Emma A. sent in our newest example. Chad Ochocinco, of the New England Patriots, tweeted this pic of Black History Month being celebrated…with a sale on Kool-Aid:

Yep.

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

Today kicks off New York Fashion Week, an important time of year for models.

In this interview, sociologist Ashley Mears talks about her research on modeling. Modeling, she explains, is a “winner take all” market; most live in very precarious economic circumstances. The value of her product — her body and her ability to use it — is something over which she has almost no control.

Accordingly, modeling requires an incredible amount of “emotion work,” the control of one’s feelings and presentation of emotions for the sake of an employer or customer.

For more from Dr. Mears, see our posts on the invisibility of labor in modeling, the ugly secret behind the model search, thinness in modeling (trigger warning), and contrasting aesthetics for high end and commercial models.

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

Download Office Hours #40.

R. Lance Holbert is an Associate Professor in the The Ohio State University's School of Communications. He is the author (with Maxwell McCombs, Spiro Kiousus, and Wayne Wanta) of The News & Public Opinion: Media Effects on the Elements of Civic Life.

Heather LaMarre is an Assistant Professor in the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and is an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology. She studies how and why social and entertainment media are changing public relations, politics, and news.

Kristen Landreville is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of Wyoming. She studies the intersection of mass and interpersonal communication on political and social outcomes.

Don Waisanen is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the Baruch College School of Public Affairs. He is a former journalist and political speechwriter, and he is a contributor to the TSP Community Page ThickCulture.

Bruce Williams is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author (with Michael Delli Carpini) of After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment.

Dannagal Young is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Delaware. She is the founder of Breaking Boundaries, an online forum for the interdisciplinary study of politics and entertainment.

Making fun of politicians is a fundamental part of American culture—particularly as we race toward each major election. As this group of scholars points out, political humor is unique in its ability humanize and criticize, while also creating serious political and social commentary through satire, standup, and other comedic forms. Social science helps untangle the meanings and effects of American political humor.

What are the dominant forms and persistent themes of political humor?

Kristen Landreville: Popular venues for political humor today include late-night comedy shows and satirical websites. While oftentimes the humor focuses on more trivial matters, such as a politician’s appearance or personality, political humor also has a serious side that sometimes provides serious political, social, or economic commentary. It is this type of political humor that politicians, institutions, and authority figures over the centuries have feared the most. For example, satire… can make politicians nervous because of [its] attacks on their character, policy, or even larger issues like the electoral system. …The cogs start spinning in people’s minds, and, soon enough, people begin to deeply question a particular politician, authority figure, or group.

History shows us that politicians have been persistently cautious, and sometimes hostile, to political humor and satire. Plato saw satire as a type of magic that needed legal penalties. In early Rome, emperors banned satire and employed a punishment of death to satirists. British authority also banned it during the Middle Ages. You get the point: it’s tough to be an authority figure and love political satire.

Don Waisanen: I think the label “humor” can often gloss over an incredibly rich diversity of comedic forms. For instance, some political humor is based upon exaggerating characters, imitating an individual’s physical tics, quirky mannerisms, or unreflective slogans—such as Stephen Colbert’s parody of combative media figures. On the other hand, comedians like Jon Stewart are more satirical …primarily attacking substance rather than style. …[A] as soon as a statement might be made about dominant types of humor, we find examples of evasive and evolving comedy that defy traditional categories. Some comics now even create humor through a type of paradoxical “anti-comedy.” Fred Armisen’s bad political comedian character on Saturday Night Live is one such example.

Bruce Williams: [W]e live in a world now where professional journalists speaking through newspapers and network news broadcasts have lost a lot of their authority to shape the kind of language and narrative of politics in the United States. Now …political information is coming at us through a bewildering number of conduits [and] individuals are much more able to shape the kind of media diet they consume…. That’s a very different situation than by the end of the 1980s, when 8 out of every 10 television sets that were turned on were watching one of the three nightly news broadcasts, not because people were more committed or were better citizens then, but because it was the only thing on!

Image by Edalisse Hirst via flickr.com

…Jon Stewart has to attract and keep his audience every single night. …[O]ne of the concepts that I am most skeptical about is the idea that there somehow is a sharp distinction between news and entertainment or between serious stuff and stuff that’s less serious or fluffy. …[H]umor…is just one of the ways in which, in a fragmented market, providers of information or people who want to comment on the political world can attract and maintain an audience. …[T]he context is different even if the kinds of humor that get deployed are not that different.

What are the limits to what’s “appropriate” to joke about in politics?

Robert (Lance) Holbert: There are some classic rules that apply to joke telling in general which are also applicable to politics. For example, there are certain political events which require some time or emotional distance before humorous perspectives can be offered about them. This issue was made salient after the 9/11 tragedies. This issue is a classic one concerning the tragedy-comedy dichotomy—when can we make the switch from tragedy to comedy?

As for satire, this question speaks to the issue of effectiveness. When will a piece of satire be well received and deemed to have possible influence on a public? One perspective offered on this matter argues that there needs to be an implicit agreement between the satirist and the satiree (i.e., the audience member consuming the satire) that the subject of the satirical material (i.e., the satirized) is worthy of satirization. Two questions are usually raised when judging worthiness: (a) Has the person being satirized made choices which have led them to being a public figure?; (b) Is the characteristic of the person being satirized a genuine example of human folly/weakness? If you can answer in the affirmative on both counts, then the object is worthy of possible satirization. So, there can be a satirical piece about President Obama and how he often thinks very highly of his intellectual abilities (i.e., hubris as human weakness). However, a piece of satire about the President’s daughters, who have not chosen to be public figures, and their academic performance would be deemed off limits for a majority of the American public.

Kristin: The limits are perpetually being tested and re-drawn. Comedians and satirists push the limits of commentary on religion, race, capitalism, gender identity, sexual affiliation, the political system, stereotypes, and a myriad of other topics that parents typically teach their children not to discuss around polite company. However, the extent to which limits are pushed depends largely on the media outlet. While television broadcasters and cable networks have to obey Federal Communication Commission laws on obscenity and indecency, print outlets and websites such as The Onion do not have such heavy restrictions. No matter what media outlet the humor is showcased, I believe that calls for violence, bigotry, and xenophobia are less tolerated as humorous. For example, The New Yorker magazine learned that not all satire is perceived the same way. Recall its July 2008 cover of Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim and Michelle Obama dressed as a terrorist, with a photo of Osama bin Laden in the background and a burning American flag in the fireplace. [M]any people thought the satire went too far and reinforced stereotypes…. This example tells us that there are limits to certain groups’ tolerance of satire.

Don: Mark Katz, President Clinton’s humor writer (yes, this was an official position!), said that in politics, you “can do jokes about the smoke and not the fire. We can do jokes about the hoopla of impeachment, but not what brought us to the brink of impeachment.” I also once read The Daily Show correspondent Mo Rocca’s comments that during the Iraq War, “since we couldn’t make fun of the events themselves, we could make fun of some of the coverage of the events.” While perhaps not holding true in every situation, these comments generally tell us that there are serious limitations to humor itself—primarily that it’s only one… mode of communicating among many other choices that might be made. Of course, any effort to curtail what is or is not appropriate in comic discourses should also be seen as suspect, as comedians are some of our best critics and free speech advocates, providing alternative interpretations and attitudes about public events when sorely needed.

Heather LaMarre: [O]ne of the comedian’s roles is to test limits. And right now we have that going on with Colbert’s SuperPAC, this would be a perfect example of limit-testing. Never before can I think of that, in a time when a piece of satire was taken outside the comedic… form. And he has now created satirical PSAs, he’s raising real money, real people are actually contributing their real dollars to this satirical SuperPAC. …[Colbert is] forcing the media to pay attention because he’s moving outside his late night show.

Bruce: [F]or all its faults, the rules of professional journalism are very explicit…. It is a profession, people are trained how to do it. …When we get to comedy as an increasingly influential way in which citizens understand the political world, then… I get a little queasy, because I think the rules are very unclear about what someone like Jon Stewart is doing and what he’s not doing… I don’t think we have a good way of thinking about “What is their responsibility? What is it okay to talk about and how is it okay to talk about it?”

Has humor always played a key role in politics?

Lance: There is a long history of political leaders calling for satirists to be jailed, excommunicated, or censored. …I would argue that the jury is still out on the degree and nature of satire’s influence. There is much more work to be done at a wide range of levels of analysis before we can offer any valid or reliable conclusions in relation to this empirical question.

Dannagal Young: Humor has always played an important role in political life. In fact, satirists like Aristophanes writing in Ancient Greece used rich political satire and irony to expose hypocrisy and flaws among elites and within policies and institutions. What we see now is a media environment in which the former division between entertainment and information has become obsolete, hence we tend to think of political humor as a “new” thing. …In reality, humor has always had a very natural place in politics, particularly in democratic regimes where elected officials are accountable for their actions and citizens look at them with a critical eye.

Don: Humor has probably played a role in just about every election and political circumstance. While we can look back to ancient figures such as Cicero for advice on how wit can be used in the political realm, I would argue humor’s centrality to the political process has less to do with politics and more to do with how humor is found in every human society. What might be found humorous in one society or culture often differs from another, but I think one would be hard pressed to find a situation where humor was not involved to some extent. Even when humor is not a part of “official” public discourse, humor is a regular part of group communication and is thus as much a part of “unofficial” interpersonal communication and backroom, informal political conversations as anything else.

