Sociological Images

The March, 2010 issue of Details, sent to us by m&k, “stars” Robert Pattinson:

As you can see, other than Pattinson, the most important part of the magazine is the discussion of “the remasculation of the American man,” but that’s for another day. What struck me was the way that the photo shoot uses naked women as props for Pattinson’s masculine display. The rest of the photos aren’t safe for work, so after the jump…

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Welcome Guest Poster Brady Potts, who just put together this post about online communities and collective mourning of Alex Chilton’s death. Brady is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Southern California who studies discourse in the public sphere. He is also the co-editor of The Civic Life of American Religion, and an inveterate music junkie.

I’m cheating a little with the whole “image” thing, but, you know…it’s Alex Chilton. I’m interspersing some videos for no reason other than that I can.

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Flags are at half-mast today mourning the death of Alex Chilton, former Box Top, Big Star, producer of The Cramps and Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, and truly eclectic solo artist. It got me thinking about the way people use the internet to collectively mourn the passing of public figures, and how online spaces have developed cultures of their own.

In the comments to a New York Times story about Chilton’s death, you’ll find a variety of comments ranging from brief RIPs to lengthy statements about what Chilton’s music has meant to them. Over at the Onion AV Club, which has a robust-yet-often-snarky commenting culture, you find lengthier, more thoughtful comments that are more like a dialogue between members of the site, as members trade stories, recommend songs to each other, and post links to Chilton’s work.  The comments also reveal a shared knowledge of “what kind of place this is and what kind of discussions we tend to have here,” as is the case with “PB,” who writes:

“Seriously, folks……the first person to make a snarky “Who?” comment gets a punch in the mouth.
Not just because this guy was a legend and your ignorance of him should be viewed with pity and disgust. But also because it’s obnoxious and ghoulish.Remember, just because you’re on the internet doesn’t meet you have to say something.”

“PB” acknowledges the speech norms of the site (“Who?” is a frequent, if contentious, comment regarding cult artists on the site) and, given the occasion, suggests that the usual sarcasm would be inappropriate.

On the other hand, if you click over to this Chilton tribute song by the Replacements and poke around the comments, you find mostly one or two lines of “RIP” and “You’ll be missed”. This is about par for the course with YouTube, whose commenters seem to favor mostly brief remarks (and, it should be said, often veer into speech that many would find wholly objectionable).

So are the differences in these patterns of commenting evidence of a shared collective identity (“AV Clubber”), as opposed to the more anonymous “anything goes” posting style of YouTube? I think that many observers would agree that it is, but looking at the different sites, there also appears to be a “group style,” what Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman describe as “recurrent patterns of interaction that arise from a group’s shared assumptions about what constitutes good or adequate participation in the group setting.”* Some online spaces we implicitly understand as places for anonymous commentary (with all that entails) while others we recognize as places where one should comment in a certain way, regardless of the identity we may or may not share as visitors to the site. This would suggest that visitors to web sites draw on collective understandings of what it means to be a good commenter in certain kinds of online spaces and post accordingly.

In any case, discussions like these are a starting point for all manner of interesting conversations about how we negotiate interaction online, and for that matter, how we use spaces like these to collectively mourn the passing of public figures whose life’s work is deeply meaningful to many people. And to that end, here are a few of my favorite of Chilton’s tunes, so feel free to use the comments to commemorate his work, wonder what the big deal is, lament the fact that they’ve been missing from your life thus far, or otherwise muse on the uses of the internet.

* Nina Eliasoph & Paul Lichterman, 2003, “Culture in Interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 108(4):737.

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So there’s your late-night Alex Chilton memorial post and rumination on the creation and maintenance of online communal identities. For a somewhat different example, see Jay Smooth’s discussion of people mourning Michael Jackson’s death.

If you’re interested, I wrote a piece for The Daily Mirror about my recent trip to the LAPD’s “Behind the Scenes” exhibit here in Vegas (which got a lot of media attention when the Kennedy family protested the inclusion of bloody clothing from Robert Kennedy’s shooting). My friend Larry was interested in the politics involved–whose personal tragedy gets put on public display? Were the displays as sensationalistic as he suspected they would be? He was particularly interested in how the case of the Black Dahlia (aka Elizabeth Short) would be presented, and what the LAPD would think was appropriate to display for public consumption.

So I agreed to go take a look. And I was horrified in so many ways. Absolutely stunned. You can find the piece here.

