Sociology Lens

I recently came across a tool that has been around for a couple of years. GenderAnalyzer claims that it can determine the gender of the author of any text that you point it to. It learns to do this by looking at thousands of blogs and the corresponding gender of the author.

Give it a try: genderanalyzer.com

As of today, it looks like it has a 63% success rate; not impressive but better than chance. Leaving aside how serious we should take this particular tool, many feel that men and women write differently. These different performances of gender through the creation of text can be documented and predicted. This study concludes,

[…] females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. […] female writing exhibits greater usage of features identified by previous researchers as “involved” while male writing exhibits greater usage of features which have been identified as “informational”.

All of this made me think of how Wikipedia strives for a “neutral point of view” in its articles. That is, “without bias.” For fun, I picked some Wikipedia articles and ran them through the GenderAnalyzer to see if they were deemed male, neutral or female. Results indicate a strong male bias in my very small and non-random sample:

• Male: Coffee; bell hooks; oil; love; hip hop; rugby football; philosophy; sex; web 2.0; sexism; feminism; WNBA; Ani DiFranco; men’s health; welding; women’s suffrage.
• Gender neutral: Childbirth; bread; donuts; gravity.
• Female: Quilt; knitting.

Whatever the validity or reliability of GenderAnalyzer, the research cited above begs the question of how Wikipedia would best be organized given different male and female writing styles. Would the ideal Wikipedia contain only the gender neutral voice? Or would it strive for a more even distribution of male and female voices throughout?

Finally, is Wikipedia’s effort to achieve a “neutrality” a male endeavor? Some feminist epistemologists (Gilligan, Harding, etc.) have argued that objectivity and value-disinterestedness are inherently male. Thus, is the neutral voice actually quite gendered? ~nathan

On this blog, I typically discuss the intersection of social theory and the changing nature of the Internet (e.g., using Marx, Bourdieu, Goffman, Bauman, DeBord and so on). In a chapter of the new third edition of the McDonaldization Reader edited by George Ritzer, I argue that what we are seeing is a general trend towards the deMcDonaldization of the Internet.

The shift from a top-down centrally conceived and controlled “Web 1.0” to a more user-generated and social “Web 2.0” is a shift away from the dimensions of McDonaldization as Ritzer defines the concept. For example, a corporate-generated website that does not allow user-generated content is paradigmatic of Web 1.0. The site is produced efficiently by few individuals, making it predictable, controllable and relatively devoid of outside human input. Web 2.0, alternatively, is not centered on the efficient production of content [I've made this argument previously]. User-generated content is, instead, produced by many individuals, making it much less predictable –evidenced by the random videos we come across on YouTube, articles on Wikipedia, or perhaps the best example is the downright capricious and aleatory experience of Chatroulette. The personalization and community surrounding social networking sites are hard to quantify and make the web far more humanized. Thus, Web 2.0 marks a general deMcDonaldization of the web. Examples of these points are further illustrated in the chapter.

This conclusion also counters the thesis that McDonaldization is something that will only continue to grow – opposed to the “grand narrative” that Ritzer (and Weber before him) put forth.

Finally, further consideration needs to be given to the various ways in which Web 2.0 remains McDonaldized, rationalized and standardized. Many of the sites that allow for unpredictable user-generated content do so precisely because of their rationalized and standardized -and thus McDonaldized- underlying structure. In many ways, our Facebook profiles all seem to look and behave similarly. The rationalized and standardized structures of Web 2.0 seem to coexist comfortably with irrational and unpredictable content they facilitate. ~nathanjurgenson.com

by nathan jurgenson

The New York Times gathered experts to discuss the disappearance of the physical book, especially important in light of the announcement of the iPad media consumption device. The predictable narrative throughout the article is that the digital is trivial and the physical has more “depth.” I’m interested here in troubling this narrative. It goes well beyond this article. Bring up Twitter in certain circles and people will laugh, calling it trivial. Talk to someone over thirty about Facebook and you very well might get the same reaction. I discussed this trend previously on how unfair it is to quickly label discussions of politics on social networking sites as “slacktivism” (slacker+activism) simply because they are done online. Why do we belittle the digital as trivial when, as danah boyd points out, our everyday material world interactions are equally as trivial as what is posted online?