Bruce:I think that humor has always played a part in American elections and politics, but we notice it more at

Thomas Nast cartoon lampooning Andrew Jackson, 1866

some points than others… [I]f you go back to the earliest days of the American republic… a lot of the campaign arguments were made in political cartoons. I show my class cartoons that were aimed at Thomas Jefferson, that pointed to his supposed loyalty to France, um, you know, there were no mentions of “freedom fries” at that point, but, the idea that he was more loyal to France was brought out in cartoons. There were allusions to his relationship with Sally Hemmings in the newspapers of the time; there was the kind of, you know, satirical character assassination that we take for granted today. Also, if you think about the late 19th century and the political cartoons of Thomas Nast… they were effective in reaching the audience he wanted.

What are the effects of humorous media?

Lance: Political satire programming attracts a highly knowledgeable audience (you need to know a thing or two about politics if you are going to get the jokes), so does political satire generate humor or are those individuals who are already knowledgeable about politics selectively exposing themselves to this material? It is most likely a bit of both.

As for attitudes and behaviors, there is no question… political entertainment media can impact an audience member’s attitudes…. However, questions still remain concerning how long lasting these effects are, how well they stand up to counter-persuasion, and whether insights generated from satire can impact how other pieces of political information (e.g., from news) are processed cognitively. On the behavioral front, there has been work done on how political entertainment media exposure can generate political discussion. Someone sees something funny about a political topic and then discusses it with others, or a piece of political humor is not fully understood by an audience member and they talk to friends or family members about it in order to gain some clarification about the message’s meaning.

Kristin: [C]onflicting findings… suggest that political humor and satire are much more nuanced than researchers once believed. Humor and satire can be complicated messages that demand quite a bit of cognitive energy for people to decode, or humor and satire can be fairly simple messages that people disregard and do not pay much attention to. Both ways of processing these messages (critically and uncritically) can lead to different effects…. Thus, it is very difficult to summarize effects of such a diverse and complicated genre. However, there have been links [found between] late-night comedy viewing to increased presidential debate viewing for young people… [and] to increased traditional media use for political information. These studies are evidence for a democratizing effect of late-night comedy. Other studies have found increased cynicism for politicians after exposure to late-night comedy and a lack of information acquisition and memory… It’s complicated.

Dannagal: Literature to date has demonstrated nuanced effects of political humor… For instance, exposure to political humor programming, particularly among those people who are not politically engaged, can spark an interest and attention to politics, leading to information-seeking. ..In addition, Political humor has been found to increase the “salience” of issues and concepts that rest at the heart of political jokes. This means that people who frequently watch late-night comedy jokes about a political candidate for being boring, unintelligent, or dishonest will be more likely to have that trait come to mind when they think of that particular candidate in the future. We know that people who report watching shows like The Daily Show are more politically interested in general, more politically knowledgeable, more participatory in political life, and more likely to discuss politics with friends and family than people who do not watch such programming. While these are merely correlational findings, they do suggest that there is a unique audience of young, politically savvy people who are tuning into these shows.

In terms of the subtle cognitive implications of political humor, one of the reasons that political humor has received so much attention from scholars [is that] humor seems to hold a certain persuasive capacity that other forms of discourse do not. Recent work has… [found] that humor is actually less likely to foster the kind of “counter-argumentation” or “argument scrutiny” that serious discourse usually receives. …–[P]eople just do not scrutinize arguments received through humor to the extent that they do when [it’s] presented seriously.

In that area, we are starting to understand a couple of basic things. One is message receptivity. People have their guard down… so they’re more open and receptive to messages [than] maybe otherwise… [humor] sort of disarms them…. There’s a gateway hypothesis… that entertainment brings in, the “politically uninterested”—especially young people, and that leads to more information-seeking, participatory behavior, voting.

Bruce: First, I think that, I think that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, for their audience, do the same thing that the nightly network news broadcasts used to do… The Daily Show… provides, in 30 minutes (less commercials)… a way of thinking about what’s happened [and] the media that delivered that information to you. And how are you going to do that in a way where people can just change the channel any time they want?

Well, I think humor is a real… a very effective way of doing that. …[W]e trust Jon Stewart, just like we trusted Walter Cronkite, and I think that part of that trust for Jon Stewart is the idea that you know who he is. You know that he is gonna make fun of things, but he’s not gonna make stuff up. That he’s going to be scrupulous about the kind of facts that he introduces. …I think we’re gonna see what happens in 2012. We’re gonna see where the youth vote goes. We’re gonna see whether new media mobilizes people [and how it’s] gonna affect mobilization and participation [over] the next couple of elections.

Does humor help people engage in politics create apathy toward the process?

Lance: Researchers who are critical of various types of political entertainment argue that it makes a skeptical citizenry (i.e., a democratic good) into a cynical citizenry (i.e., a democratic evil). There is some empirical evidence to support this claim, but it is also the case that those who are more cynical about politics naturally gravitate to this material as well (once again, an issue of selective exposure). With this being stated, there are a host of potentially positive effects which have been linked to various types of political entertainment media outlets. Empirical studies have shown that certain political entertainment messages can generate critical thinking on political issues, create greater breadth and depth of attitudinal structures, and (at least indirectly) increase political behaviors like giving money to political causes, talking about politics, or watching political debates.

Heather: We’ve answered the question of whether it engages audiences, we know that. But engages them how and to what end? We’re not sure. In some cases, we find they learn more about the issues. In other cases, we find they don’t understand the sarcasm or satire, and so they come away misinformed. In a lot of cases, we find evidence that, because comedians… cherry-pick segments and then use them to an exaggerated point to make it funny, sometimes audiences don’t understand that it was exaggerated.

Is political humor just for liberals?

Kristen: Political humor and especially satire is about deconstructing politics, politicians, policy, institutions, and authority. This deconstruction often involves questioning, mocking, and criticizing the status quo, the traditions, and the standards. From mocking a politician’s expensive haircut to mocking the hypocritical politician who employs illegal residents yet rails against immigration, humorists are making statements about society. Perhaps liberals are more attracted to satire and humor that exposes the hypocrisy of traditions and traditional society because part of being liberal is being progressive and deconstructive of restrictive societal norms. However, conservatives are certainly attracted to satire and humor that exposes the hypocrisy of liberalism and progressive society. That is probably why some conservatives watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and view it as interesting and insightful comedy on liberals—these shows do not hold back on criticizing anyone. In the end, I think all shades of political red, blue, and purple benefit from political humor.

Don: This issue is far more complicated than it might appear. Certainly, comedians like Jon Stewart have tended to embrace a leftist political perspective, while in recent years, others like Dennis Miller have leveraged their comic credentials toward conservative political causes. …But I think a more important consideration is to move beyond thinking about in this issue in terms of people or political worldviews, asking instead what kind of radical or conservative perspective might be invited by any particular act of political humor. That is, how much does any comic act, like a particular joke, invite its audiences to think of their worlds in ways that maintain or interrogate the status quo? In a single HBO stand-up special by someone like Chris Rock, for example, I think we can note ways that some jokes both embrace and perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes as much as other jokes invite us to think critically about them. As such, the politics of comedy is probably best described and evaluated as close to each text and context as possible.

Finally, what happens when politicians try to be funny?

Lance: It depends on the type of humor. There are certain politicians who have comedic timing. President Obama is one …Former Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas is another recent politico who comes to mind…. When they have [comedic skill], they can use it to connect to an audience. However, if the presentation of humorous material appears forced, then, just as at dinner parties, people seek other company really quick.

A special case of humor often used by politicians is self-deprecation. Senator John McCain is a classic example of someone who uses self-deprecation well [as was] Vice-President Albert Gore, Jr. in the latter years of the Clinton presidency. …Politicians as elites are always looking for ways to appear more common, and self-deprecation is one way to go about achieving this goal. However, …self-deprecation is effective only when the focus of the deprecation is perceived to be a true personal weakness/character flaw. For example, former President Bill Clinton may make fun of his famous temper, [but] if the politician pokes fun at a personal characteristic that many perceive to be an actual positive trait, then the act of self-deprecation could be seen by many as a tawdry attempt to receive praise. Such acts of praise seeking are never well received by the general public.

Self-deprecation can also be used for image repair. A recent example would be Governor Rick Perry who ran a series of television advertisements leading up to the Iowa caucuses where he pokes fun at himself for not being the best debater… the most effective strategic communication decision his campaign could make was to acknowledge the personal weakness and make light of it in some way in these advertisements.

Kristen: It is risky business. When politicians attempt to correct a perceived failure, such as Rick Perry’s “oops” moment in a Republican presidential debate, and use humor to do so… they could be making themselves more down-to-earth and carefree, but they could also be bringing more attention to a negative event…. Also, if the attempt at humor is awkward and uncomfortable, then the politician will be portrayed as stiff, unlikeable, and elitist. Clearly, playing with humor is like playing with fire for politicians.

