Sociology Lens

source: http://wmuv.org/

There is much discussion in Sociology currently about the impact of technology on people’s lives; in particular on their relationships and sexuality. One specific phenomenon that emerged with the increase of smart phones and personal technology is the issue of ‘sexting’; the sharing or exchange of sexual messages or images. Cases such as those of Hope Witsell or Jessica Logan, both of whom committed suicide after nude pictures they had sent to boyfriends were publicly circulated, have received a great deal of media attention. These and numerous other accounts portray the impact of these technologies solely in a negative light (Drouin and Landgraff 2012) and emphasize the danger young people are putting themselves in when participating in this behavior. Whilst it is of course important to highlight these problems, the rhetoric is so often starkly gendered, re-emphasising a double standard and failing to engage with notions of pleasure or agency in young peoples sexuality. It also tends to place great importance on the role technology plays, without looking at the way other social pressures are played out in these behaviours. (more…)

Source: greenbookblog.org

Big Data refers to the enormous amount of information now possessed by companies, that we offer up in our day-to-day lives. In Google searches, Facebook wall posts, or any purchase we are contributing to the vast amount of data, and allowing companies to make predictions about how we will behave. The use of patterning, statistical analysis and algorithms give these companies a perceived ability to ‘predict the future’; ranging from suggesting future purchases to tracking the flu virus through Internet searches. Cheerleaders of this phenomenon (for example Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier 2013) see it is an extremely useful tool that will revolutionise our lives, unequivocally for the better. An opposing view comes from Evgeny Morozov (amongst others) who criticises ‘technological solutionism’ (Morozov 2013) arguing that these benefits are over-stated, and blind us to imbedded structural issues that cannot be solved by ‘more’ data. Whilst there is not space in this blog post to explore these views in full, the debate raises a consideration for Sociology: are there methodological issues with using Big Data, and what are the implications for the social sciences? (more…)

An image from Bridle’s Dronestagram

In a recent article, Brad Allenby and Carolyn Mattick argue that the ‘rule book’ of international warfare needs to be rewritten to include of the use of new technologies, in particular drones.[1] Drones sit in an ambiguous legal space because they are unmanned aerial vehicles that are often used to fly in a restricted airspace. Compounding this problem is that the use of drones is largely undocumented as a matter of national secrecy. Nevertheless another layer of technology, social media, is now providing a battleground for visual accountability. On the one hand, I want to draw attention to the use of Instagram to highlight the use of social media to inform – and critique – the use of drones through layered representations of their targets. On the other, and competing with this critique, we must look at the use of drone target visuals released by governments to communicate the drones precision and safety. These examples are a way of demonstrating how social media produces a visual politics that can be used to highlight the use of these new military technologies. This contestation for visual accountability may be the social inroads to in fact see the target. The target I am alluding to here is not what the drones see but the frameworks that that legitimatize the actions of these drones.

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Google is a behemoth of an organization. Most everyone is familiar with its search engine (to the point where “Google” is a now a verb), and of the top 25 most-visited web sites in the world 6 are Google-branded, including YouTube. The company makes much of its money by selling targeted advertisements through its AdWords service, and has been wildly successful doing so. But Google has been busy with some interesting projects that fall outside its traditional role as search engine. One in particular should be of interest to sociologists: Google Fiber, a fiber-optic based Internet service very different from current offerings.

By some measures, the United States is an incredibly wired nation. One way to discern this is the number of devices connected to the internet. Since each device connected to the internet gets a unique address, called an IP (internet protocol) address, the number of IP addresses assigned within an area, say the United States, is a measure of how many devices are connected to the internet. The tech savvy among you will note this measure is far from perfect since multiple devices can share an IP address (e.g., two computers sharing the same wireless router), and you would be right. Nevertheless, the United States accounts for 146 million of 666 million total IP addresses worldwide – nearly 22%.

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Sustainability, social progress, environmental protection, economic growth and energy are discussed using the sustainability framework in Figure 1, where sustainability is at the confluence of social progress, environmental protection and economic growth.

Figure 1 Sustainability framework

(Source: IUCN 2006)

There are designs being made toward Ecological Civilization and welcome moves to address the shortcomings of GDP in Completing the picture – environmental accounting in practice by the Australian Bureau of Statistics .  Extending the national accounts to include degradation of natural resources makes a measurable target for politicians to focus on rather than purely GDP.    However, there are problems when social progress is overlooked in the move toward more environmental protection. (more…)

It’s the middle of class. Looking out into the classroom, a dim light reflects on students’ faces as they stare or type into the devices in front of them.  Walking up and down the aisles, blue-tinted Facebook pages on the students’ screens are usually the source of the reflected light.