In the article, Matthew Kirschenbaum claims that the “stillness” of physical print is more conducive to “deep concentration.” Liz Gray agrees, arguing that people reading screens have lowered attention spans and less skill at engaging complex issues. Nicholas Carr states that physical books develop deep comprehension and learning because screens sacrifice single-mindedness and lead to shallow learning. William Powers also describes physicality as “deep” and claims it is “best” because it leads to more thinking. With the exception of Kirschenbaum’s point that the loss of depth might be of diminishing concern, this line of thought is deployed throughout the article without “deep” counterpoint or reflection.

Let’s trouble this. Perhaps digital learning lacks depth for these critics. This might be true for them becuase they developed their outlook in a world of physical books. However, new realities, such as the digitization of text, breed new ways of learning about and viewing the world. Those developing in today’s augmented world (that is, the massive blurring of the physical and digital that is occurring) will not lose the ability to focus or concentrate. The increased amount and access to information and communities of knowledge will be utilized in ways that the physical-only folks cannot (yet) comprehend. Historically, the development of the book, the telephone, and every other communications technology has faced similar claims about the loss of “depth.” With hindsight, we look back at these claims with amusement because we develop new ways of learning to best cope with and utilize new realities. The criticisms come from those who have not developed these new standpoints.

When faced with our new augmented reality, the reaction of the physical-only folks in the article is to claim that their outlook or standpoint is universally better. Thus (following Nietzsche, Foucault, Harding, etc.), these “trivial” and “deep” narratives are claims to power focused on the superiority of one way of learning the world at the expense of another. Let’s acknowledge and analyze these different outlooks instead of trying to universalize our own by claiming our perspective as fundamentally “deeper”, “better” and more true. Last, let’s ask who benefits from constructing digital learning as inherently deficient? ~nathan

Read More: “Do School Libraries Need Books?”

by nathan jurgenson

I’ve written many posts on this blog about the implosion of the spheres of production and consumption indicating the rise of prosumption. This trend has exploded online with the rise of user-generated content. We both produce and consume the content on Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube and so on. And it is from this lens that I describe Apple’s latest creation announced yesterday: the iPad. The observation I want to make is that the iPad is not indicative of prosumption, but rather places a wedge between production and consumption.

From the perspective of the user the iPad is made for consuming content. While future apps might focus on the production of content, the very construction of the device dissuades these activities. Not ideal for typing, and most notably missing a camera, the device is limited in the ways in which users create content. Further, the device, much like Apple’s other devices, is far less customizable than the netbooks Apple is attempting to displace (which often use the endlessly customizable Linux OS).

Instead, the iPad is focused on an enhanced passive consumption experience (and advertised as such, opposed to their earlier focus: can’t resist). Unlike netbooks, the iPad is primarily an entertainment device. Instead of giving users new ways to produce media content, the focus is on making more spectacular and profitable the experience of consuming old media content -music and movies via the iTunes store, books via the new iBookstore and news via Apple’s partnership with the New York Times.

Thus, the story of the iPad’s first 24hours, for me, is the degree to which the tasks of producing and consuming content have been again split into two camps. The few produce it -flashy, glittering and spectacular- and the many consume it as experience. And, of course, for a price.

Does this serve as a rebuttal to an argument that the trend towards the merging of the spheres of production and consumption into prosumption is inevitable? Or is prosumption indeed the trend for a future Apple seems not to grasp? Or will the applications developed for the device overcome its limitations? ~nathan

Read More: Times Topics: the iPad

Read More: Read More: The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co-production, Co-creation and Prosumption

Some have criticized the new slacker-activism, or slacktivism, on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Slacktivism encompasses activities where people post about issues they care just enough about to spend one minute constructing a status update or tweet about them [some early examples]. This came into the news again because of a viral campaign where women reveal their bra color in order to raise awareness about breast cancer. The critiques against slacktivism predictably followed [here, I am putting aside the important issue of the sexualization of illness that is specific to the bra-color campaign].

