Sociology Lens

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how much of our lives are being captured and translated into numbers, percentages, and statistics. It seems that no matter where one turns, some aspect of our social life is being measured quantitatively. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon – things like age, weight, body mass index, intelligence quotient, height, and physical aptitude scores have been with us for some time now. However, it appears that this movement to quantify and measure aspects of our social life and then translate them into numbers and statistics has increased with great haste; perhaps resembling a juggernaut out of control. While gaining acceptance among many circles and embraced as a way to better one’s life, this movement as often been termed as the ‘quantified self’. (more…)

In 2010, MSNBC published an article written by Alex Johnson entitled “Some schools rethink bans on cell phones: Bans don’t work, so administrators explore using mobile devices”. In the report, Johnson notes that 100 plus students were suspended – not for cheating, smoking, or bullying – but for having cell phones. While presented here as merely an anecdote, there can little doubt that the use of cell phones, and mobile technology more generally, is an issue that has caught the attention of school administrators across the nation. Within the article, Brian Begley, principal of Millard North High School, illustratively notes: “Cell phones aren’t going away.” As mobile devices become increasingly marketed to today’s youth and as their functionality blurs with that of computers, the issue of wireless, new media technology within high schools will reshape school operations.

The article cites that although 69 percent of American high schools have placed a ban on cell phones, 63% of student respondents nonetheless reported using them on campus. Recognizing that simply banning the devices does little to discourage their usage, Johnson notes that “a growing number of school districts are exploring other ways to shut them down.” Rather than employing suspension as a punishment, certain schools have resulted to more invasive forms of social control,  including “confiscating phones…keeping them for 30 days and searching them for evidence of cheating, pornography or other ‘illicit activities.’ If such evidence is found, it’s turned over to the sheriff’s office”.

Whilst illustrating both the complications for banning cell phones and their potential applicability within schools, the issue of cell phones points to a larger development.  Scholars have recently begun to document how two large-scale trends are transforming the socialization of youth within school settings. The first stems from a late-modern preoccupation with safety and security (see Garland, 1996, 2000; Simon, 2007; Foucault, 1977). Whether accelerated by internal events such as school shootings, or external factors like reported rates of youth violence, it is clear that crime has now become a chief organizing principle shaping school discipline. Consequently, issues such as cell phone use are caught in the proverbial cross-hairs and mobilized against in the name of promoting school safety. (more…)

President Obama receives the script from his recent Mic Checking

Author’s Note: This piece was originally posted to Sociology Lens on December 10th. On December 13th, the piece was temporarily removed and I was asked to make revisions to make more explicit the conventional sociological themes in this piece. This request was made as the result of pressure from a senior professor who deemed this piece too “polemical” and not “sociological.” While I and many others in the discipline have epistemological objections to very concept of value-free social science, and thus view with suspicion any implication that sociology can be separated from politics, I agreed to make revisions, because I think that argument in this piece important and can only be strengthened by further reference to the social theory canon. The downside is that the post is now less accessible to a popular audience than it was originally intended to be, so I have archived a copy of the original here. Finally, I must note that, while examining power is, perhaps, the oldest and most important task of sociology, it is (and has always been) political by nature.

A recent news piece for Inside Higher Ed reports on several instances where students have disrupted public presentations by conservative academics, activists, or politicians. The students used “the human microphone”—i.e., a practice of amplifying a speaker’s voice by having many people repeat the speaker’s words in unison—to offer counterpoints to the arguments being made by the presenter. The article’s author, Allie Grasgreen, asserts that the mic checking the conservative presenters is tantamount to “censorship.” This assertion shares the logic of what Karl Rove demanded when he was mic checked at John Hopkins:

If you believe in free speech and you have a chance to show it… if you believe in the right of the First Amendment to free speech… then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q&A session… line up behind the mic…

But Grasgreen and Rove both miss the point. Occupiers are trying to demonstrate—through the very performance of this act—that “free speech” is not evenly distributed. The point is that only the 1% ever find themselves at the podium. The 99% are left to fill the seats in the audience, and, if they are lucky, they may have the chance to do as Rove commands and line up behind the mic for a few brief seconds in the spotlight. This is, of course, because the opportunity to speak and to be heard is inextricable from issues of wealth and power. The few who hold these assets in abundance have more purchasing power in the attention economy. K Street is nothing if not an industrialized machine for converting money and power into speech that will be heard. Sure, we all may have “free speech,” but as George Orwell quipped in Animal Farm “some animals are more equal than others.” (more…)

