

The popular understanding is that women who have large debt burdens and are destitute opt to become surrogate mothers. But while they are in debt, the 70 mothers I met were not among the poorest in Bangalore. Many were part of dual or multiple income households, and tended to be garment workers who earn more than the average working woman in the city.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Like garment workers in sweatshops across the world, women in Bangalore are underpaid and overworked. In order to meet short production cycles set by global market demands, they work at an inhumanely fast pace, with few or no breaks. They frequently suffer from headaches, chest pain, ear and eye pain, urinary tract infections, and other health problems. Sexual harassment and abuse are rampant on the production line. The supervisors, almost all men, castigate women in sexually derogatory terms when they do not meet production quotas, and often grope the women as they instruct them on how to work better. “Sometimes,” says Indirani, “I wouldn’t take a lunch break when pieces piled up. I didn’t want to be shamed in front of everyone. I would go to any length to avoid calling the supervisor’s attention to me.”

Indirani earned $100 to $110 monthly, depending upon her attendance, punctuality, and overtime hours. Frequently, she and her co-workers were unable to meet the inordinately high production targets and were required by supervisors to stay past regular working hours to meet their quotas. “Playing” catch-up, however, did not necessarily result in overtime pay. Indirani’s husband became suspicious if her paycheck did not reflect her overtime hours. He wondered whether she was really at the factory, or whether she was cavorting with another man. Indirani, like many of the women I interviewed, reported that she felt debased at work and at home.

Prior research on Bangalore’s female garment workers suggests that they work an average of 16 hours a day in the factory and at home doing laundry, cooking, taking care of children, and commuting to work. Working in the factory all day, and then returning home to complete household tasks was absolutely exhausting. Indirani’s friend Suhasini, who was also a surrogate mother, avoided garment work altogether. Her mother, sister, and other women family members had worked the line, and she knew it was not what she wanted for her life. “But I need money,” she told me. “For us,” she says, “surrogacy is a boon.” She describes Mr. Shetty who started COTW, as “a god to us.” When I met her again in December 2011, Suhasini was receiving hormonal injections so that she could be a surrogate mother for a second time.

For much of her working life Indirani has been intermittently employed in one of Bangalore’s many garment factories. She quit when pregnant, and joined the line again when her two children attended school. She also stopped factory work when she was sick, or had to care for sick family members. From the perspective of the garment factories, when Indirani is healthy she is a valuable worker for the firm. But during her pregnancies and illnesses, or when she has to attend to her family’s needs, she loses her value as a worker, and the company replaces her. She is, as anthropologist Melissa Wright calls it, a “disposable worker.” Upon recovering her health, or managing family chores efficiently, Indirani cycles back into the garment factory again, this time miraculously having regained her value for the production process. Over her working life, Indirani has shifted from being valuable, to becoming an undesirable worker who must seek other forms of employment to help support her family.

Making Babies

Indirani and her auto-rickshaw worker husband have struggled for much of their married life to make ends meet, and to support their small children. Indirani’s husband did not earn much money. He rented his vehicle from an acquaintance, and the daily rental and gasoline costs cut significantly into the household income. So Indirani and he decided to borrow money from her cousin to purchase an auto-rickshaw of their own. Their troubles worsened when they were unable to pay back the loan, and the cousin would often arrive at their door, demanding his money and screaming expletives at them. He would come to the factory on payday and take Indirani’s entire paycheck. She said, “I’d work hard, facing all sorts of abuse. And at the end of it I wouldn’t even see any money. I felt so bad I contemplated suicide.” When a friend at work suggested that she sell her eggs to an agency called COTW for approximately $500, Indirani jumped at what she perceived as a wonderful opportunity. After “donating” her eggs, Indirani decided to try surrogacy; she became pregnant with twins on her first attempt.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Indirani did not find surrogacy to be debasing work. She earned more money as a reproduction worker than she did as a garment worker, and found the process much more enjoyable. She was exhausted physically and emotionally working as a tailor in the factory and then cleaning, cooking, and taking care of her family. Upon getting pregnant, however, Indirani lived in the COTW dormitory. At first she missed her family, often wondering what her children were doing. Was her mother-in-law taking care of them? “I was in a different place surrounded by strangers,” she recalled. But soon she began to like the dormitory. She didn’t have to wake up by 5 am to prepare meals for the family, pack lunches for everyone, drop the children off at the bus stop so they could get to school, and then hop onto the bus herself to get to the garment factory. Instead, she slept in, and was served breakfast. She had no household obligations and no one made demands on her time and emotions. Surrogacy afforded her the luxury of being served by others. She did not remember a time in her life when she felt so liberated from all responsibilities.