These critiques are justified to some degree. It is certainly annoying when you see friends whose support for various causes never goes beyond an incessant stream of awareness-oriented status updates.

However, what is implicit in much of the anti-slacktivism writing is a critique of digital social media. Specifically, that efforts spent on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter must mean less effort is spent in the material world. Opposed to this zero-sum perspective, research on social media has shown just the opposite to be true [this hearkens back to the old Hegelian idealism versus Marxian materialism debate].

Further, anti-slacktivism often falls into the ever-popular trap of criticizing that which is on social media as unimportant or trivial. What fuels this knee-jerk reaction is rooted in the tendency to see the digital realm as separate from material reality. Instead, as I have argued elsewhere, we should view the material and digital as enmeshed and in conversation with eachother. The extent to which social media awareness campaigns are actually enmeshed with material-world activism is an open question.

The point is that if you see status updates and tweets on their own, removed from the user’s everyday lives, they do seem trivial. However, acknowledging that these updates are part of a stream of sociality that bridge one’s digital and material lives allow these updates to be seen for what they are. As danah boyd points out, most of what we say in our everyday lives is trivial, and Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are no exception.

Thus, those who post their bra color or partake in other viral awareness campaigns may indeed care about the issue and be doing more to help. To label them “slaktivists” serves to downplay the overlap that these campaigns have with “real” activism (however the slacktivist-haters actually define this).

Last, it should also be recognized that the anti-slacktivists are writing blog posts, creating facebook groups and updating their Twitter feeds and status updates to fight slacktivism, using just the strategies the slacktivists are being criticized for. So much for the argument that creating memes instead of marching in the streets is ineffectual and irresponsible. ~nathan

Facebook bra color question: Real breast cancer awareness effort, or slacktivism at its finest?

Users logged into Facebook this week to find various messages from the company telling them of changes in the way they will share their information. While the company frames all of this as putting users in “control” of their own data, it strikes me that this is more about empowering the company than the users. Users are given more opportunity to share more information with more people, creating more of the data that Facebook profits from.

Whether you care if Facebook profits from all of this or not, it is important to identify the rhetorical strategy: to accumulate more data that Facebook ultimately controls and owns by telling its users that they are increasingly in control.

As CEO Mark Zuckerberg states that you have more control of your data, he is simultaneously allowing you to share more by changing the defaults that users rarely deviate from. Now more information such as as your name, profile picture, gender, networks, friend list, and any pages you are a fan of are publicly available to anyone on the Internet rather than just with your friends. See: Facebook’s Privacy Upgrade Recommends I Be Less Private. Further, Zuckerberg is not mentioning that he still owns this data and is poised to profit from it.

Unlike other posts on this topic, this is not an argument that Facebook dupes us into sharing too much. The mass exhibitionism and voyeurism in our current moment runs much too deep -often contrary to capitalist goals. Instead, one should simply read Facebook’s insidious message of “empowerment” with a skeptical eye.

Finally, we can describe this strategy as an outcome of the new more weightless prosumer capitalism. Prosumer because we simultaneously consume and produce nearly all of the content on Facebook. Weightless (as I’ve previously argued for, using Bauman’s terms) because we-the-laborers are unpaid and are given the product for free. Thus, capitalism is hardly distinguishable as such, increasingly hidden by the rhetoric of user-empowerment. Facebook is letting our mass exhibitionism spread, lubricating social interactions as well as they can, and cashing in on the data we supposedly “control”. ~nathan

The New Facebook Privacy Settings: A How-To

Secrecy and New Religious Movements: Concealment, Surveillance, and Privacy in a New Age of Information

By: George Ritzer

Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland

(Note: The Following comments were prepared for a symposium sponsored by the Center on Religion and Culture, September 15, 2009.)