Since the Occupy movement began in September, my sociological imagination has been churning with questions. I initially thought: Is this the beginning of a revolution, or is it an anti-tea party left wing group? But most of all, I wondered more broadly: What is it? Seemingly, I am not the only one in the realm of confusion. The Occupy Movement has been criticized for not being a cohesive movement. It has likewise been lauded as unstructured, lacking of a clear agenda, and a disjointed group of “lazy, unemployed” people. In all reality, the list could go on with the criticisms. It behooved me to ask my students and colleagues what they believed the movement was meant to represent. While I was met with different responses, I was most commonly told that the protesters are an impassioned group of people: “The 1%” who have taken it upon themselves to speak on behalf of the 99% that are fed up with exploitative, economic meltdowns which are the fault of the big banks.” Many respondents were fed up with the fact that when the rich make “mistakes” they do not get prison; they get bailed out (see Jeffrey Reiman’s, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison). Underneath the surface, both the movement and public perceptions of it are  multi-faceted and complex. My next move, therefore was to continue this line of questioning at the movement itself.

(more…)

Watch the live webcast of Noam Chomsky’s ICA 2011 Closing Plenary session on Monday 30th May at 12pm EDT!

“Democracy, the Media, and the Responsibility of Scholars“

Go to http://www.wiley.com/college/wfn/breeze/index.html?icaonline

Chair
Larry Gross, U of Southern California, USA

Participant
Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Linguist Noam Chomsky is a trenchant critic of the mass media, which he tackled memorably in his 1988 book with Ed Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In the years since its publication Chomsky has continued to subject the media to the same critical scrutiny with which he has relentlessly analyzed and criticized the actions of nation states and corporations. In this session Chomsky will address the present state of the media and the threats to democracy posed by the corporate control of mainstream media. He will also discuss the landscape of information in the public interest in the age of the Internet, as blogs and now Wikileaks change the terms of engagement. Finally, he will address the responsibilities of intellectuals, scholars, and academics to participate in the struggle for true freedom of expression and information that is a precondition for the survival of democracy.

TWEET ABOUT THIS SESSION USING #ICA11

http://twitter.com/?q=icaboston2011#!/search/ica11

Watch the live webcast of the ICA 2011 Opening Plenary session today from 6pm EDT!

“Communication as the Discipline of the 21st Century”

Go to http://www.wiley.com/college/wfn/breeze/index.html?icaonline.

Chair
Larry Gross, U of Southern California, USA

Participant
Craig Calhoun, SSRC/ New York U, USA

Respondents
Susan J. Douglas, U of Michigan, USA Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics, UNITED KINGDOM John Durham Peters, U of Iowa, USA Joseph N. Cappella, U of Pennsylvania, USA Georgette Wang, National Chengchi U, TAIWAN

The 20th century witnessed the immense impact of communication technologies, from the spread of sound recording, motion pictures and radio as world-wide phenomena to the emergence of television as a dominant influence in nearly every institution, to the explosion of the Internet at the turn of the new century. If it once was possible, as many in the academy did and some still do, to view communication studies as peripheral to the central mission and focus of the academic universe, that is no longer a defensible position. Today, any credible model of the liberal arts must recognize the centrality of communication for any responsible educational program. In this plenary session, Craig Calhoun will address the contributions that communication scholarship can make to our understanding of the world today. Five distinguished communication scholars will then comment in response.

TWEET ABOUT THIS SESSION USING #ICA11!

http://twitter.com/?q=icaboston2011#!/search/ica11

In a new study from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, it was revealed that women are both underrepresented and sexualized in the mainstream motion picture industry. The study, headed by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and Marc Choueiti, evaluated 100 films released in 2008 though survey and content analysis methodology and focused on the gender of all speaking characters, behind-the-scenes employees, and the hypersexualization of on-screen characters. Overall, their findings show that only 32.8 percent of speaking characters were female, 8 percent of directors were female (i.e., 92% were male), 13.6 percent were writers, and 19.1 percent of producers were females. Lastly, the findings report that females, especially 13- to 20-year olds, are sexualized on screen through sexually revealing attire, partial nudity, and an emphasis on a small waist and physical attractiveness. In their conclusion, Smith and Choueiti report that, “Our findings reveal that motion picture content is sending two consistent and troubling messages to viewers. The first is that females are of lesser value than are males. This is evidenced by their on screen presences and the lack of employment opportunities behind-the-camera. The second is that females are more likely than males to be valued for their appearance.”