Don: To an extent, humor always both unites and divides audiences. When politicians try to be funny, they can unite one audience while dividing another. Ronald Reagan was known for his humor, but it’s easy to see how a quip like “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’” could reinforce one audience’s belief that the government was a problem, as much as it confirmed for another that the President’s beliefs were a problem. Some humor can unite more than divide, but in so doing, may run the risk of losing its critical edge. Think Jay Leno versus Jon Stewart. Leno plays his humor relatively safe and maintains a mainstream, large audience, while Stewart plays to a smaller cable audience with humor that is more divisive and critical. This is the tough tightrope that politicians themselves walk when attempting to use humor.

Bruce: [W]ho was it that has on their tombstone something like “Dying is easy, comedy is hard”? Comedy is really hard. And some people can do it, and some people can’t… you have to have a certain amount of being relaxed enough and comfortable in—at least seeming to be comfortable in—your own skin to make jokes. …[O]ne of the ways that comedy can often help politicians [is in] humaniz[ing] them. Nixon, as uncomfortable as he looked saying “Sock it to me!” there was something about his willingness to do that.

…[O]ften, when it comes to celebrity—and politicians are celebrities—is we have this desire to get to know who they really are, as if we can kind of puncture somehow the public image that they show us. And often humor is used or seems to be a way to get past that public mask.

Heather: I think it depends on when you use it and do it. President Obama sent Betty White a Happy Birthday message [recently], and he cracked a joke about wanting to see her birth certificate. And I, myself, found that hysterical! …[E]ven the leader of the free world can tell a joke. I think the big question is going to be …whether people under 30 are… developing a sense of humor about politics that’s good for democracy or a disgust about politics that’s bad for democracy. That remains to be seen!

Authors Sarah Lageson, Sinan Erensu, and Kyle Green, are graduate students in sociology at the University of Minnesota.

One of our sister blogs recently posted on the issue of welcoming new students.  The blog author was emailed by an elementary teacher who is expecting a new student from China.  The student will be the only Asian child in the community, and the teacher was seeking advice on how to help him feel less alone or isolated.  We enjoyed reading the blog’s response, found here, and wanted to share it!

Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

The Web is a Class VI river rapid that is so much fun and engaging of the senses that we can’t help but want to go for a ride. At times, I worry sometimes that I get so caught up in the current that the world around me seems ordinary by comparison. I have to work hard at intentionally quieting myself. But the pull of a portable “everything device” that can give me any corner of the world at anytime makes that task increasingly difficult.

Last week, I wrote a piece entitled “There is no Cyberspace,” where I argued the today’s World Wide Web bears little resemblance to the thing that cyberpunk authors like William Gibson imagined as cyberspace. I explained that Gibson defined cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” and proceeded to argue that the Web was neither consensual nor hallucinatory. I noted that even Gibson himself acknowledges that the cyberspace concept is outmoded—that, rather than being sucked into the world behind the screen, computers have “everted,” overlaying the physical with the digital. I concluded that the term “cyberspace” confounds our ability to makes sense of a social Web that has very real consequences in our lives because it evokes images of fantastical space apart from reality that we can enter and exit at our leisure.  The piece received thorough feedback and critique in posts by Mike Bulajewski (on his Mr. Teacup blog)  and Jeremy Antley (on his Peasant Muse blog), which has encouraged me to further develop my argument.

My claim that the “cyberspace” misleadingly evokes elements of fantasy left room for possible confusion insofar as I failed to define what I meant by fantasy. Bulajewski, for example, attempted to invert my argument, making a sort of post-Modern claim that “there is only cyberspace” because both our individual psyches (à la Sigmund Freud) and our collective consciousness (à la Emile Durkheim) mediate and interpret experience through the lens of our history, memory, traumas, etc. As Immanuel Kant (and his sociological successor Georg Simmel) explained long ago, there is no access to “real,” unmediated experience—all subjective input is filtered through the pre-existing structures of our consciousness. Bulajewski wants to call all experience “fantasy” because it is historically and culturally relative. Perhaps this is an important distinction in an arcane philosophical context, but I’m rather more concerned with what people actually mean when they say “real” in the context of the Web, as in: “real” life vs. cyberspace.

Credit: Werner Kunz

What do we mean when we say “the real?” Why is it generally stated in a positive tone, while “the virtual” or “cyberspace” is generally stated in a negative tone? What does this reveal about our present historical moment? These are the question that concern me. I think the social theorist Jean Baudrillard has a lot to offer to this conversation. In his (1981/1994) classic book, Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard contrasts the real to its simulations. Baudrillard never actually does a great job at defining the real—mostly because he’s convinced it no longer exists—but we can generally gather that he (and the culture he is describing) interpret the real variously as that which is organic, original, indigenous, non-rationalized, undiscovered, and undisturbed. The real invokes a romanticized vision of the primitive or the pre-Modern. Baudrillard opines that the real has been supplanted by various layers of simulation; he explains that there are four orders of such simulations:

[1.] it is the reflection of a profound reality;
[2.] it masks and denatures a profound reality;
[3.] it masks the absence of a profound reality;
[4.] it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

Here’s where the confusion arises. I claim that we wrongly perceive the Web as a fantasy, a simulation called “cyberspace,” but I did not specify what order of simulation I was referring too. I believe Gibson (an other cyberpunk authors) were offering us an enlightening and engaging second-order simulation that tweaked and distorted reality through the lens of fiction. The cyberpunk authors demonstrated a profound ability to reveal important aspects of the present through an imagined future; they tapped into what Marshal McLuhan recognized as artist’s capacity to recognize important patterns emerging in the present (more on that below) such as the fact that the our culture was increasingly organizing itself around a perceived divide between physical and the digital. Importantly, however, Gibson and his peers avoided conflating fantasy and reality by setting their stories at some ambiguous future date, thus the images they present (including that of cyberspace) do not originate as third-order simulations (i.e., fantasy masquerading as reality); rather, something drove us, as a culture, to move from interpreting cyberspace as a matter of science fiction and toward an interpretation of cyberspace as a matter of science fact—to say, “hey, that Web thing we’re all doing now, that’s a separate, virtual world: a space set apart from the real.” This cultural movement to characterize the Web through the fantasy of cyberspace does violence to the very real social relationships that flow on and off the Web; it posits them as otherworldly and, as such, inessential to our lives.

Why is it, then, that we are so prone to denial and self-deception when it comes to the role that the Web plays in our culture? I believe that accepting the Web as integral to the fabric of reality threatens comfortable assumptions about our natures, about the essence of the self and its authenticity, and about our romantic conceptualization of the human soul. If the Web is enmeshed in every aspect of human life and we accept that the Web is real, then we must conclude that every aspect of our lives are synthetic—that nothing is “real” in Baudrillard’s romantic conceptualization of the term. McLuhan once presented just such a vision in televised debate:

Whenever a new environment goes around an old one there’s always new terror… When you put a man-made environment around the planet, nature from now on has to be programmed… the [new man-made] environment is not visible, it’s electronic.

Moreover, McLuhan proceeded to offer what could be interpreted as and explanation of why Baudrillard simply recoiled from this new, heavily-mediated environment, while Gibson is capable of providing an nuanced account of how one might come to terms with inhabiting such a world:

Every age creates as a Utopian image a nostalgic rear-view image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy… The present is only faced in any generation by the artist… The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life and therefore it’s anti-Utopian… it’s a world of anti-values and the artist who comes in contact with the present produces an avant garde image that is terrifying to other contemporaries…

Additionally, McLuhan explained that

Information overload produces pattern recognition… When give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition—in other words, to structuring the experience. And, I think this is part of the artist’s world. The artist, when he encounters the present… is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heavens sake. His great need—the absolute indispensability of the artist—is that he alone, in the encounter with the present, can give the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness to tell us what the world is made of.

As an artist, Gibson engages in pattern recognition, managing to observe not only the increasing interplay between physical and digital but also our latent anxieties about a world that moves between the two. For example, Gibson provokes us confront to deep philosophical tensions in our belief that identity rests both in the unity of body and mind and in a transcendent soul, by challenging us to imagine a world where mind can be separated from a living body and can inhabit new bodies. Where, then, does the self reside? Can the self be split? Copied? Can identity take physical manifestations outside of the body. Can identity take immaterial manifestations in the absence of or beyond the body?

Gibson's novel with a coincidental title.

As an artist, Gibson’s role is not so much to provide answers but to articulate the problem. He concedes: “we live in an incomprehensible present… I’m not really trying to explain the moment, I’m just trying to make it accessible.” His  fiction conjures the very aspect of the present that we are least equipped to handle and gives it name (i.e., “cyberspace”). He takes our deep-seated informational/material dualism to its logical conclusion and makes these ideas manifest in a world of fantasy. In so doing, he gives us a reference point against which we can contrast our own present experience. what we discover, in retrospect, is that the world he develops on the basis of our dualist assumption bears little resemblance to our own. Once this gulf between ideas and experience is laid bare, we are left with two choices: get new ideas, or escape to a new world. We have tried desperately for several decades to accomplish the latter. Rather than confronting the shortcomings of our ideas, we have asserted that Gibson’s fantasy of cyberspaces is real. We have sought replace reality with fantasy, and in so doing, we have denied existence of the mixed/blended/mediated/augmented reality that we truly inhabit. This has led to a state of pessimism and despair for Baudrillard and others who mourn the loss of reality altogether.

