Beloit College’s Mindset List for the class of 2012

This year’s cohort was born in 1990. They never knew Ronald Reagan as President (which is why they spell the name “Regan”). None of them remembers George W. Bush or the Gulf War. They were only 8 when Bill and Monica made headlines, and just 10 when George H.W Bush emerged victorious from the debacle in Florida.

So if it seems as if they “haven’t got a clue” it’s because all they’ve learned of their immediate past was what they heard from adults or saw on TV or cobbled together in a hurry for a paper in High School.

And adults are still trying to make sense of the past! Some of my colleagues are still trying to come to terms with the fact that BOTH Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were elected President of the United States TWICE. All that heat and so little light makes their immediate past (or what we would call “the present”) an off-putting topic, something adults haven’t finished carrying on about, something that’s their problem, as in ‘that was when you were living your life, now I’m living mine’. So little wonder today’s teens think ‘Watergate’ was a movie, have never heard of Iran-Contra, and think ‘Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution’ were a grunge band!

It’s not that they’re so young, it’s that we’re so old! So have patience when you speak about that present. For your students, by definition, the decade before last is ancient history!

I’m happy to be blogging here and I want to thank Jon Smajda, Chris Uggen, and the other folks at Contexts, for the invitation. I’ll be back with a more substantive post soon, but assume most readers don’t know me so I thought I’d offer a brief intro.

I started thinking about technology in my research and teaching in 1996-1997. The timing of this new thinking was not coincidental. That was also the same year that Chris Toulouse (my co-conspirator and fellow blogger here) and I started teaching together at a suburban Long Island university. Chris shared with me his enthusiasm for using computers in the classroom and quickly convinced me of the importance of cyberspace for sociologists interested in understanding society in the 21st century. Chris and I both lived in Brooklyn at that time, so we often commuted together on the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). And, it was on those LIRR journeys that Chris and I talked for hours about the way that sociology as a field of study and our jobs as professors in the classroom were going to change because of the Internet.

In about 2001, Chris and I together approached some people within the ASA administration about the tsunami-like changes that were soon to transform the discipline. Our suggestions were met with politely blank stares. At the same time, some of our colleagues were discouraging us from using technology in the classroom or from focusing on it in our research, because after all, “the Internet is a fad.”

Fortunately, lots of things have changed since those days. Chris and I are friends now more than colleagues, since we’ve both moved on to other institutions; and, most people realize that the Internet is something more than a fad. And, most delightfully, the ASA has begun to wrestle with the implications of digital technologies for the discipline. Yet, I think that sociologists are still just beginning to ponder what the Internet might mean for our usual practices of research and teaching. This is where Chris and I come in. We’re still having those long conversations about technology and how it is transforming sociological research and teaching. At this point, we’ve each also had more than ten years of experience doing research and teaching with, about and through the Internet, and we’ll draw on that background for our writing here. Our plan is to update this blog five days a week, Monday-Friday mostly. I’ll focus on research, methods, and how the way we think about society is changing because of the Internet and “social media” more broadly. Chris will focus primarily on the classroom and how these technologies are changing how we think of the pedagogical side of our jobs. Of course, Chris has things to say about research, and I have a good deal to say about teaching, but that’s the general plan. That said, we recognize that the distinction between “research” and “teaching” is often a false one, so feel free to regard those categories as heuristic devices.

So, again I’m happy to be here, and look forward to this new blogging venture as a way of expanding the conversation to include new friends and colleagues.

As you might have noticed from the new (temporary) banner, changes are afoot here at Contech.

I started this blog as a primarily internal resource for people blogging at thesocietypages.org. Whenever people asked me questions about things like blogging clients or adding images to posts, I’d write up a post on Contech instead of just replying individually. However, I always secretly wanted to do a little more with this blog as well…

So from now on, all the “how-to” posts will now live at thesocietypages.org/howto. Contech is, as the blog description says, now about putting “social media in social contexts.”

What does that mean? Technology and the internet are obviously huge factors in our lives today. Most importantly, in our opinion, they are huge factors in our social lives. New “social media” and technologies like blogs, wikis and social networking sites have the potential to radically impact and transform the way we communicate, the relationships we form, and the knowledge we have about the world. The web is full of sites filled with daydreaming and speculation about the social causes and consequences of new technologies. Our aim is to bring social science research and theory to bear on these new developments. What does empirical data about social media technologies tell us? And in the absence of hard data, we think we can offer at least slightly more informed daydreaming and speculation. 🙂

I’m going to have company! Jessie Daniels and Chris Toulouse will both be writing for Contech. Chris specializes in teaching with technology & Jessie studies the convergence of race, gender and digital media. Over time, we hope to have others join in as well!¹

So pardon the mess for a little bit, but the new Contech will be up and running very soon!

Footnotes

1. Take that as an invitation, social scientists interested in blogging about technology! Email contech (at) thesocietypages.org for more information! [↩]