One of my biggest hopes (and ultimate disappointments) in editing Contexts has to do with contemporary fiction. When Chris and I took over the magazine, I was convinced that addressing literature would excite and engage the general, non-scholarly, public readership we hoped to reach. I believed then, as I still do, that novelists are among the best, most accurate and insightful, and most probing chroniclers of social life, and sociologists can learn from fiction, productively using its insights to revitalize ourselves, our work, our field, and our adoring (obviously I’m prone to flights of fictional fancy myself) public.

Obviously, that didn’t pan out. Contexts has run some literary reviews, but not many. The few we did have focused on populist works like the Harry Potter books or Twilight, but none took on the more deeply philosophical works we associate with capital-L Literature. And in spite of varied and repeated attempts, we never got anyone to do a feature on the topic. I’m still not sure why. It can’t be that sociologists don’t read fiction. Maybe we don’t have the confidence to go outside our familiar methods and areas of specialty. Maybe the fictive just troubles our empirical sensibilities.

(In my more pessimistic moods, I worry we lack the courage of our convictions: sociologists have lots of big claims and ideas about modern life, but we’re uncomfortable offering them up to inspection and critical dialog with those outside of our discipline, or even more so outside of the academy altogether. But this is probably fodder for another, more pessimistic day…)

It’s in mind of all this that I’d like to commend—and recommend—Johnathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay “Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude.” In it, the author of Freedom, one of the most celebrated books of the past year, reveals much of what is to be gained from a closer, deeper engagement with contemporary writers.

Ostensibly, this “reflection” is a travel diary. Franzen goes to an uninhabited island 500 miles off the coast of Chile to recover from his book tour, search for a rare bird, and, most fundamentally, to grapple with the 2009 suicide of his dear friend, the astounding, incomparable author David Foster Wallace. Among the few items Franzen brings are Wallace’s ashes and a paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe. Franzen’s re-reading and rendering of the novel (perhaps the only literary love his own father ever had) animates his essay, providing its narrative thread.

The trip, nicely detailed in Franzen’s skillful telling, first unfolds as a meditation on modern fiction. “So, what exactly is a novel and why did the genre appear when it did?” The answer, for Franzen, is to situate the novel (in a fundamentally sociological fashion) in the context of the modern world’s many changes: the rise of social mobility and specialized labor, the decline of religious belief and practice, the glorification of the individual, and the emergence of leisure.

It’s this last point, that modern people have so many resources and so much time on their hands, that Franzen follows. When we moderns gained free time, it opened up leisure’s terrifying cultural cousin: boredom. Like Wallace, Franzen seizes on the themes of boredom and distraction. Both can spur pathology: “The more you pursue distractions,” he writes ominously in the first few paragraphs (reflecting on the things he tried to do to get him through his book recent book tour), “the less effective any particular distraction is.” Novels, he believes, emerged as a certain kind of answer and antidote to modernity. They offer escape—“fields of play at once speculative or risk free”—but are also reflections on some kind of real world, even in the case of Crusoe’s otherworldly, allegorical setting. They offer “a writer’s experience onto a waking dream,” but they are also true in the sense of authenticity and relevance (or, perhaps even, verisimilitude—the word Franzen poignantly employs in the essay).

As time passes on Franzen’s island, his article grows into a meditation on cultural life today. He has much to offer in sense-making about entertainment saturation, the spectre of monoculture (which Wallace’s fictional worlds so richly depicted), radical individualism and reality TV, and everything from The Godfather to Charlie Sheen and blackberries (the fruit and the device). Ultimately, he comes to rest at the emotional core of his Crusoe adventure in the South Pacific: his coming-to-terms with the life, work, and self-inflicted death of his friend David Foster Wallace.

Franzen knew Wallace on an intimate, personal level. Operating on impulses both loving and enraged, he is unflinching. They shared, he says, interests in mutual themes, but clearly believes Wallace’s writing and decisions were tragically misguided. Pathological or beautiful, depending on your point of view, Wallace believed “fiction is a solution, the best solution to the problem of existential solitude.” But, then, couldn’t fiction quell a suicidal impulse? Franzen in fact claims that Wallace’s death can be understood as deriving from the unique (and perverse) experience of over-stimulation, reflection, and boredom. “If boredom is the soil in which the seeds of addiction sprout, and if the phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as those of addiction, it seems fair to say that David died of boredom.” Too much wasn’t enough.

