RU110813Missing the Point

I was so struck last night to hear a little piece about the sociologist Clifford Nass on NPR (in a fun side note, I’d like to point out that Nass was also a computer scientist and professional magician… which is pertinent to the next sentence). Yes, he was known for his warning that multitasking was dangerous to real thought and real learning, but what caught my ear was how his colleagues spoke of his relationship with expanding technologies. Nass didn’t seem to have any antipathy for the tech—he saw its utility, of course—but he realized that all those blinky things were going to be attention sucks. Multiple distractions tend to be bad when you aren’t a good multitasker (to be fair, he didn’t think anyone was a good multitasker), but worse, he seemed to believe, the divided attention meant that his students paid attention to too much noise. Over time, he felt his students were getting worse and worse at understanding an argument and repeating it clearly. They weren’t good at finding the point or pulling out a specific nugget of information from a whole article. They had trained themselves (or been trained by their technologies) to see the forest, not the trees. I’m not wholly convinced, but I am intrigued—and I’m sad that the world has lost another great sociologist in the meantime. more...

Bowl of Someone Else's Memories by cogdogblog via flickr.com
Bowl of Someone Else’s Memories by cogdogblog via flickr.com

My colleague Teresa Swartz (full disclosure: I’m also married to her) has this writing exercise that she does with all of her Intro students at the end of the semester. In a nutshell, she asks them to write a brief paper situating themselves in the social contexts that have most profoundly shaped and determined their lives and identities. The exercise, which she calls a “sociological memoir,” is inspired by C.Wright Mills‘ famous definition of the sociological imagination as becoming aware of the intersection of one’s personal biography with larger social and historical forces. The book she often has the class read as an illustration is Dalton Conley’s wonderfully idiosyncratic early life narrative Honky. In the last couple of days I’ve read another couple of pieces I think I’m going to recommend to her as well.

Andrew Lindner’s “Epilepsy, Personally and Sociologically,” on TSP’s ThickCulture blog, is one of them. more...

RU110113At a Loss

The Society Pages is housed, as many of you know, at the University of Minnesota, and stems from a vision Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen formulated in their term as the editors of the ASA’s journal Contexts. That vision was also shaped by the young sociologists who made up the graduate editorial board of Contexts for each of its four years at the U of M, and later when it came to creating and sustaining The Society Pages. It’s now been a week since we lost one of those bright young minds: Tim Ortyl. I still don’t know what to say, other than that Tim did everything in his life whole-heartedly, and so I’m pleased that you can read some of his work here on our site, as well as a Contexts article that SAGE publications and the ASA are offering as a free download. I believe Tim had contributed immensely to the discipline already, and I hope that having known him as a friend, teacher, colleague, or student will continue to inspire sociological imaginations long after our quiet time of mourning fades. Right now, that time seems impossible. more...

Kids might do things differently today… Image via Tumblr

“Docs to Parents: Limit Kids’ Texts, Tweets, Online.” So reads one version of today’s reports on a new study published in the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy. I haven’t even read the study yet, and I’m skeptical. First, why are physicians the experts on this? Second, what research is this directive based upon? From the news story, I learned only that, according to the AAPP study, time online has been “linked with” such bad things as “violence, cyberbullying, school woes, obesity, a lack of sleep,” as well as “a host of other problems.” “Linked with?” Even the study’s lead author acknowledges in the first paragraphs of the article that online activities are “not a major cause of these troubles,” though he does cheekily say, “I guarantee you that if you have a 14-year-old boy and he has an Internet connect in his bedroom, he is looking at pornography.” more...

We’ve lost a true friend and remarkable colleague. Tim Ortyl was an extraordinary young sociologist and TSP grad board member. His countless friends are shocked and saddened by news that he’d passed away yesterday of natural causes due to epilepsy.  It is too early and too damn painful to post personal recollections or pictures — especially when Tim’s joy, sly wit, and vitality seem to leap from every image. But his talents and range as a sociologist are amply displayed in the publications he leaves behind, his public writing and podcasts for TSP and Contexts, and in the care and commitment with which he taught hundreds of students about statistics, gender, family, and sexuality. We mourn Tim Ortyl as a young friend with limitless potential, but we also recognize him as an accomplished and respected sociologist.

RU102513Becoming Aware

Root canal: that’s what I’ll be doing with my morning. In fact, I’m in the chair awaiting my fate right now. You are welcome to send mocking notes of semi-pity via the comments below. It’s a combination of a routine-emergency thing, and hopefully by noon or so I’ll be nice and numb, by Monday I’ll have a bruised face, and by this time next week I’ll be right as rain, happily eating and breathing and whatnot. But it’s super weird to suddenly become aware of one toothmore...

Perhaps envisioning Chris Uggen as a Sociological Spiderman last week got me going, but over the past few days, I have found myself thinking about all kinds of super-hero analogies and metaphors for sociologists and the sociological enterprise. The one that has stuck with me is the idea of sociologists as “Society’s Super Egos.” more...

RU101713A Digression on Writerly Fitness:

I’ve been reading and writing a bit about fitness lately, and I’ve noticed two trends come up again and again: High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and “body confusion.” What does this have to do with TSP and writing you ask? Excellent question.  more...

Hodges
Star-Tribune photo

I’ve long believed a graduate degree in the social sciences provides excellent preparation for elective office. We learn to critically analyze data, to abstract from individual cases to broader social processes, and to understand how both powerful institutions and grass-roots movements shape the social world. Though few U.S. sociologists have entered the fray since Pat Moynihan left the Senate, our training and experience should prepare us well for many  aspects of the political arena.

Consider today’s Star-Tribune  profile of Betsy Hodges, who is making a strong run to become mayor of Minneapolis. Ms. Hodges, who did her graduate work in sociology at Wisconsin, is characterized in the following terms:

  • “numbers-oriented and careful with her words”
  • “adept at untangling complicated financial matters”
  • “a theme of activism around social justice”
  • a concern with “people being separated from one another by things that don’t matter”
  • showing “leadership above and beyond her own stated personal views and keeping people together”

Ms. Hodges certainly possessed many of these skills and orientations before entering graduate school (though I believe that Wisconsin implanted a “numbers-oriented and careful with words” chip in all graduate students throughout the 1990s). So why don’t more of us pursue politics as a vocation? I got a glimpse of the answer when I chided a legislator for not “demonstrating courage”  on a crime policy. He said, “its a helluva lot easier to be courageous when you’re not running for reelection. Give me your university tenure and I’d demonstrate courage up the [wazoo].”  Good point, that — and all the more reason to appreciate courageous sociologist-politicians like Betsy Hodges.

 

Hedgehog Spider FoxA few months ago, one of our bloggers, the “backstage sociologist” Monte Bute offered up a post that referenced political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between foxes and hedgehogs.  In the world of ideas, according to Berlin (borrowing from ancient Greek poet Archilochus), there are those who know many, many things (foxes), and those who know one big thing (hedgehogs). Berlin’s categories have been widely referenced in both the social sciences and the humanities to identify styles of thought, the contributions of various scholars, and lines of research and writing. In reflecting on Berlin’s categories back in the long, lazy days of summer, Chris and I had a little fun putting our favorite sociologists and works in one box or the other. And as we played with the categories and thought about sociology as a discipline, we began to realize anew—much as I think Berlin meant to suggest (this appeared in an essay about Tolstoy)—that real insight and understanding in any field requires both foxes and hedgehogs. more...