The alternate, of course, is to simply accept the idea that the real is synthetic as theorists such as Donna Haraway council. Haraway famously voiced her opposition to the pessimistic romanticism of Baudrillard and company when she concluded: “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves…  Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” The goddess, here, represents the romantic view of identity, where identity arises out of an opposition between binaries; on the other hand, the cyborg is a creature of context that continually renegotiates its identity in the space between supposed opposites (most pertinent in this case, the opposition between the physical and the digital). We must learn to embrace an augmented, cyborg reality, characterized by synthetics, copies, colonization, (de-)rationalization, reflexivity, and networked interactions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ever ahead of the curve, Gibson, himself, has embraced the view that the digital and the physical occupy the same space:

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical.

Similarly, he contends that:

Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us.

And that “[t]he non-mediated world has become a lost country… the mediated world is now the world.” Perhaps most provocatively, Gibson has claimed that his own neologism has outlived its usefulness:

Cyberspace might one day be the last usage of the prefix ‘cyber,’ because, I think, “cyber” is going to go the way of the prefix “electro.” We don’t use the prefix “electro” in pop-cultural parlance much anymore… it being taken for granted that most things are electrical.  And, I think, at this point, it could be taken for granted that most things are computerized.

This critique of digital dualism, however, does not imply that the interchanges between the physical and the digital are “frictionless.” I am not seeking to promote a naive Utopianism. As Haraway says: “This is not some kind of blissed-out technobunny joy in information.” Antley, for example, rightly observed that elements of our synthetic identity are prone coming  out of sync. This experience can be quite alarming. We all likely have stories of logging on to find uncomfortable images or other documents about us posted without our knowledge; panic ensues as we attempt restore and re-sync our online profile. Similarly, many of us have also probably found ourselves lost because reception on our phone or GPS cut out. Antley argues:

If we accept the premise that the Web is reality, then we must also accept that primary loss of connection to the web will create asynchronous gaps between our experience and the experience pervasively documented on the web.

Moving beyond the dualism of “cyberspace” does not mean escaping the difficulties of our mediated lives; rather, it is merely step towards better identifying and negotiating such issues. And, if the past is any indicator, we are well-advised to be on the lookout for new works of art that will aid us in better identifying the problems of our present reality and the anxieties they will surely provoke.

Photo by aagius

What does the term ‘cyberspace’ mean?  Does this Gibsonian construct adequately fulfill the task, currently asked of it by many, of defining the digital/physical realm interaction in terms of its scope and function?

PJ Rey argued that the term cyberspace, first coined by William Gibson in the short story ‘Burning Chrome’ and defined as a ‘consensual hallucination’, is deeply problematic in describing our contemporary social web because the web is neither consensual nor a hallucination.  Thanks to the ubiquity of smart phones, pervasive documentary practices (something Nathan Jurgenson calls the ‘Facebook Eye‘) mean that even if someone does not participate in the social web their actions are nonetheless captured by it to some degree, thus shaping our actions on the individual and societal level.  Many of us cannot control the degree to which this ‘Facebook Eye’ documents our actions (Could you stop every friend from making comments or posting pictures of your embarrassing moment from last week’s party?  What about last year’s party?) making the web far from a consensual space.  In many ways, because the web is not consensual it is also not a fantastical or a hallucinatory space either.  It is a part of reality- the web is as real as reality itself.  Actions taken offline impact online relations and vice-versa, allowing Rey to state that, “causality is bi-directional.  We are all part of the same human-computer system.”

For Rey, ‘cyberspace’ is merely the continuation of dualist thinking inherited from the Western philosophical conception of the mind-body separation.  Because the web always held a dialectal relationship with the physical world, Rey suggests that new vocabulary be created to more accurately explain the web/reality interplay, the augmented reality encompassing it all.

Affirming several of Rey’s assertions through a decidedly different analytical embrace, Mr. Teacup first dissects what he calls ‘augmentism’, a view attributed to the stance taken by Rey and others who write on the Cyborgology blog, before tackling the main issue at stake in the piece; what if there is no reality and only cyberspace?  Teacup expresses a very nuanced critique in both sections of his response, one that makes a compelling yet, ultimately, flawed case for why augmentism and augmented reality claims fall flat.

Let’s begin with the presentation of augmentism.  Teacup states that, “One thing that seems to be often implied is that digital dualism leads to exaggerated fears and anxieties, and augmented reality does not…augmentism effects a kind of naturalization or even domestication of technology.”  He goes on to bring up the example of parents concerned with their child spending too much time playing World of Warcraft.  While on face, the concern expressed by the parents would appear to enforce a digital dualist perspective of reality (Our son is spending too much time in the virtual world and ignoring the real world), Teacup accurately demonstrates that an ‘augmented’ perspective is actually at work as the parents are essentially stating that while the son may only feel like he’s in a virtual world, he is, in fact, very much a part of the real world and that ignoring real world concerns to play immersive games has impact.  The parents concern reflects a belief in the dialectal relationship between the web and reality- a conception Rey argues for in his piece.

“Many moral panics are centrally concerned with the threat of confusing fantasy for reality,” writes Teacup, who later adds, “by this definition, the criticism of moral panics is itself a moral panic.”   When Rey criticizes conceptions of reality rooted in a digital dualist discourse (like those espoused by the media concerning issues of internet addiction, violence in video games, etc…) he is engaging in a moral panic that is similar to the moral panics criticized in the first place.  Yet Rey plays the trump card in asserting that there is no other space, no other fantasy world or virtual reality, for a digital dualist moral panic to build upon- there is no ‘alternate world’ that can be confused for reality because the web is as real as reality itself.  The augmentist perspective, with its soothing naturalization of technology, presents a conception of reality in which the web seamlessly integrates and becomes a part of the everyday.  One can’t have panic over frictional issues between the web and the real- the web is real so there is no friction and thus no panic.

Photo by New England Secession

Why?  Because, as Teacup asserts in the second-half of his argument, there is an alternative between a dualist construction of reality, embodied by the mind-body debates, and an ‘augmented’ perspective of reality (Teacup calls this an ‘embodied cognition’); there is the Lacan inspired ‘antagonistic opposition’ perspective.  He writes, “to put it another way, our subjective self-consciousness feels like it has been grafted on, and sits in an uneasy relationship with the body.”  As such the self exists in some degree of friction with the body, making augmentist claims impossible to assert.  In denying the hybridity involved in ‘antagonistic opposition’, Rey ignores what Teacup labels the “simultaneously horrifying and compelling” nature of the modern cyborg.  This is why Rey must refute the term ‘cyberspace’- to accept its existence would be to face the traumatic reality head on.

The reason Teacup makes such a compelling argument is that he attacks Rey’s ‘augmented reality’ conception at its assumed weakest point; the idea that web/reality dialectal relationships, through their interplay, are devoid of friction that could lead to panic.  Yet I’m not sure that is an accurate assessment on the workings of an augmentist perspective.  For example, there are questions related to the degree of permeation the digital wave of augmentation holds on any given space or situation.  I live in Oregon and it is entirely possible for me to drive into a vast forest and lose all cellular connection, making my Galaxy S phone (my personal connector to the ‘Facebook Eye’) useless in documenting my experience.  Say I go on a hike and see an amazing waterfall.  When I return home, reentering the potential gaze of the ‘Facebook Eye’, the composition of my self is asynchronous to the self connected to and expressed through the web.  I could remedy this asyncronicity by posting an update, or perhaps uploading and posting photos I took of the hike with my old point-and-shoot camera.  But, I may choose not to post an update or upload photos.  If I never tell a single person about my hike, then no matter how good the ‘Facebook Eye’ becomes it will always possess an asynchronous composition of my identity as compared to the lived experience.  Smart phones and digital platforms make documenting life very easy (even non-consensual, as Rey observes), but in this ease I am reminded of the Philip K. Dick quote from ‘A Scanner Darkly’:

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.” (185)

Photo by Denis Mojado

This, to me, is the main conundrum in trying to assert that the web is reality.  We must address this issue of whether or not the ‘Facebook Eye’ operates as a scanner darkly or a scanner clearly when engaging in pervasive documentation.  If it indeed operates as a scanner darkly, then there can be no denying the presence of friction in the web/reality interplay found in an augmented reality.

There is also the question regarding the order, or level, of augmented documentation.  I’m not on Facebook but it is still possible for my life to be documented there through discussions people have about me, pictures taken with me in them that are then posted, etc…  Yet, I would generally have no knowledge of this documentation unless those who saw the post or produced it informed me of its existence.  In a strange way, the web connected self, in this case, would be asynchronous to the self of lived experience, but only when the two are conflated.  Also, because I’m not registered as an official entity on Facebook there is no publicly available collected ‘timeline’ through which to view my web connected self.  I have become a ghost, one that is asynchronous to the lived self.  In the pre-digital era, such asynchronous meetings of one’s self occurred with the spread of rumors or reputation (I am reminded of that classic phrase by Twain, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated), yet the limits of communicative speed provided some measure of delay for the impact of their effects.  Today, thanks to nearly instantaneous communication platforms available to an increasing number of people, rumors or reputation can spread quickly and in a very organized fashion.  Unless one dedicates a great deal of time to managing their Web-connected self, there will always be moments of asynchronicity when the lived self and the web-connected self are called upon to account for each other.