Midday through Crusoe, the titular character, alone for fifteen years in which he ached for companionship, finds a footprint. The novelist and his hero both recognize this moment as an ironic unraveling. Franzen writes, “Nowhere was Defoe’s psychology more acute than in his imagination of Robinson’s response to the rupture of his solitude. He gave us the first realistic portrait of the radically isolated individual, and then, as if impelled by novelistic truth, he showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is.”

Yes! This is, to me, so much of what sociology is about; a critique of individualism, obviously as well as a recognition of the centrality of the social, even with its particular perversions and injustices, in modern life. But I can’t say it so succinctly as the novelist can: “No matter how carefully we defend our selves [two words, not one!], all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall to us the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.” What a beautiful, sparing (or is it unsparing?) formulation.

Franzen continues, bringing us even further and more concretely into the contemporary moment: “Even Facebook… contains an ontological exit door, the Relationship Status menu, among whose options is the phrase ‘It’s complicated.’ This may be a euphemism for ‘on my way out,’ but it’s also a description of all of the other options. As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored?”

As an editor, I generally try to guard against such rhetorical questions, especially as a motivating force or a sort of emoticon wink appended to a title, but here I kind of like it. The question here is a challenge, rhetorical in its way, but really a moral taunt to obligation, responsibility, connection, and just continuing to push on with life. Generally, sociologists don’t allow ourselves to be moralistic—at least, not overtly. Yet we are, of course, deeply moralistic, insistent, and normative, if only by virtue of our core interest in the social.

And that’s how I get from Franzen and Crusoe back to the importance of fiction for sociology. It’s kind of like Erik Olin Wright’s take on the study of real-life utopias. By considering, critically and carefully, actual utopian projects, we open up a set of possibilities so that we can be ready when historical opportunities to increase human flourishing arise. Wright calls it “a sociology of the possible.” For me, fiction, too, can help us grasp our present realities and open up alternative stories of who we are and who we’d like to be—and it often accomplishes the task more powerfully and imaginatively than our own literal empiricism typically allows. After all, it’s not called the sociological imagination for nothing.

Last weekend, I read a very interesting column about populist outrage and the American dream. Written by Steven Thomma, White House correspondent of the McClatchy newspaper group, the piece got me thinking once again about the value of sociological research and thought.

Thomma’s article, which appeared in our local paper under the headline “Fading American Dream Promotes New Political Rage,” begins by detailing some of the basic social changes fueling unrest among protestors Left and Right: stagnant and declining wages, increasing health care costs, job loss, and income gaps, as well as ongoing (and ineffective) wars, corporate bailouts, and skyrocketing debt. Very empirical, sociological stuff. Indeed, Thomma drew on research and findings from our field implicitly and quoted Harvard’s Bruce Western directly (on union declines and increasing income gaps in America).

Where the piece really caught my eye–and where Thomma took it up a notch, sociologically speaking–was in situating these structural and demographic shifts in the context of “something deeper” going on in American culture.  Mobility–or the relative lack thereof–and rights were important touchstones for this discussion. However, it wasn’t just the actual facts about mobility (or rights) in the U.S. that are striking, but the American expectation and hope that both should be available and possible. For Thomma, this is where the American dream and the perceived loss of it come in. “The rules,” Thomma writes, “seem to be changing.” With these insights about cultural norms and expectations, we see that our politics, lives, and communities are shaped not only by how things are but how we want and expect them to be–and there is no greater cultural force in America than that crazy, inspiring dream so many of us share. The fact that Thomma quoted a political scientist to set up these points doesn’t make them any less sociological (or useful).

When I finished reading, I was left wondering what sociologists like me might contribute to public understanding on these themes. One contribution I can imagine centers on leadership and the American political structure. An orienting point for Thomma is that populists of both Left and Right are frustrated political leaders who have promised, but failed to deliver, change. Engaged citizens of all stripes, he believes, feel disheartened and betrayed. Clearly our political leaders have often failed us. They haven’t always done as well as they could have. But I think a more sociological orientation to the problem would situate leaders’ shortcomings in the context of our archaic and dysfunctional political institutions–two-party paralysis, decentralization, and so on–and, even more importantly, in the context of a culture that lacks a rich conception of and commitment to the public good andis fundamentally cynical about government itself.