Let me begin by quarreling with the title of this discussion. I think it is certainly a good idea to focus on consumption because: (1) of its enormous importance in the developed world; (2) it is not going away even with the current recession; and (3) it reflects a willingness to move beyond our traditional, and now outdated, focus on production. However, a discussion of consumption in the U.S. cannot be divorced from issues relating to production, including the decline in the U.S. and the rise elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, in production. Further, we need to realize than an artificial distinction is being made between consumption and production. These two processes have always been combined in the process of prosumption and that phenomenon has increased greatly in recent years with the growth of systems (e.g., fast food restaurants, ATMs) that rely on putting consumers to work (producing) and, most importantly on the Internet, especially Web 2.0 sites (e.g. Facebook, Wikipedia, blogs) where the consumer is also the producer of the content on those sites (vs. Web 1.0 sites such as Yahoo where the content is created by the producer).

I would also quarrel with a focus on America in a global age in which nation-states, including the U.S., are of declining importance. This is true in the realm of consumption in the sense that what is consumed in the U.S. cannot be separated from what is produced elsewhere in the world (especially China), as well as what is not being consumed by many (“the bottom billion”) in many parts of the world. Hyperconsumption in the U.S. (and other countries such as Great Britain where the level of consumer debt is higher than in the U.S.) and its relationship to under-consumption in the less developed world is a global issue and needs to be discussed in that context.

Then there is the question: What have we done to ourselves? What do we mean by ourselves? It could be Americans in general, but that is too broad a category since most of the upper class has not hurt itself, or suffered very much (Bernie Madoff and many of his clients are exceptions) and many in the lower class cannot be seen as playing a large enough role in consumer society to be hurt by its decline (although they have been hurt, and hurt the most, by the larger economic decline). Thus, the implication of this is that the main focus in this should be on the consumption of the vast American middle class (itself far too broad a category). However, to focus on the middle class, to blame it for its current predicament (high levels of consumption, indebtedness, foreclosure, etc.) is in many ways to “blame the victims”. In saying this, I am not saying the middle class is innocent; that it didn’t play a significant role in creating its own economic problems (greed manifested in too much consumption and debt; naivete about the problems they were creating for themselves). However, we need to look to the larger global and national forces that contributed mightily to the problems of the middle class (and to those of the U.S. in general). Let me enumerate at least some of them:

1-Cheap products.

a-For decades the US market has been inundated with cheap products (e.g. shiny electronic gadgets from Asia) that are often far more expensive in their countries of origin. These have proven hard, even foolish, to resist. As many have demonstrated, most recently Ellen Shell (2009) in Cheap, there is a high cost to low price (an idea most often associated with Wal-Mart) and one of those costs is its role in spurring hyperconsumption.

b- Then there is the seemingly low priced (but nonetheless highly profitable) industrial food that increasingly dominates our supermarket shelves and lies at the heart of the success of fast food restaurants, as well as higher-end restaurant chains. Inexpensive industrial food also has the same high costs, as well as its devastating effect on the health of consumers (obesity, diabetes, especially in children).

2-Easy, even fraudulent, credit. Given the events leading up to the Great Recession, I needn’t belabor the excesses and abuses of the mortgage and credit (and debit) card companies which lured millions of American consumers into high levels of debt for which they should never have qualified and that they had no way of ever repaying.

3-The billions, probably trillions, of dollars all invested by all sorts of companies have to make products alluring, even impossible to resist. Marketing and advertising are the obvious villains (see the TV series, “Mad Men”) here, but then there are those who build our spectacular contemporary “cathedrals of consumption” (Las Vegas casino-hotels, Disney World, cruise ships [the new Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas which can accommodate 6,000 passengers], mega-malls [e.g. the problem-plagued Xanadu in the Meadowlands across the river from New York City]) in order to lure consumers to them and then structure them in such a way that consumers are led, usually unwittingly, in the direction of hyperconsumption.