Surveillance and Sisterhood

As she got to know the other women in the COTW dormitory, Indirani began to feel as though she was on vacation. For Indirani and many of the surrogate mothers I interviewed, it was easier to talk with the friends they made in COTW than with childhood friends and relatives; they felt they had more common with one another. Through the surrogacy process, many women told me, they lost a baby but gained sisters for life.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Noting the closed circuit cameras that monitored the
mothers’ every move in the dormitory, I asked how they felt about them. Indirani said they didn’t bother her; in fact, most of the mothers did not register the cameras’ presence. While this initially surprised me, I soon realized that they were accustomed to surveillance in their everyday lives. Living under the gaze of relatives and inquisitive neighbors, and housed in one-two room homes where it was common for six to eight households to share a bathroom, notions of privacy were quite foreign.Surveillance at the dormitory was benign in comparison to the surveillance and punishment meted out for supposed infractions on the garment shop floor, where long conversations with teammates, taking a few minutes of rest, or going on breaks were all curtailed. In comparison, surveillance at COTW, designed to check on whether the women were having sex with their men folk who visited the facilities, seemed relatively banal.

The surrogate mothers delivered their babies through caesarian surgeries between the 36th and 37th week of gestation in order to conform to the scheduling needs of potential parents. Indirani was initially fearful of going under the knife, but she saw many mothers survive caesarians and was no longer anxious. In the end, she found the caesarian method of delivering the twins she had carried easier than the vaginal births of her own two children.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Indirani claimed she does not feel any attachment to the twins she carried. “They were under contract. I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything for them,” she told me. “They were never mine to begin with, and I entered into this knowing they were someone else’s babies.” It is hard enough for her to take care of her own two children, she said. “Why do you think I’m going through all this now? What would I do with two more? They are burdens I cannot afford.” On the other hand, some mothers professed deep attachments to the babies they had given up. Roopa, a divorced mother who gave birth to a baby girl three years ago, always celebrated her contract baby’s birthday. “June 21st akka,” she said, “I cook a special meal. My daughter doesn’t know why we have a feast, but it’s my way of remembering my second child. I still cry for that little girl I gave away. I think about her often. I could never do this again.”

Life out of Waste

Regardless of how they felt about the babies they had given up, the women almost all said they derived far more meaning from surrogacy than they did working under the stern labor regimes of the garment factory. In our conversations, time and again, women described the many ways they are deemed worthless in the garment factory. Their labor powers exhausted, their sexual discipline suspect, their personal character under question, they are converted to waste on the shop floor—until they are eventually discarded. On the other hand, Bangalore’s reproduction industry, they said, gave them the opportunity to be highly productive and creative workers once more.

Indirani contrasted the labor processes in producing garments and producing a baby: the latter was a better option, she said. “Garments? You wear a shirt a few months and you throw it away. But I make you a baby? You keep that for life. I have made something so much bigger than anything I could ever make in the factory.” Indirani observed that while the people who wore the garments she’d worked on would most probably never think about her, she was etched forever in the minds of the intended parents who took the twins she bore.

Indirani and the other mothers I met did not necessarily see selling eggs or surrogacy as benign processes. Nor did they misread their exploitation. However, given their employment options and their relative dispossession, they believed that Bangalore’s reproduction industry afforded them greater control over their emotional, financial, and sexual lives. In comparison to garment work, surrogacy was easy.

Surrogacy was also more meaningful for the women than other forms of paid employment. Because babies are life-affirming in ways garments are obviously not, surrogacy allowed women to assert their moral worth. In garment work their sexual morality was constantly in question at the factory and at home. At the dormitory, in contrast, they were in a women-only space, abstaining from sex, and leading pure, virtuous lives.

Through surrogacy, Indirani said, she had built a nuclear family unit and fulfilled one infertile woman’s desire to be a mother. In the process, she had attempted to secure the future of her own family and her own happiness. As a garment worker Indirani felt she was being slowly destroyed, but as a surrogate mother she said she was creating a new world. She was ready to go through surrogacy once again to earn money for her children’s private schooling. The last time we met in December 2011, Indirani asked me, “If anyone you know wants a surrogate mother, will you think of me? I want to do this again.”

Recommended Resources

Haimowitz, Rebecca and Vaishali Sinha. Made in India (2010). This is a feature length documentary film on surrogacy in India, which explains the organization of the industry through the journey of one American couple to an Indian surrogate.

Pande, Amrita. “Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker,” Signs (2010) 35: 969-992. This is an account of surrogate mothers living in dormitories in Anand, India.

Teman, Elly. Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. (University of California Press, 2010). The book documents the relationships between straight women and their surrogates in Israel, where assisted reproductive technologies are subsidized for heterosexual couples.