Photo by Miles Tsang

This is not to say that a dualist conception arises between the lived self and the web-connected self, merely that augmentation of our reality is limited to permeation and penetration of its augmented effects.  If we accept the premise that the Web is reality, then we must also accept that primary loss of connection to the web will create asynchronous gaps between our experience and the experience pervasively documented on the web.  Even if others note our absence through Web platforms like Facebook or Twitter, this documentation is on a secondary order (sometimes bordering on speculation) from that attained by the primary view of documentation.  In short, even an augmentist perspective contains elements of friction that can lead to panic, but more accurately asynchronicity.  With this viewpoint, debates over the alien nature of the self to the body become largely moot, as they, too, primarily deal with asynchronous concepts.  However, Teacup is right to question the ‘naturalization of technology’ perhaps glossed over in current augmentist conceptions, as there is much ground to explore on the nature of the web/reality interplay.  And, of course, while Rey dismisses and Teacup only obliquely mentions it, the fact that a digital dualist conception can still be used in contemporary discourse at all needs to be more fully investigated.  As I’ve noted with Russian peasants during the late 19th century, the era of textual augmented reality, there were situations when an augmentist perspective proved most effective (i.e. using concepts of Justice found in folktales to challenge the law or treatment under a landowner) and other situations when a dualist construction (eschewing traditional rights in a court proceeding in favor of written statutes) suited needs better.  As Rey states in his post, the durability of the term ‘cyberspace’ to describe the web clearly indicates that a digital dualist discourse continues to hold sway.  This strategic selection of dualist vs. augmentist perspective demands further investigation if we are to better understand the relation of the self to the larger augmented reality.

Just like Mr. Teacup, I agree with Rey’s argument that the web is reality and not a separate sphere of activity.  However, just as I cannot accept Teacup’s view that ‘augmentism’ equates to a frictionless, panic-less, ‘naturalization of technology’, I also cannot put full faith in a conception of augmented reality that does not account for the asynchronicities inherent in documentation, which is something Rey’s ‘augmentist’ position does not address.  To be fair, elaborating the workings and composition of relations that go into an augmented reality is still in its infancy, and posts like those written by PJ Rey and Mr. Teacup do a great service in deepening our understanding of this phenomena.  As I have tried to demonstrate above, there are many aspects of this conception of reality that need to be explored.  Ultimately, Rey is correct when he calls for a new vocabulary to explicitly describe our affirmation that the Web is not a separated sphere from our reality- our current terminology is too vague.

 

Jeremy Antley is a writer/student/gamer who currently lives in Portland, OR and writes on all sorts of interests on his blog, Peasant Muse.  Follow Jeremy on Twitter- @jsantley.

 

I couldn’t help but think of this when I watched the trailer for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, sent in by Katrin.  In this trailer, the Magical Negro isn’t a Black person; it’s not even a person.  It’s the entire country of India.

See if you see what I saw:

For examples of the Magical Negro, see our post on The Secret Life of Bees, the Magical Negro at Ikea, and the Magical Aboriginal Child in an Australian tourism ad.

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

Partnership-driven infrastructure project financing | Creating a formula for success from existing projects

Visualizing Finance

For almost a year I have been working at the Center on Law and Public Finance, a center based at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, which is currently dedicated to research on American infrastructure. Infrastructure has a halo of geeky coolness about it that is a combination of the tinkerers desire to figure out “How Things Work” ala David MacCaulay and the awe of beholding massive public works projects like the Hoover Dam, the Tappan Zee bridge, and New York City’s monumental water delivery system.

Tappan Zee Bridge | ABC Local

Right now, though, the debate in DC and in various states is about how we can pay for the upgrades and extensions of our infrastructure that are badly needed. It’s also about just what counts as infrastructure. We define infrastructure as physical, regulatory, bureaucratic, and behavioral assemblages that are durable over time. This is a fairly academic definition, but it allows for the inclusion of not only of bridges, roads, ports, and mass transit, but also of things like suicide prevention hotlines, manufacturing plants, and educational institutions. Once we broaden the definition to include a more realistic, inclusive set of infrastructures that underpin civic, commercial, and social life, the challenge of explaining how we might pay for these projects gets even harder.

For our most recent report, “Partnership-driven Growth: A bipartisan way forward”, I tried to develop a flexible strategy for demonstrating the reliance on partnerships of monetary and non-monetary support that come together to meet the specific needs of particular projects, while following a loose template adopted by many infrastructure projects. Since infrastructure generally benefits many constituencies, including civic society, the most common successful infrastructure funding is like a collage. Often, successful projects draw on a modest amount of federal support, either in the form of loans, loan guarantees, or (matching) grants. These federal dollars are good at acting as funding anchors (and votes of confidence) which tend to smooth the way for states, local governments, and private investors to commit their own funds and support to the projects.

One of the things I wanted to emphasize with the graphic was that though each project presents a unique ‘flower’, there is a general formula for success. Nobody is out there re-inventing the wheel with respect to financing vehicles even though it might sometimes feel like that for local governments, states, and private investors who haven’t built many financing vehicles. I was also trying to find a way to indicate that not all support for infrastructure projects is monetary support. Sometimes support comes from a willingness to change a zoning law or to create a partnership with a local university where the business, design, or engineering school dedicates time and effort to overcoming challenges within the infrastructure or business plan.

The page you see at the top of the post was the frontis-page for a section in the report that looked at a number of case studies. Each case study contained the same “flower” from the frontispiece with a lengthier description of just how much of which kinds of funding were involved. I’ve included the relevant page of the Tesla case study below, just to demonstrate how the design was developed within the report. I wanted the frontis-page to this section to give readers pause – they had just made it through about 10 pages of prose – and to help them connect individual projects back to a general ‘formula for success’. Hence, I repeated the flower form from the frontis-page in each of the case studies, hoping that a little repetition would help to cement key concepts.

Tesla Fremont partnership project case study

Infrastructure banks

Politically, the reason it is important to understand how infrastructure financing works when it is successful, is that both at the national level and within particular states, lawmakers are considering establishing infrastructure financing authorities (hereafter referred to as infrastructure banks). The exact dimensions of these banks are still being hashed out. Will they fund only certain sectors of infrastructure like transit, energy, and manufacturing or should they include social infrastructure, too? Will they use revenues generated by some of the stronger infrastructure sectors to help support those sectors that are less likely to be self-sufficient? Or, should each project be responsible only for its own bottom line? Since infrastructure has a long time horizon, what is the best way to set up lifecycle-aware financing structures?

Electric Vehicle Charging infrastructure schematic | Schneider Electric

Our current work tries to build a baseline of understanding so that decision makers, including voters, will have a framework within which to advocate properly for their own interests while keeping an open mind about the visionary possibilities of infrastructure banks. This discussion needs to be much bigger than one that only responds to the “we’re in a recession, let’s find a rapid cash infusion from the private sector” frame. A new bank could do much more than that. It could be time to reconsider agency structures and break down silos; it could be time to reexamine the way infrastructure necessary for commerce relates to private sector revenues; it could be time to recognize synergies between sectors that make more sense now than they did in the past (the energy sector and private automotive transportation have something different to say to each other as more cars are electric, for instance. Social infrastructure and broadband supporters have a different conversation now that so many people turn to the internet for social services and broader social support).

There will be more to come in this series. The conversation is just getting started.

Criticism welcome

As always when I present my own work, I invite criticism. Readers of this blog have been generous (and civil) with their comments in the past and I am quite grateful to have such a thoughtful readership.

References

Likosky, Michael and Norén, Laura. (January 2012) “Partnership Driven Growth: A bipartisan way forward” [Report] Center on Law and Public Finance, Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University.

The ruling did not address whether any ban on same-sex marriage was inherently unconstitutional; instead, it focused on the fact that same-sex marriage had been (at least briefly) legal in California, and Prop 8 was designed to specifically take away a recognized status that was in existence at the time it passed.

After the ruling, Talking Points Memo posted a map showing the current legal status of same-sex marriage throughout the U.S.:

Does anyone know what’s going on with New Mexico?

UPDATE: Reader Anonymous Bosch explains, “Gay marriage is de facto illegal in New Mexico, since licenses won’t be granted to gay couples. There hasn’t been enough legislative support for either bans or civil unions…”

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

Photo by gadgetdude via flickr

The concerns of unemployment—especially within the last few years—have even the college-educated uncertain about the value of their diploma. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a new article shows the type of knowledge and critical thinking skills acquired in college can have a dramatic effect on later employment success. The journal article, by Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and a few new additions to their team, is a followup to their influential, yet controversial, 2010 book Academically Adrift.