While such students might seem withdrawn from the class, this familiar scene holds a potential goldmine of sociological exploration and examples.

If these students are already intently interested in, or “studying” the profiles and usage of their friends and themselves, why not engage them to do so via in-class assignments and beyond? The setting seems ripe for investigation on topics like presentation of self, production of identities, symbolic boundaries, and social interaction of all sorts.

Some sociology departments anchor courses in such investigations. According the article “College Offers Facebook Sociology Course,” Nell Vidyarthi explains,

As a student, I was always amazed by the abilities of students to simultaneously “pay attention” and browse Facebook, but a new course from Bowdoin College in Maine brings Facebook into the course load.  Entitled “In the Facebook Age”, the course analyzes sociological concepts and applies them to the emerging phenomena of Facebook and other social networks.  The course itself is fluid, and its material responds to the changes that occur every day in the social sphere.

Other sociology courses could find ways to weave their themes and concepts into things that could be analyzed by using Facebook (as long as bias and investigation are incorporated into such assignments or discussions). With the many facets and pieces of information we all provide for each other via Facebook and the time our students already spend interacting through it, it seems absurd not to engage them to sociologically utilize the time they spend there.

In what ways do you or others engage sociologically with students’ Facebook usage?

To the left is a 1917 portrait of Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM. A few weeks ago, IBM debuted its latest supercomputer, named after this giant of innovation (Watson), on the TV game-show Jeopardy! Though it seemed as though Watson was standing in between the two other competitors on the show, as Jeopardy! provided the computer with the same electronically-equipped podium as the other contestants, and even wrote “his” name on said podium, the brains behind this powerful supercomputer capable of answering complicated trivia questions, in fact, looks a great deal like the computer to the bottom left, one of the original IBM machines from the 1960′s. Like this primitive machine, Watson is monstrous, though certainly more “brilliant” than the room-sized machine that was too cumbersome for anyone to actually own as a personal item. Watson roundly defeated former Jeopardy! champions. Though I won’t dare pretend to be schooled enough in technology to delve into the details of Watson’s inner workings, I’ll summarize for the purposes of this piece by saying that the machine functions by recognizing key words and concepts, much like a human being, when faced with the need to process information at top speed.

While there are myriad issues of interest here, I’d like to propose that we think about the presentation of machines as something with human qualities – specifically, the use of human names to talk about machines – and what that does to the perception of machines. Consider the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, who were not named to seem particularly human. Nonetheless, the rovers were often described as adorable, or cute, and people truly feared for those little rovers, and mourned them when they ceased to respond to signals from earth, allowing their human friends back in the control room to assume they were longer functioning, or, had died. Naming these machines, making them look like human beings (with human-body-like features), makes it easier to think of them as people. For more information on sociological work or this nature, see Janet Vertesi’s work. Just as many people have, for decades, named their vehicles, people name their computers, cell phones, ipods, etc. But a computerized Jeopardy! contestant with the same name as the IBM founder, that (or who) buzzes in to answer questions, and uses word recognition to do so (however imperfectly) is a new step in blurring the line between human and machine.

Though Watson has a human name, it doesn’t have a face or a body or any “real” human characteristics. The Time Magazine article linked below suggests that computers are rapidly becoming more capable of human-like functioning. Millions of people tuned in to watch Watson live and online after the show, but what if this were a life-like “being,” something that, for all intents and purposes appeared human?What if Watson were a human-looking machine connected to a room full of technology rather than just an empty space behind a podium with a mechanical-sounding voice? Lev Grossman of Time Magazine explains:

“…if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties”

If there is a likelihood that the line between the human and the computer might become rapidly blurrier as we hit a new threshold with this kind of advancement – the ability to create machines that seem very human – might the feeling of threat increase? Watson was exciting and intriguing to most people, but not scary. What about if we were not able to tell the computer apart from the human quite as easily? What if, as Grossman suggests, computers could actually be smarter and just as (if not more) capable than humans? How might this change the nature of humanity? The nature of technology? The nature of social interaction?

IBM – Watson

Watson’s Jeopardy Win…What Did we Discover?

