Sociological Images

Network effect is a concept from economics that explains situations in which something becomes more valuable as more people use it. The classic example is the telephone; as more people and businesses adopted telephones, they became more useful (you could call a larger number of people you might wish to contact). More usage increased the value of the product, both for existing users and potential users. Social media work much the same way — an issue Google has faced as they try to pull enough users into Google+ to make it competitive with Facebook.

Over the weekend Matthew Hurst posted a video at Data Mining that illustrates the network effect…with dancers using an open area at the Sasquatch music festival. The video starts out a little slow; one guy starts dancing in the field, and a second guy joins him. For about a minute, it’s just the two of them. At 0:54, a third dancer appears. Through all of this, the surrounding crowd mostly ignores them, showing no inclination to participate. But at 1:12, a couple more people arrive, following immediately by more, and suddenly we’ve reached a tipping point: that open area is now a highly desirable spot to dance. People start running in from all directions, and many who had been ignoring the dancers suddenly jump up and join. It’s a great illustration of instances in which use drives more and more use:

Cross-posted at Compassionate Societies.

A new study from Pew, based upon a large national survey, found that people reported a lot more cruelty and the absence of kindness that many would expect. This implies that social networking sites (SNS) could use a lot more compassion.

Among adults, 85% say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind. Fewer teens said the same, only 69%.  More, social networking sites contributed to real life problems: including arguments and physical fights with friends, family members, teachers, or co-workers.  In all categories, teens were about twice as likely to report that SNS got them into trouble:

Racial minority populations encountered an even more cruel environment on SNS. Forty-two percent of Black and 33% of Hispanic SNS users said they frequently or sometimes saw language, images, or humor that they found offensive, compared with 22% of White SNS users.

Interestingly, people who used social networking sites on a daily basis were far more likely to report experiencing negative things:

SNS users also reported positive experiences, suggesting that, for many, social networking is a mixed bag of good and bad:

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Ron Anderson, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, has written many books and hundreds of articles, mostly on technology. In his retirement, he is doing research and writing on compassion and suffering and maintains the website CompassionateSocieties.org.

Scholars who study journalism, myself included, have found that efforts by journalists to stay neutral often backfire, resulting in exactly the opposite effect they desire.  Journalists, for example, may try to balance “both sides” of a contentious issue, seeking out authoritative sources to give a credible account of each position.  But, in seeking out authoritative people, they simultaneously offer a public platform to the very people who are already powerful.

Along these lines, Describing early coverage of the Vietnam War, Hallin (1986: 25) writes:

…most of the reporting, in the best tradition of objective journalism, ‘just gave the facts.’  But they were not just any facts.  They were official facts, facts about what the president said and what ‘officials here believe.’  The effect of ‘objectivity’ was not to free the news of political influence, but to open wide the channel through which official influence flowed (my emphasis).

More, because journalists need highly-authoritative sources in order to do their job, they need to cultivate relationships with them.  Likewise, authorities need reporters to help them get their stories to the public.

Powerful reporters and powerful people, then, become… friendly.  Reporters may try to avoid saying these that their regular sources wouldn’t want said, partly because they like them and are influenced them, and partly because they need them for the next story and the next.

I thought of this research when Jay Livingston posted this picture, on the Montclair SocioBlog, of Alan Greenspan and David Brooks having lunch together:

Note: The photo was removed at the request of the person who took it. Sorry.

Greenspan is the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Brooks is a decorated journalist.

Source: Hallin, D. (1986) The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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

Academic disciplines sometimes seem isolated from each other.  Like seems to speak to like.  This, it is sometimes worried, may lead to stultifying agreement within fields. Meanwhile, each field solves the same problem in different ways, unbeknownst to the next.

It simply isn’t true, it turns out, that scholars don’t cite research in other fields.  Nor do all fields have the same level of insularity.  Illustrating this is the network map below, featured by the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The connections between disciplines represent how often academic articles published by scholars in each field link to other fields.  The results are pretty interesting:

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

Brian Spranger gave me a LOL when he sent along this cartoon addressing the way in which technological change changes our lives:

Found uncredited at FunnyJunk. If anyone knows who made this, I’d much prefer to link to the cartoonist.

UPDATE: Thanks so much to Daniel for offering some information about authorship!  He writes:

This comic is an example of a “rage comic” and there isn’t a single author that makes all of these. They originated on 4chan and then spread to and were further developed on other social websites. This particular comic appears to be made by one “Gordondel” of reddit.com. You can see the original posting and comments here.

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

That’s Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and, behind him, his “law of information sharing.” The equation and graph illustrate, in his own words:

…that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.

The norms surrounding privacy are changing and new apps and services for us to display ourselves are being invented. Because of this, Zuckerberg predicts that we will share more and new types of information as time passes.

Facebook and the rest of social media (Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and so on) need us to share more and more information. Facebook, for instance, uses our personal information to attract advertisers who want to better “target” their advertisements to us. Change your relationship status to “engaged” and you may be quickly targeted with wedding ads.

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Hurricane Katrina landed the gulf coast six years ago on August 29th.

This is what it looks like when government fails to protect its citizens:

(source)

More than a quarter of people living in New Orleans in August of 2005 lived below the poverty line.  Many of the poor in New Orleans stayed at home to weather the storm.  Why?

Twenty-seven percent of New Orleanians didn’t own a car, making evacuation even more difficult and expensive than it would otherwise be.

People without the means to leave are also the most likely to rely on the television, as opposed to the radio or internet, for news.   TV news began warning people how bad the storm would be only 48 hours before it hit; some people, then, had only 48 hours to process this information and make plans.

Poor people are more likely than middle and upper class people to never leave where they grew up.  This means that they were much less likely to have a network of people outside of New Orleans with whom they could stay, at the same time that they were least able to afford a motel room.

For those who were on government assistance, living check-to-check, it was the end of the month.  Their checks were due to arrive three days after the hurricane.  It was also back-to-school time and many were extra cash poor because they had extra expenses for their children.

A study of New Orleanians rescued and evacuated to Houston (Quigley, 2006), described by political scientist Caroline Heldman, found that:

…14% were physically disabled, 23% stayed in New Orleans to care for a physically disabled person, and 25% were suffering from a chronic disease…  Also,

• 55% did not have a car or a way to evacuate
• 68% had neither money in the bank nor a useable credit card
• 57% had total household incomes of less than $20,000 in the prior year
• 76% had children under 18 with them in the shelter
• 77% had a high school education or less
• 93% were black
• 67% were employed full or part-time before the hurricane

The city failed to get information to their most vulnerable residents in time and they failed to facilitate their evacuation.  The empty buses in flood water, buses that could have been filled with evacuees prior to the storm, is a testament to this failure.

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