Jay Smooth on why we should focus less on the dumb racist/sexist/asshole-y bullshit people like John Mayer say (and man, did he ever say some dumb bullshit) and more on, say, re-segregation of the public school system:

And just for fun, Jay Smooth discussing Chris Matthews’s comment that he “forgot” President Obama was black, and what that says about what we think racial equality would look like:

I get this with students a lot: they desperately want to deny ever noticing anyone’s race/ethnicity, because the discourse of color blindness states that the way to treat people equally and eradicate racism is to stop acknowledging racial categories at all. But when you simply start ignoring the role of an important socially-constructed category without actually eliminating the negative effect it has on those in certain categories, you aren’t ending racism. It’s just making it harder to talk about or address, since anyone who tries to start a conversation about racial inequality is accused of actually perpetuating inequality and/or being racist for bringing the topic up.

This ties back in with the first video–we are more comfortable with more symbolic or linguistic forms of combating racial inequality (so, say, people say they have a friend who “happens to be Black,” as though it’s something they never thought about until that very second) than the much more complicated, difficult, and long-term work of rooting out structural inequality.

Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience tracked down the age at which all Oscar winners in the Academy’s 82 year history won their awards.  He found that men who won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor were typically in their 30s and 40s.  In contrast, women who won were typically in their 20s or 30s.

Men:

Women:

Looking at it another way, 55% of the women who have been awarded Oscars were 35 and under, whereas only 14% of men were the same:

Perhaps we’re seeing an age bias in award nomination and granting.  It’s reasonable to expect that older actors would be much more likely to win awards, given all their years of experience acting.  But this is not what we see for women or men.  Alternatively, there is an age bias in casting such that the only men and women available for an award are in these age groups.  Disaggregating the data by decade might also reveal some interesting patterns or trends that are invisible in this data.  There is, then, much room for speculation.

Kelly V. sent in a video by Alisa Miller of Public Radio International about the impact of news coverage on what we know about. In particular, she argues that changes in the U.S. news media, such as shutting down expensive foreign bureaus, have led to less coverage of events or issues in other countries:

For other examples of the role of media outlets in signaling what’s worth talking about, check out our posts on media outlets covering celebrity stories while chastising us for caring, presenting polls in the media, what stories get covered?, people are more interested in Tiger Woods than Afghanistan, meaningless statistics, U.S. and international versions of magazine covers, “us and them,” which missing kids get news coverage?, covering Obama and McCain, covering Obama and Clinton, and what’s worth covering in a slideshow?

When thinking about how media coverage affects public perceptions, many people think of it in terms of an “injection model”–that is, media outlets “inject” ideas into a passive public, directly affecting what they think (or, anyway, what everyone else thinks, since most people are convinced that they personally aren’t affected). Many researchers have argued this model depicts media audiences as having little agency when it comes to interpreting things they read or hear. People do ultimately decide what they think of issues, though the media play a large role in defining what issues are worth thinking about.

I have spent the last several days being mystified and annoyed by the number of news stories I’ve heard about Tiger Woods and his wreck and apparent affairs. I do not understand why this is national (and even international) news, and why news outlets from Fox to NPR found it worthwhile to have on commentators to talk about the fact that an athlete cheated on his wife.

Upon hearing my grumbling, my friend Larry (of The Daily Mirror) sent in this Google trends graph showing searches for “Tiger Woods” and “Afghanistan” during the last month:

The top graph shows searches for those terms; the bottom graph shows the frequency of them in news stories distributed by Google News. What was interesting to me is that news coverage has actually been higher for Afghanistan, with the gap growing during the days following the Tiger Woods story, but searches have followed the opposite pattern, with the enormous spike in searches for Tiger Woods in the last few days. It’s possible that TV media outlets have covered the Tiger Woods issue more than print media, so that could show a different trend.

But from what we see here, it appears that public interest isn’t being driven solely by media coverage, and any increases in news stories about Tiger Woods may be a response to an appetite for more information. That doesn’t mean media coverage doesn’t play a large part in framing public discourse–after all, we wouldn’t even know about the Tiger Woods story if it didn’t get some initial media coverage–but media outlets don’t decide what to cover in a complete vacuum, with the ability to get the public interested in any story they report on.

UPDATE: Larry sent in this image that contrasts searches for those terms with searches for “porn”:

Sigh.

Also see our posts on CNN questioning whether Jon and Kate’s divorce was getting too much coverage, which missing children get media coverage, the media shape reality, and coverage of Obama and Clinton.