2045: The Year Man Become Immortal

Technology, Philosophy of – in The Blackwell Encyclopedia

Rutgers University has been my intellectual home for the last 8 years. Recently, one of our freshman, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. He took his own life after his roommate and another student posted a video of him engaging in sexual activity with another student on the internet. This horribly sad and disturbing event sparked an emotional reaction on our campus, as well as discussion of how to protect students from this kind of infringement on their privacy, bullying, and also from themselves, when they feel overwhelmed by mistreatment.

In the wake of Tyler Clementi’s death, I asked my freshman what they think are the important lessons to learn from this. Most of the answers were along the lines of:  “we have not come as far as we think we have.” My students referred many times to the need to increase awareness of prejudice. Clementi’s suicide was clearly the act of a troubled young man, but students certainly recognize that perhaps the greatest factor here was that the video of Clementi depicted him having sex with another man. Though Rutgers tries to be inclusionary and strives toward creating an egalitarian environment, this event does, in fact, remind us that being gay is still considered wrong and at the very least “weird” or “fascinating” by more people than many of us care to imagine. Those of us who are sociologically-minded are well aware of this, but what is striking about my students’ comments is that, to many of them, it seemed surprising to find out that homophobia is real and has real consequences. Of course there were certainly students in my classroom who have felt the horrible emotional toll of being subject to this kind of hate. The new realization that homophobia and bullying related to it are such problems likely does reflect, in some ways, just how far we have come – it was so striking to my young students that not everyone is accepting and tolerant. On the other hand, it points out that living in a place where exclusionary attitudes and practices do not abound, where we are not surrounded by prejudice and conservative sentiment about sexuality, can be dangerous. In fact, this little part of the world where we live, work and go to school, is not at all representative of the attitudes of society at large and makes people susceptible to forgetting that our tiny corner of the world is not the norm. While it’s true that progress has been made, one lesson for these students who live in one of the most liberal parts of the country is that their little island is not at all representative.

To me, the starkest realization came from the complete lack of mention of technology in these discussions. It seemed clear to me that one of the central issues here was that the internet was used as a tool to taunt a student, embarrass him, violate his privacy, and ultimately push him to feel the consequences so greatly that he took his own life. This seemed a clear indication to me that the use of technology has become so ubiquitous that it almost seemed to my students to be irrelevant to the conversation. In fact, when I brought up the role of technology in Clementi’s suicide and asked for feedback on this issue, I found myself starting out at a room of blank faces. The quotidian nature of internet usage, of posting things online, is something new but already taken for granted. In particular, Clementi’s death has me wondering about the effect of technology on the way we treat one another. In her article in Sociology Compass, “The Sociology of the Future: Tracing Stories of Technology and Time,” Cynthia Selin suggests an important role for sociologists in studying the relationship between technology and the future. Selin focuses mostly on nanotechnology and its important role in shaping the future, but her general message is one that pushed me to reflect on what happened at Rutgers. Selin begins her piece with the following:

“Scholarly attention to the development of new technologies and to exploring the sociological tools and methods we have for grasping their emergence is exceedingly important not only for the dual nature of technology as blessing and curse, but also because our technological reach into the future is growing. Our ability to produce technologies that have a lasting impact on social systems seems to be growing given the biological, chemical, and material technologies of late. Nanotechnology is one such novel technology area that is regularly promised to radically alter what it means to be human, our systems of production, and our environmental landscapes” (1878).

Has not the ability to post videos, personal profiles and generally to interact online not already altered what it means to be human, and, if those technologies are so involved in our humanity, might they not also have the ability to take away that humanity? I don’t mean to suggest that the internet is evil or that we should all stop using technology, but that, if technology is part of what provides us our humanity today, then we must be extremely careful about what it can also take away (or even how it can be used maliciously to take away other people’s humanity). The internet breaks down barriers and allows people to be more open, to spread important messages, to have political and personal power to create change for the betterment of society. However, the internet also allows people to say things they wouldn’t normally say, to do things they would not otherwise and to be more removed from the consequences of what they say and do. These kids would not have been able to have the same impact on Tyler Clementi’s life, had they not had internet access. And would they have even tried? The fact that not a single one of my forty four students mentioned this as a factor shows us just how important it is to point out to them, and to adults as well. The consequences of technology are powerful and some are not reversible – the video of Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounter has been removed from the web, but he took his own life and nothing can reverse that.

Bullying, Suicide, Punishment: In the New York Times

The Sociology of the Future: In Sociology Compass