After spending last spring surveying a large sample of students they’d previously studied for their book, the researchers found stark differences in post-graduation success between those developed top-notch critical thinking skills and those who struggled on that measure. Students who scored in the bottom 20 percent on a critical thinking skills test were three times more likely than those who were in the top 20 percent to be unemployed (9.6 percent compared with 3.1 percent). Additionally, graduates who’d scored low on critical thinking were twice as likely to be living at home with their parents and significantly more likely to have amassed credit card debt (51 percent compared with 37 percent). According to the Chronicle, “The results that [Arum] and his colleagues found were so arresting, he said, that they chose to release them earlier than the follow-up book that they are planning to publish in the next year or two.”

Despite some criticisms about the initial book’s validity and methodology, Arum maintains the sharp differences in post-college achievement are worthy of attention. “That’s a dramatic, stunning finding,” said Mr. Arum, “What it suggests is that the general higher-order skills that the Council for Aid to Education assessment is tracking is something of significance, something real and meaningful.”

Specifically, one reader wrote to me:

I am a full time elementary school teacher and I will have a new student in a few days from China. He and his family do not speak English–they are opening a restaurant in our small community. In our community, he will be the only Asian child. What can I do to help him not feel so alone and alienated? I know language will be a problem, but what could I as his teacher do to help? I was scanning the internet trying to find resources and found your site. Thank you for your time.

I replied back:

I commend you on trying to find ways to make this new student feel welcomed. Although my expertise is not in education, these are some suggestions that come to mind:

(1) Some time ago, there was a commercial (I forgot what the actual product or service was), but it showed a young Chinese boy about to enter a predominantly White school for his first day. Before entering, he was speaking in Chinese with his mom outside and told her, “My English is not good. What if the other students hate me?” His mother calmly replied, “You’ll be fine.” As he entered his classroom escorted by the principal, the teacher introduced the new student to the class. Then the entire class welcomed him by saying in unison, “Ni hao [student's name]” — translated, it means “Hello [student's name].” It was very sweet and it would be great if your class would do the same.

(2) You may already have plans to do so already, but I’ve heard from many educators that it helps new students if one or two other students are assigned to be their “guide” or someone who will spend time him the new student, show him around the school, eat lunch with him, introduce him to other students, and basically act like an ambassador for him to make him feel more comfortable.

(3) You may know Google Translate already , but if not, it’s a great tool to assist in translating between different languages. In the meantime, you’ll probably be surprised how quickly the student will learn English. Just stay patient and positive while he does.

(4) Perhaps some time in the future, your class can make a field trip to his parent’s restaurant to learn about Chinese food, running a small business, etc. This would be a great way to welcome the family to the community and to show the other students that he is welcomed in their class.

(5) Finally and perhaps most importantly, I hope you and the rest of the teachers and administrators can do whatever possible to stay on top of any incidents of racial teasing. Nothing will alienate the new student more than if other students start making fun of him because he’s Chinese — because he’s different than everybody else around him. With that in mind, it is absolutely critical to let the other students (in your class and elsewhere) that it is not acceptable to make fun of him because he’s Chinese and that any such incidents will be punished. This how we start to break the cycle of racial prejudice — one student at a time.

The teacher wrote me back and thanked me for the ideas and seemed very excited about them.

This question of how a school, administrators, teachers, and students can best welcome new student who is both an immigrant and a racial minority to their class got me thinking that, rather then just giving her my ideas, I should “crowdsource” this question and ask all of you for your suggestions on how to best welcome this new student.

If you have been in this situation, either as the new student, one of the existing students, or the educator, what were some ways to make this new student feel welcomed and comfortable? Or even if you were never in this situation, what are some strategies to try? If you are a researcher who is familiar with this issue, what are some “best practices” that have been shown to be effective? I would love to hear from others with your ideas and suggestions.

As globalization and demographic changes keep taking place and as U.S. society and more communities around the country like this become more diverse and multicultural, this kind of situation is likely to become more common. In other words, this is sociology taking place in the real world.

Daliah Lithwick thinks it could have been a more liberal because it was narrowly based on California’s same sex rights protections rather than a broad rationale ala Lawrence v. Texas. No doubt the court wanted to insluate itself from having its decision overturned by a court skittish to expand equal protection rights nationally.

The question I’d raise here is simply whether getting tough on bullying will worsen racial disparities in education. Bullying is a hot issue these days, with a steady drumbeat of legislation and opinion pieces urging us to “strengthen” anti-bullying laws. At the same time, there is deep and abiding concern about closing the gaps in education. Now I can’t claim any real expertise in bullying or in educational attainment, but I can offer a respectful heads-up to policy folks as they craft new anti-bullying laws and practices. How are you thinking about their likely racial impact? I ask because stricter regulation of a broad set of behaviors like bullying could worsen racial disparities in school discipline.

I’ll explain my rationale for this heads-up below, but I really want to make the more general point that sometimes social scientists can contribute to public debates even when we aren’t the leading experts on a topic. We have to be more careful and guarded in our claims, of course, when our expertise is limited to reading and teaching what others have written. Still, we can provide a service even when we raise questions or help people ”connect the dots” in a useful way. My approach is usually to just point to the ”dots”  that I’ve found convincing and to ask questions about whether and how the policy action being considered might take account of them.

I base my bullying heads-up on two related lines of social science research. The first concerns implicit racial bias in perceptions of threat and dangerousness. The chart below is taken from a 2010 piece by Kimberly Kahn and Paul Davies, who  showed that both White and African American study participants were more likely to assume people with stereotypically African American features had guns in a split-second shoot/don’t shoot computer simulation. Both Whites and African Americans mistakenly shot targets with darker skin, broader noses, and fuller lips about 11 percent of the time, relative to 8 or 9 percent of the time for White targets and “low-stereotypical” African American targets. This sort of pattern is evident in a lot of research on “implicit bias,” where whites tend to be perceived as more safe and less threatening than (otherwise identical) African Americans. My sense from this research is that actions by darker-skinned students might be more likely to be perceived and punished as bullying than when the same actions are taken by lighter-skinned students.

The second “dot” is that most of the self-report studies I’ve seen also show racial differences in self-reported bullying behavior. The chart below is taken from a 2007 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health by Aubrey Spriggs and colleagues. According to their analysis of a nationally representative sample of 6th to 10th graders, African American children were significantly less likely than White children to report they were targets of bullying and significantly more likely to report engaging in bullying behaviors themselves.  

About 17 percent of African American kids self-reported physical bullying, relative to 15 percent of Hispanic youth, 11 percent of Whites, and 12 percent of those of other groups. The targeting or victimization numbers go in the other direction, with 12 percent of African Americans reporting being physically bullied, relative to 15 percent of whites. The same patterns seem to hold for other types of bullying (verbal, relational, and cyber) as well.

Experts on bullying can surely provide a better account of these figures than I can, but it looks to me as though enforcing vague bullying rules more strictly could worsen racial disparities in school discipline and, perhaps, educational attainment. I don’t know enough about bullying or schools to make strong policy recommendations, but it seems there is enough evidence here to at least put the question of racial impact to those charged with making or enforcing new rules. A small but significant difference in self-reported bullying combined with implicit bias in enforcing bullying rules could lead to pronounced disparities. That doesn’t mean anyone should ignore bullying, of course, it just means that we might consider steps to help reduce or mitigate bias when we change the rules.

One proposed Minnesota bill would define bullying as conduct “so severe, pervasive or objectively offensive that it substantially interferes with the student’s educational opportunities,” or places the student in “actual and reasonable” fear of harm, or substantially disrupts school operations. This seems to set a pretty high bar, which would appear to be racially neutral – unless, of course, students, teachers, and administrators are already more afraid of darker-skinned students. If so, there is some evidence to suggest they will be quicker to pull the trigger in suspending or expelling such students.

Photo by Ben+Sam via flickr

Raising healthy kids is usually seen as a result of some magical combination of resources and education in a child’s home, school, and neighborhood. A newly released study by Penn State sociologists Molly Martin, Michelle Frisco, and Claudia Nau and the Census Bureau’s Kristin Burnett, however, finds poverty at schools has a greater affect on adolescent obesity than poverty or low education at home.

Well-educated parents are less likely to raise overweight children, but according to the study’s findings, if the student attends a poor school, the effect of his or her parents’ education is minimized. According to the online news source Futurity‘s report on the research , “A parent with a graduate degree who has a child in a poor school is more likely to raise an overweight adolescent than a parent with an eighth grade education who has an adolescent enrolled in a rich school.”

“The environment can actually limit our ability to make the choices that we all think we make freely,” Frisco says. Martin maintains that poor schools influence a student’s weight even beyond the typically-blamed unhealthy food choices. Low-funded schools have a difficult time offering athletic or fitness programs. Martin also argues that low income schools may house students with higher levels of stress. “Schools with limited financial resources tend to be more stressful environments,” Martin says. “Stress promotes weight gains and usually the worst kinds of weight gains.”

ProPublica explains:

…President George W. Bush decided at the beginning of his first term to rely almost entirely on the recommendations made by career lawyers in the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

The office was given wide latitude to apply subjective standards, including judgments about the “attitude” and the marital and financial stability of applicants…

Bush followed the recommendations of the pardons office in nearly every case… President Obama — who has pardoned 22 people, two of them minorities — has continued the practice of relying on the pardons office.