4-We must not forget the role played by the US government (and others) in inducing Americans, especially those in the middle class, to consume.

a-Long-running tax breaks such as deductions for mortgage payments (interest, taxes) that help fuel home-building and -buying.

b-Post 9/11 pronouncements by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and President George Bush that we needed to get out and shop (and Robert Reich’s response asking when it had become our public duty to consume -of course, it had and that responsibility continues).

c-Pronouncements and policies after the onset of the Great Recession and to this day including:
-Stimulus packages, 2008 tax rebates, as well as fears about the latter that people would save the money and not spend it on consumption
-Worry over the continuing unwillingness to consume and the increase in the savings rate (after decades worrying about our minuscule savings rate)
-Cash for clunkers; $8,000 rebates for first time home buyers, etc.

d-Fundamental contradiction: the government abhors, critiques the causes of the Great Recession (at least publicly)- especially hyperconsumption, hyperdebt- but it cannot countenance a smaller economy, lower growth, lower tax revenues, etc. The government feels the need to stimulate the economy in general, and consumption in particular, leading to at least the eventual possibility of renewed hyperconsumption, hyperdebt.

a-Return to an agricultural age? Not likely for many reasons- not enough money, profit in it; not enough jobs in an era of industrial agriculture.

b-Return to an industrial age? Not likely since most of our once-successful “smokestack industries” are dead or dying; they are too expensive to rebuild; other parts of the world have huge leads in these industries, especially technologically; we would need to pay our “new” industrial workers wages that approach those in the less developed world; etc.

c-(Return to) the age of services? Services are still important, but declining in at least some areas in the US (e.g. call centers, radiology) as a result of outsourcing; also traceable to recent declines in consumption since many service jobs (“McJobs”) related to consumption.

d-Lack of alternatives above brings us back to consumption (70% of US economy; importance of Consumer Confidence Index [CCI] vs. Producer Price Index [CCI]; from GM to Wal-Mart, Nike) as route to economic success in the U.S. (other alternatives? alternative energy; Green products, processes):

1-Can we buy enough consumer-related services from one another to make for a prosperous economy?

2-Is our economy really helped by buying more cheap (sometimes dangerous, unhealthy) products from China, etc?

3-Can we, or any economy, consume ourselves to affluence? It now seems clear that pre-2007 many mainly consumed themselves into the illusion of affluence.

A Likely Future Scenario:

a- Our global economic position after WW II (advantages in production) and after 1970- or 1950s and the “Consumer Republic”(advantages in consumption; rise of consumer society) were both unsustainable

b-The US will need to adapt to a relatively smaller economy (lower wages; less hyper-, conspicuous-, consumption)

c-A global redistribution of wealth (OPEC, China, India, Brazil, etc.) is underway

d-Greater global economic equality is welcome (easy for me to say), although new inequalities are arising (e.g., oil-producing states)

Hope?

a-Creative Destruction- something new to arise on the base of the wreckage (empty auto factories, strip malls, big-box stores) of production and consumption in the U.S.

b-Comparative advantages in the US- creativity, ingenuity, innovative use of compressions of space and time, increases in speed,

Will We See a Change in Values (e.g. hyperconsumption, hyperdebt)?

There are positive movements in the direction of a change in values (voluntary simplicity, Slow Food), but I’m never optimistic about values changing on their own, especially in consumption which arguably became our “religion” (with its “cathedrals of consumption”). However, to the degree that they are forced to change, they are more likely to change as a result of larger structural changes. They will change as a result of the structural changes discussed here (e.g. global redistribution of wealth), but those with vested interests in hyper-consumption, -debt (the U.S. government, producers, consumers, banks) will oppose such changes (and who, what is strong enough to oppose successfully such a confluence of powerful actors?).

