• In response to protests on university campuses calling for divestment from Israel, NHPR ran a story on how social media has changed protest movements. Zeynep Tufekci (Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton) commented that protests organized using social media “get very big very quickly,” but are not necessarily more effective in generating policy change. Non-digital movements of the past “facilitated face-to-face relationships and cohesive group problem-solving.” For example, Tufekci describes that during the Civil Rights Movement, it “took them six months just to organize the logistics of the March on Washington because you couldn’t just put it on a hashtag on social media. But that meant that [the] organizational structure they built helped them navigate what came afterward.” However, Tufekci also notes that movements utilizing social media may be evolving, citing the “message discipline” (or, clear boundaries around what is said as a group) of the protests at Yale, where organizers limited the group to approved chants.
  • Beth Linker (Professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania) recently released a new book: Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America. “With the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, certain scientists began to worry that slouching among “civilized” peoples could lead to degeneration, a backward slide in human progress,” Linker described in an interview with the New York Times. The book investigates this “posture panic,” the rise of posture correction in medical science, and how the “postural defects” became a social marker of “character, intelligence and physical ability.”
  • The New York Times ran a story on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected American gun violence. Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz (Population Health Sociologist at the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and California Firearm Violence Research Center) commented on the effects of violence beyond the direct victims: “Neighborhoods that have persistently elevated levels of violence have lots of trauma across many people. That impacts relationships between neighbors and translates into collective senses of fear.” Kravitz-Wirtz noted the racial disparities in geographic proximity to gun violence.
  • A new dating app with selective membership, The League, aims to connect individuals who are equally successful–financially, socially, and in their careers. “Data shows that men and women are increasingly dating and subsequently marrying individuals who share similar backgrounds,” Jess Carbino (Online Dating Consultant and former Sociologist for Tinder and Bumble) commented. “So on one hand, The League has been criticized for perpetuating existing social inequalities, but on the other, you can say it’s helping people do what statistically, they’re already doing, which is basing their preferences on certain markers.” This story was covered by Yahoo! Life.