Sometimes disparate decisions in pardon cases were eyebrow raising:

An African American woman from Little Rock, fined $3,000 for underreporting her income in 1989, was denied a pardon; a white woman from the same city who faked multiple tax returns to collect more than $25,000 in refunds got one. A black, first-time drug offender — a Vietnam veteran who got probation in South Carolina for possessing 1.1 grams of crack – was turned down. A white, fourth-time drug offender who did prison time for selling 1,050 grams of methamphetamine was pardoned.

ProPublica traces the disparity to age, leniency given to people who are seen as “upstanding” members of society (e.g., they’re married, have little debt), the influence of money and politics (letters from Congresspersons and donations to lawmakers by convicts’ spouses), and simple prejudice.  Nevertheless:

When the effects of those factors and others were controlled using statistical methods, however, race emerged as one of the strongest predictors of a pardon.

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

The Komen Foundation is known to many primarily because it’s often listed as a recipient of the funds companies promise to donate when we buy products branded with a pink ribbon. But many critics express concern with this type of marketing-as-awareness, and discussions of the “pinkification” of breast cancer and criticism of the policies supported by groups such as Komen surfaced as part of the debate about the organization over the weekend (which is ongoing, with the VP for Public Policy at Komen announcing her resignation today).

Given this, Dmitriy T.M. thought readers might be interested in the trailer for the documentary Pink Ribbons, which looks at the rise of pink ribbon branding and its impact on breast cancer prevention efforts. I post it with the caveat that I haven’t been able to see the whole film, but would love to hear from those of you who have, or who can speak to the issues it raises:

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

Social theory should both grow out of, and be applicable to, empirical phenomena. As such, an important part of theorizing is to understand the substantive realities about that which we theorize. When theorizing about new technologies, this means keeping up with a highly complex and quickly changing empirical landscape. This post is a roundup of some recent empirical findings about social media trends, with a focus on Facebook—the current social media “hub.”

Study 1:

Title: “Why Facebook Users Get More than They Give: The Effect of Power Users on Everybody Else.”

 Authors: Keith N. Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Cameron Marlow, Lee Rainie

Out of: Pew Internet and American Life Project

Highlights:

• 40% of Facebook users in our sample made a friend request, but 63% received at least one request
• Users in our sample pressed the like button next to friends’ content an average of 14 times, but had their content “liked” an average of 20 times
• Users sent 9 personal messages, but received 12
• 12% of users tagged a friend in a photo, but 35% were themselves tagged in a photo

Excerpt:

The average Facebook user gets more from their friends on Facebook than they give to their friends. Why? Because of a segment of “power users,” who specialize in different Facebook activities and contribute much more than the typical user does. The typical Facebook user in our sample was moderately active over our month of observation, in their tendency to send friend requests, add content, and “like” the content of their friends. However, a proportion of Facebook participants – ranging between 20% and 30% of users depending on the type of activity – were power users who performed these same activities at a much higher rate; daily or more than weekly. As a result of these power users, the average Facebook user receives friend requests, receives personal messages, is tagged in photos, and receives feedback in terms of “likes” at a higher frequency than they contribute. What’s more,power users tend to specialize. Some 43% of those in our sample were power users in at least one Facebook activity:  sending friend requests, pressing the like button, sending private messages, or tagging friends in photos. Only 5% of Facebook users were power users on all of these activities, 9% on three, and 11% on two

Study 2

Title: “Real People VS Fake Profiles”

By: Barracuda Labs

 Highlights: I’ll let the infographic speak for itself

Study 3

Title: “Getting beeped with the hand in the cookie jar: Sampling desire, conflict, and self-control in everyday life.”

 Authors: Wilhelm Hofmann, Kathleen D. Vohs, and  Roy F. Baumeiste

From: Presented at the 13^th annual meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology

 Highlights:  A study of 205 adults found that their desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, but the desire for media and work were the hardest to resist. Surprisingly, participants expressed relatively weak levels of desire for tobacco and alcohol. This implies that it is more difficult to resist checking Facebook or e-mail than smoking a cigarette, taking a nap, or satiating sexual desires.

 Excerpt (from press release):

 In the new study of desire regulation, 205 adults wore devices that recorded a total of 7,827 reports about their daily desires. Desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, while desires for media and work proved the hardest to resist. Even though tobacco and alcohol are thought of as addictive, desires associated with them were the weakest, according to the study. Surprisingly to the researchers, sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting “pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations,” says Hofmann, the lead author of the study forthcoming in Psychological Science. Moreover, the study supported past research that the more frequently and recently people have resisted a desire, the less successful they will be at resisting any subsequent desire. Therefore as a day wears on, willpower becomes lower and self-control efforts are more likely to fail, says Hofmann, who co-authored the paper with Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota.

 Study 4

Title: “Facebook Makes a Splash in the Bathroom”

 Author:  Vlad Gorenshteyn

From: AISMedia

 Highlights: According to a telephone survey conducted by marketing firm AISMedia, about 1/3 of Facebook users engage in Facebook activity while in the bathroom. Women were slightly more likely than men to report using Facebook in the bathroom (54.4% and 46.6% respectively), and the most prominent ‘bathroom-bookers’ were between the ages of 30-39.

 Excerpt:

We contacted 500 Americans and asked them a rather personal question: “Do you ever use Facebook on your mobile device while you’re in the bathroom?” Our survey results reveal that Facebook has become so prolific, that nearly 1/3 of people (27 percent to be precise) can’t resist the urge, responding “yes”!

General Summary

We see several interesting and related findings in these seemingly disparate studies. From the Pew Research report, we see that a) practices of Facebook use vary widely among members, and b) the way members of our network uses Facebook shapes our own social media experience. Moreover, we see that some are characterized as “power users,” engaging in high levels of activity. Perhaps these “power users” partially account for the findings of Hoffman et al., as they may be unable to resist the urge to engage in social media interactions. Relatedly, it may be these power-users and/or social media addicts who bring their mobile devices with them into the bathroom. Then again, the technology that allows us to bring Facebook into the bathroom (i.e. mobile devices) may simply offer a more entertaining alternative to paper-based reading materials. Finally, an analysis of real versus fake Facebook profiles alerts us to a socially inappropriate way to use Facebook: dishonestly.

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

James Fallows has an excellent dressing down of this ad. Pointing out that most of China doesn’t look like what’s depicted in the ad.

I’m not even sure what the main point of this ad is supposed to be? That Democrats in general and Debbie “Spend it Now” are funneling money to a country full of Chinese women in rice paddies? I can get too scared about some 1950′s depiction of China? Shouldn’t you be showing Chinese engineers in factories or Chinese mega-cities?

But of course if you did that, it would undercut the idea of American exceptionalism. Central to the idea of a “yellow peril” is that Asians use guile and deceit to achieve their ends. And that Asian women secretly want to be taken by virile American men. So it’s no accident that there’s a “come hither” aspect to this ad. I mean, what’s with the accent? Who thinks this is the way Chinese people speak English? It’s as if they are trying to conjure up the hooker in Full Metal Jacket.

I’m not sure that ham-handed appeals like this work in our political climate. Ads like this are typically run by losing campaigns. If you look at the Real Clear Politics run down of the polls for this race, Stabenow has a decent lead. I don’t see it shrinking based on this ad.

HT: Mike Frieda

Intended to coincide with the super bowl and in the middle of the republican primaries, the main point was to examine all of the ways in which sport and politics are intertwined, even if we don’t like it. We concluded that piece by saying that our goal was not necessarily to argue that the two should be separate but concluded that some might take it that way.

Well, what do you know but this week’s back page column in Sports Illustrated is a mock political campaign by columnist Phil Taylor to push for passage of a bill that would “ensure” the permanent “separation of sports and politics.”

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1194467/index.htm

Taylor is clearly having fun with the piece, mostly at the expense of politicians who have pretended to be sports fans and men of the people. (Joe Biden, John Kerry, Newt Gingritch, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney all take shots).  There are no great sociological insights here–just a number of great and revealing examples of the awkward, potentially combustable collusion of sport and politics in contemporary life.

My favorite part is Taylor’s speculation that this campaign might be one of the few arenas in which a bipartisan coalition in American politics might be possible. I love that line–both it speaks to how deeply and broadly-held are our beliefs about the separation of sports and politics (“God bless any elected official who doesn’t pretend to care about the Super Bowl,” he writes) and as a commentary on how difficult it is to imagine Democrats and Republicans coming to consensus on anything these days.

Living Alone by Gender, Age Cohort in the US since 1850

What works

This post is an update to an earlier post about the increasing rate of Americans living alone. The first graph does an excellent job of visualizing the change in Americans’ tendencies to live alone, by age and gender. It’s clear that living alone is on the rise, especially for Americans over 45. It’s interesting that there seems to be a collective slow down in this trend in the decade between 35 and 45 when I suppose some of the late-to-marry people finally settle down and before the marital dissolution rate starts to fire up.

The graphics in this post accompanied an article by Eric Klinenberg in the New York Times Sunday Review that laid out the basic findings in his latest book, “Going Solo” that was based on 300 interviews with people living alone. He finds that while for some, living alone is an unwanted, unpleasant experience, most people who live alone are satisfied with their personal lives more often than not. In fact, they are more social, at least in some ways, than are their counter-parts who live with others. Singletons (his word, not mine. I prefer ‘solos’ in part because it’s an anagram), go to restaurants and other social spaces more often than do those who live with others.