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.  He has chaired the American Sociological Association’s Section on Theoretical Sociology, as well as the Section on Organizations and Occupations, and is the first Chair of the section-in-formation on Global and Transnational Sociology. His books include The McDonaldization of Society (5th ed., 2008), Enchanting a Disenchanted World (2nd ed. 2005), and The Globalization of Nothing 2 (2nd ed., 2007). His most recent book is Globalization: A Basic Text (Blackwell, 2010). He is currently working on The Outsourcing of Everything (with Craig Lair, Oxford, forthcoming). He was founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. His books have been translated into over twenty languages, with over a dozen translations of The McDonaldization of Society alone.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

My previous post centered on the implications of Google’s dominance in internet search. However, subsequent major news provides the possibility of a major restructuring of the internet search market. It also has implications on how “flat” and “open” the web really is.

One of the basic things all users of the internet do is search. Search is what makes the abundance of information usable. We assume that our search engine has access to the relevant information on the web. Most of us simply use Google to do this. These last two statements are impacted by recent news that Microsoft and Newscorp are in talks to have Newscorp’s online content (e.g., The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times of London, The Sun in Britain, etc.) removed from Google and be hosted exclusively on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

The magnitude of this news becomes clear given some of the possible implications:

1-While Google can well-afford to purchase exclusive content of its own, the very possibility of users having to go to different search engines for different types of searches so drastically changes the face of search that Google’s dominance could be unsettled. Will the users that so far have used Google out of habit continue to do so when they have to think about what engine to use depending on what they are searching for?

2-We may see a search engine arms race, where different engines gobble up different content, spreading information all around and making it far less usable for the rest of us. This creation of barriers to information and access is opposed to Friedman’s “flat world” hypothesis or the idea that “information wants to be free” (hypotheses that sociologists should be skeptical of in the first place). Whether this deal between Microsoft and Newscorp happens or not, we should remember that interested parties want information to remain expensive. ~nathan

News Corp. Weighs an Exclusive Alliance With Bing

Read More

Googlization of Everything

Following PJ Rey’s excellent summary of the Internet as Playground and Factory yesterday, I offer a few additional observations from the conference this past weekend, focusing on Web 2.0 capitalism, and Google as the primary target. The roughly 100 presenters were not joined by Google, as the company said that the conference content seemed “slightly anti-capitalist.” Much of the content, indeed, took the corporate ownership of our productive labor online to task.

A common theme was how to discuss Marx’s Labor Theory of Value with respect to Web 2.0. Clearly, companies are exploiting our free labor, but they do not have to coerce us. Julian Kucklich argued that we now have exploitation without alienation. That is, our unpaid labor is used for corporate surveillance and profit, even if the labor is not alienating or “foreign to ourselves.” Simply, we like using Facebook, Twitter and so on. However, Kucklich further argues that we are taught to think Facebook is fun, that companies use the “ideology of play” to seduce us into producing (or better, prosuming). Martin Roberts, in, ironically, perhaps the conference’s most entertaining presentation, also took to task the culture of “fun”, arguing that we have been trained to see our work as “fun”, making us more productive for the capitalist system. Christian Fuchs most forcefully argued for a communist Internet, stating that exploitation on Web 2.0 is infinite because users are not being paid material wages. A good Marxian, he downplayed the importance of immaterial value gained through sites like Facebook because we live in a capitalism system based on the material. And Ulises Mejias takes Web 2.0 to task for the creation of corporate Monopsonies, where we have seen Facebook, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, Google and so on become corporate titans of Web 2.0 capitalism. He argues that using these corporate Monopsonies is dangerous and irresponsible, calling for open-source and public versions of these types of services.

Thus, it is clear to see why Google was reluctant to join this conference. Frank Pasquale forcefully called on Google to be more transparent. Given what was discussed above, as well as Google’s central status in our day-to-day knowledge-seeking life, Pasquale leaves us with questions to ponder: should its page-rank algorithm be public? Should Google be allowed to up-rank or down-rank links based their relationship to the company? Should Google be able to simply remove pages from its listings? Should Google be forced to let us know when they do these things? ~nathan

The Googlization of Everything