While these findings work to substantiate the concern over both the symbolic annihilation of women in media (both in front and behind the camera) and the sexualization of young girls, this report does not directly address the question: Why do these findings matter? On page four of their report, the authors offer a slight mention of “effect,” but fail to elaborate on why these troublesome findings matter. In other words, how do these findings impact the industry, future constructions of media texts, and audience reception? They write, in reference to hypersexualization, “These findings are troubling given that repeated exposure to thin and sexy ideals may contribute to negative effects in some viewers and reinforce patterns of lookism in the entertainment industry.” What are the negative effects? What is “lookism?” As media scholars continue to grapple with the question of “effects,” it would have been extremely helpful to gain insight to Smith and Choueiti’s understanding of how these findings will “effect” audiences and cultural practice. While these scholars most likely have a theoretical framework for effects and audience reception, it was lost in the pages of the available report. So the question remains: What do these findings tell us about media’s relationship to gender inequality? What do these findings tell us about the status of hypersexualization in the film industry? In the end, these findings are extremely important, but without support from a cultural analysis, remain couched as an “industry update” and miss out on an opportunity for a critique of gender inequality, the sexual division of labor, and the continued social sexualization of women at the societal and cultural level.

Sexualised culture and young people’s sexual health: A cause for concern? By Clare Bale (Sociology Compass)

On March 25, The International Women’s Media Foundation revealed its two-year study, “Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media” during its Leaders Conference in Washington, revealing that – not surprisingly – there is gender disparity in newsrooms worldwide. According to the final report (2011), “More than 150 researchers interviewed executives at more than 500 companies in 59 nations using a 12-page questionnaire” (p. 7). Although the report offers a regional breakdown of findings, the global results suggest that, overall; women are not in a position to make choices that impact the production of news. The findings of the study show that, “In this long-awaited extensive study, researchers found that 73% of the top management jobs are occupied by men compared to 27% occupied by women. Among the ranks of reporters, men hold nearly two-thirds of the jobs, compared to 35% held by women. However, among senior professionals, women are nearing parity with 41% of the newsgathering, editing and writing jobs” (p. 9).

Facing these numbers, the female media executives that met at the International Women Media Leader’s Conference in Washington were faced with developing a plan of action, and according to The Women’s Media Center blog, one of those strategies included quotas in order to level the playing field. Further, goals were developed based on the needs of specific regions. For example, for North America, delegates made a “pledge” to “Create a cross-platform executive-level coalition with an emphasis on salary transparency and negotiation.” Although the continued condition of the gender wage gap makes these findings appear predicable, the difference lies in the generation of nuanced findings rather than abstracted support for the disparity. In other words, the “Global Report” allows for the development of both globally- and regionally-specific strategies that can assist in the development of policy, social action and ultimately, change. And, drawing from the work of political economy of communication scholars such as Robert McChesney, John Nichols, and Ben Bagdikian, a policy of “leveling the playing field” in journalism affords an environment that is directed more toward democracy and inclusiveness and less toward the profit-motive and exclusivity. (more…)

The New York Times recently ran an expose on teen “sexting” as a part of a slew of recent articles on the topic. Unfortunately, this article failed to take into account the fact that teens, especially girls, have sexual desire. A couple of quotes from the article:

“Having a naked picture of your significant other on your cellphone is an advertisement that you’re sexually active to a degree that gives you status,” said Rick Peters, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for Thurston County.

Perhaps, but what about the fact that the teen might want to enjoy the photo for themselves, too? Inner-desire is continuously ignored in the article in favor of the view that teens (again, especially females) engage sexually in order to please others.

“You can’t expect teenagers not to do something they see happening all around them,” said Susannah Stern, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who writes about adolescence and technology. “They’re practicing to be a part of adult culture,”

Teens do not need anyone to tell them to play show-me-yours. More than practicing for when they get older, teens are also attempting to explore and enjoy their sexuality in the present. It is not just adults who have sexual desire. In fairness, the New York Times did run another article that quotes teens on the topic, who are clear that sexting is the result of desire. So, why do most articles dismiss this fact?

I can accept that culture influences sexual behaviors, I am a sociologist, but to not even bring sexual desire into a conversation about sexting is erroneous. Acknowledging teen sexual desire should be at the center of how to deal with the issue of sexting moving forward. We should be promoting sexual agency, not dismissing it. Better than shaming teens is to start a conversation around how to best express themselves sexually at their age.

There are consequences to this perspective that views teen sexual behaviors as not stemming from desire but instead only as something taught. Adults too often feel they can simply squash teen sexuality through shaming and even criminalization. A scenario described in the article and that is occurring all too often is that teens are being escorted from school in handcuffs, locked up and forced to register as sex offenders simply because they shared nude photos with a significant other their own age. This over-reaction demonstrates Michel Foucault’s point: that by seemingly ignoring teen sexual desire, we’ve only succeeded in turning it into an obsession.