Wright, Melissa. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. (Routledge, 2006). An anthropological description of how women in the global south are seen as bad workers, and yet their work is crucial to multinational companies’ profits.

I haven’t had a chance to think it all through yet, but am curious what others think, both about the basic phenomenon as well as about its broader social and theoretical implications.

And on that score, check out this Huffington Post piece on religion, in-group trust, and out-group distrust. It is by Scott Atran, who is, as my colleague and collaborator Penny Edgell says, “one of the most thoughtful scholars working at the intersection of religion and evolutionary theory.”

Holding the door open for people that are (too) far away:

Walk (too) close to people and get in their way:

Staring at people:

Some of his transgressions are more out there than others, but these experiments show how uncomfortable others can be made by even mild norm breaking.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Doing Journalism in the Social Media Age

Discussion with Andy Carvin (@acarvin) & Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc)

Introduction: Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) & PJ Rey (@pjrey)

Tomorrow’s initial public offering of Facebook stock has both business and tech commentators chattering away (though, in most mainstream publications, there isn’t meaningful distinction between the two). Technology coverage is too often reduced to the business of technology. Consider the top four tech headlines on the New York Times site today: “Long Odds on a Big Facebook Payday,” “Ahead of Facebook I.P.O., a Skeptical Madison Ave.,” “Spotify Deal Would Value Company at $4 Billion, “Pinterest Raises $100 Million.”

Buried in the all the personal investing advice, some interesting quesitons are being raised. For example: How can a company with few employees and so little material infrastructure generate so much value? What is it that Facebook actually produces? Is an economy based in immaterial products and services sustainable (especially given that it’s profitability is largely dependent on it’s ability to drive additional consumption in other sectors through advertising)?

But there are also a lot of questions that aren’t being asked—the kinds of culturally significant questions that business folks and economists aren’t (though perhaps should be) interested in. Here, I want ask one such question: Will Facebook’s transition to a public corporation change the way users perceive their participation on the site? While I can only speculate about how this institutional change will effect users, I want offer a few reasons I think Facebook’s IPO may cause users to see themselves in more of an explicit work-like relationship with Facebook (based on rationalistic principles of minimizing cost and maximizing gain) and less a part of some sort of non-rationalized gift economy (based on principles of sharing and reciprocity). I should be clear, here, that I am talking about users’ relationship to the platform, not their relationships with each other. Users are, of course, primarily motivated to use the platform because of their relationships with other users; however, as recent privacy debates have illustrated, a user’s perceptions of Facebook are important in determining how users use the platform and whether they use it at all.

As Facebook evolves into a public corporation, the role users play in producing value may become more apparent and more controversial for several reasons:

Facebook’s mystique of benevolence will be harder to maintain - Facebook has actively resisted  the perception that it is just another company out to make a buck. In a letter included in Facebook’s IPO registration statement, Mark Zuckerberg said:

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist… Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

What Zuckerberg doesn’t say here is that Facebook is just any old company. It has a unique relationship with the users who entrust the Facebook to manage enormous amounts of personal data, knowing that mistakes can have profound social consequences. That unique relationship puts Facebook under more scrutiny by it’s users than, say, a company like Walmart receives from its customers. So, threats to it’s mystique of being something more than just-another-company are particularly problematic. As a public entity, Facebook with be subject to pressure by shareholders to make changes for the sake of producing revenue that are contrary to the interests of users.

The financial curtain will be rolled back - As a publicly-traded company, Facebook will be required to make extensive public reports on the state of its finances that have, in the past, remained internal to the company. This will, no doubt, lead to an intensification of media coverage on how Facebook is deriving value from its users.

The need to justify market valuation - While Facebook’s stock price, like all stock prices, is largely speculative, Zuckerberg and other executives will be under constant pressure to produce new revenue streams (e.g., charging users to ensure that their posts are highly visible). We all better get used to hearing daily updates on fluctuations in Facebook’s stock price. This will have the effect of priming us to think about the financial aspects of our Facebook usage.

So, what are the consequences if users start to view themselves as doing work for Facebook?

Pretty quickly, users should realize that they are being exploited (see: here and here)—i.e., they are creating lots money for Facebook, but that they aren’t seeing a cent of it. Of course, users do get lots of social value from Facebook, but greater attention to the economic dimension highlights Facebook’s dependency on users (let me be esoteric for a second and say this is the same sort of relationship Hegel was talking about in his master-slave dialectic). In a sense, by subjecting its finances to the disclosure regulations and revenue expectations of Wall Street, Facebook may be empowering users to leverage this relationship of dependency in debates over privacy policy and platform features.

PJ Rey (@pjrey) is a sociologist at the University of Maryland working to describe how social media and other technology reflect and change our culture and the economy.