Living alone in Minneapolis

In a number of cities, including Minneapolis, more than 40% of households are single-people households. The article included an interactive map down to the census tract level that shows what percentage of households in that tract were single-person households in 2010. I took a look at Minneapolis and St. Paul and found that the map supported Klinenberg’s qualitative findings. The highest concentration of solos is in the center city areas where opportunities to get out and be social in the community are the highest. The suburbs and rural areas have fewer solos.

I encourage others to use the map and see if their local cities replicate this pattern, that more solos live in ‘happening’ areas than in quieter areas. Of course, this could be caused by a third variable, the presence of households that are affordable for single-earner households…but there isn’t enough analytical power in the map tool to be able to sort out the dependencies.

What needs work

The information about who lives alone by age, marital status, and race that is displayed in the following long skinny stack of datapoints is the right kind of detailed information to use as an entrance into a deeper discussion about living alone, now that we’ve gotten a sense of the view from 30.000 feet. The problem is that this graphic is hard to read, too long for a single computer screen (but in order to make sense of it, one needs to see the whole thing at once), and too optimistic about what color differences are able to do than is reasonable.

The article does a better job of subtly navigating the movement from historical and international context into a detailed, robust analysis. By awkwardly pinning all the data points onto the stalk at once, viewers lose the ability to see patterns within data subsets. Here’s a test. Look at the following data and try to explain to yourself how race and living alone go together. Or how age and living alone go together. The graphic designer was hoping color would be able to do more than it has been able to accomplish here. The color is supposed to tunnel your vision down to a particular color-coded subset so that you can start to understand well just what it is about race or age or marital status that produces particular patterns in living alone. But I had a lot of trouble with the color frame because, quite literally, I had to keep shifting the frame around this graphic – it didn’t fit on my laptop screen. [Graphic designers often work on nice, roomy screens where they end up seeing more at once than their eventual audience who is probably peering at this thing from a web browser on a laptop or occupying half of a monitor somewhere.]

All the clustering around the mean is another problem that could have been avoided had the graphic been organized differently. As it is, all sorts of groups lump on top of one another down around 14%.

I also kind of hate that I can’t add categories together in any meaningful way here. I can tell that being a widow would put someone at high risk for living alone, but that’s kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it? I would have gotten more mileage out of visualizing the absolute numbers of people living alone by marital status, age, and race. Maybe over half of all widows live alone, but I haven’t the faintest idea how many widows there are in America so I don’t know if half of all widows is half a million people? Or 3 million people? Or whether it’s more or less than the 38% of separated people who are living alone. 19% of never married’s live alone, but because these people are likely to be young, maybe that is actually a larger absolute group than the 58% of widows living alone.

Final verdict: There was both a data fail and a graphic design fail.

Who lives alone? A demographic breakdown

References

Going Solo Cover

Klinenberg, Eric. (2012) One’s a Crowd. New York Times Sunday Review.

Weber, Susan and Beveridge, Andrew. (2012) [infographics]
Solo in America graphic Line graph looking of the changing percentage of singleton households in America, 1850-2000
More on their own here…and even more abroad American and International singleton households.
Mapping the US Census: Percentage of Households with only one occupant Interactive graphic of US singleton households by census tract.

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

Women snuck onto marathon courses from that point forward.  Resistance to their participation was strong and, I believe, reflects men’s often unconscious fear that women might in fact be their equals.  Why else would they so vociferously object to women’s participation?  If women are, indeed, so weak and inferior, what’s to fear from their running alongside men?

Illustrating what seems to be a degree of panic above and beyond an imperative to follow the rules, the two photos  below show the response to Syracuse University Katherine Switzer’s running the man-only Boston marathon in 1967 (Switzer registered for the marathon using her initials).  After two miles, race officials realized one of their runners was a girl.  Their response?  To physically remove her from the race. Luckily, some of her male Syracuse teammates body blocked their grab:

Why not let her run? The race was man-only, so her stats, whatever they may be, were invalid. Why take her out of the race by force?  For the same reason that women were excluded to begin with: their actual potential is not obviously inferior to men’s.  The only sex that is threatened by co-ed sports is the sex whose superiority is assumed.

Women were included in competitive marathoning from 1972 forward. The first Olympic women’s marathon was run in 1984.  Not so very long ago.

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

Johnny, the zombified brother of Barbra, is back from the grave and "coming to get you" in Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Ben's corpse is dragged from the house on meathooks during the ending credits, alluding to the white racist lynch mobs of the recent past.

The undead flock to a local shopping mall in Romero's second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978).

Romero took his social criticism one step further in his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978). In this film, protagonists bunker down in a shopping mall as zombies invade from outside. The images of zombies mindlessly walking, groping, and drooling over consumer goods provides a stark image of the cult of consumerism and American capitalism.

Similarly, the Italian zombie horror film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974) reflects fears of environmental degradation and pollution. In this film, the zombie epidemic is caused by an experimental pest-control machine, which sends radio waves into the ground. Although it solves the local pest problem for farmers, it also reanimates the dead in a nearby cemetery. Once again we see the fears of scientific progress and environmental degradation leading to the zombie apocalypse.

A still from Plague of the Zombies (1966) turned into a comedic meme.

Finally, The Plague of the Zombies (1966) captures themes of colonialism, tyranny, and proletariat exploitation. Set in the mid 1800s, a mysterious plague caused by voodoo magic leads the rural proletariat into a zombie revolution, eventually overtaking their corrupt patriarch and devouring him.

In short, the films of the 1970s became extremely political, as the zombie became a metaphor for various social anxieties that were most salient at this time, including environmental degradation, science and technology, rising inequality, energy crises, and consumer culture.

An experimental pest control machine unwittingly raises the dead in Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974).

With the 1980s, the zombie turned into a comedic figure. The films became more formulaic and less dramatic, mainly as a result of low-budget production houses capitalizing on the success of early zombie films. These exploitation films revolved around ever-increasing levels of gore and nudity in order to attract young audiences with shock value. Films like Return of the Living Dead (1985), Dead Alive (1992), and Redneck Zombies (1989) capture this era of Grindhouse cinema.

Losing a finger but gaining a laugh in Return of the Living Dead 2 (1988).

Nonetheless, the zombie films of this era still contain social commentary. For instance, themes of drug abuse and teen promiscuity feature prominently in these films, mirroring the social context of the 1980s, particularly Reagan’s “War on Drugs” and the AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Romero’s third zombie installment, Day of the Dead (1985), is credited as a criticism of Cold War international relations and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

The last living humans struggle to survive in an underground military bunker in Romero's third zombie film, Day of the Dead (1985).

As we can see from the examples above, Romero successfully turned the zombie from brainless automaton into a premier source of social and cultural criticism. The cannibalistic nature of his “flesh eaters” and the precedents he set for the genre helped to transform the zombie into powerful figure for social commentary. Next week, I will cover Part 3: The Zombie Renaissance and conclude with some theory signifying the importance of the zombie as metaphor.

But in their study, Braucher et al. found that African Americans were significantly more likely to file for Chapter 13, and more likely than they would expect when controlling for things that might make Chapter 13 more attractive. As this NYT chart shows, over half of African Americans file under Chapter 13, compared to just over a quarter for Whites and even less for other groups:

Rates of Chapter 13 filings vary quite a bit across different judicial districts, but African Americans consistently filed Chapter 13 at a higher rate than other groups, regardless of what the overall rate was:

Braucher et al. suggest that attorneys play a key role here. They sent surveys to 596 randomly-selected attorneys who represent individuals filing for bankruptcy, providing information about a married couple considering bankruptcy; 262 of the attorneys responded. When the potential filers gave the names Reggie and Latisha, attorneys were more likely to recommend Chapter 13 than when they gave the names Todd and Allison, suggesting that attorneys may play a role in tracking clients toward different bankruptcy options based on race.

The result is that African Americans are, overall, more likely to use the version of personal bankruptcy that costs them more and requires them to continue struggling to pay their debts for several more years, reducing the immediate relief most people assume bankruptcy provides.

Source: Braucher, Jean, Dov Cohen, and Robert Lawless. 2012. Race, Attorney Influence, and Bankruptcy Chapter Choice. Forthcoming in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Available free online here.

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

Just to keep it academic, here’s a 1977 New Republic article via longform.org on the moral equivalency of football…. I particularly like this quote:

Just as football has evolved in accordance with the evolving business ethic of American society, so has it evolved in accordance with the changing strategic assumptions about war. The development (or rebirth) of the T-formation in football coincided almost exactly with the development of a new era of mobility and speed in warfare best exemplified in the Blitzkrieg tactics of the German armies in Europe in 1939-40. The T-formation soon overwhelmed the “Maginot Line” mentality of traditional football, based as it was on rigid lines and massive concentrations of defensive and offensive power.

To draw this analogy out today, the NFL is bigger, more sophisticated and less dependent on “grind it out” offenses and more dependent on strong air attacks than when I grew up (drones anyone)???

Go Giants… as a Dolphins fan, I have sworn an oath to hate all AFC East rivals.