A more sociological orientation would also, I believe, be a bit more critical and forward-thinking about the American dream itself. It wouldn’t just bemoan the loss of the dream as we have known it, but also consider how that dream–and the culture itself–is being (or perhaps  should be) reshaped and tranformed, recast to fit the contemporary moment. It’s possible that new dreams and visions of America could emerge out of this angst–conceptions that would be less driven by utopian visions of limitless mobility and unabated freedom for all and more rooted in a more humble and informed (and yes, sociological) sense of ourselves, our relations to others, and our place in the world. I offer this possibility only hesitantly because it doesn’t sound as uplifting, inspiring, and patriotic as one might like. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that such a vision may not only be more realistic and sustainable at this point in our history, it would also be truer to another set of values, ideals, and imaginings that have helped to make America not only a great nation but also a fundamentally good one.

Readers of Contexts will know that one of Chris and my favorite political pundits and cultural commentators is David Brooks of the New York Times. It’s not because we agree with all of his politics and opinions, but  because he is one of the few national media members who regularly reads and consistently draws upon social scientific research. On this point, take a look at his March 17 column “Social Science Palooza II.” I found at least two things interesting about the seven different pieces he profiles. The first is that four of the studies come from psychology. The other is that two of the pieces are based upon work in the domain of sports–one about how fans impact officials (which helps account for the “home field advantage”), the other about the social dynamics that propel swimmers in the last legs of relay races to swim beyond their usual personal limits. Good stuff–and a handy reminder that I want to give Brooks’s new book The Social Animal a read.

So I finally had a chance to watch the Facebook-inspired, Academy Award-winning film “The Social Network.” I found it very entertaining–Jessie Eisenberg was captivating as Mark Zuckerberg and who among us regular folks doesn’t enjoy seeing some in-fighting among Ivy League elites? That said, I was also surprised and kind of disappointed not to learn more about the social desires and dynamics that Facebook is really tapping into and driven by–I mean, in addition to sex, dating, and scoring drugs. I see the irony of a bunch socially-challenged Harvard misfits producing the most successful social networking medium in the world today. But I think there is–or at least should be–more to the story than that, more to say about why people want and need to connect with one another, why this particular technology has proven so successful and valuable for doing so, and what broader lessons these fundamentally social questions have for the future of technology of/in society. In real life, as I wrote in a post a few weeks ago, Zuckerberg talks a ton about the power and promise of all things social without really filling in the details and the backstory. I guess I had thought the film might help elaboarate that just a bit. Maybe when sociologists make their move into Hollywood, we can do the remake.

Late last week, esteemed La Salle sociologist Charles A. Gallagher put pen to paper (well, fingers to keys, more likely) with an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Living in Fictional Land of Color-Blind America: False View of Equality Blinds Us to Remaining Issues.” We encourage you all to read Chip’s piece, and to check him out in CNN’s piece from the following day. Kudos to a sociologist in the limelight!

Our colleague, Monte Bute at Metro State University in St. Paul, is many things to us: respected sociologist, friend and supporter, blogger (https://thesocietypages.org/monte/), former Contexts’ board member, and valued opinion. He’s also a true class act, and it looks like a lot of people agree.

Today we’re delighted to point you all to Minnesota Public Radio’s wonderful piece about Monte’s approach to life, death, and bringing both into the classroom. Please do check it out at http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/02/23/dying-professor-death/

And, for a little more backstage knowledge on the backstage sociologist, here’s the text of Monte’s “about” page on TheSocietyPages.org:

Last week it was announced that, after many years of (our) waiting and hoping, former Minnesota Twins pitcher Bert Blyleven had been voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. In yesterday’s local paper, Blyleven was asked about the speech he planned to make when he is officially inducted in Cooperstown, NY on July 24.

Here’s what he said:
“A Hall of Fame speech is not talking about yourself; it’s talking about the people who helped you get where you’re at right now. There are so many great people who helped me.”

We loved the response, and it is not just because Bert is a Minnesotan or because we are trying to get him to circle us on television broadcasts next season. (Blyleven does color commentary for Twins games and is known for circling fans in the crowd with his telestrator.) We loved the quote because it is so thoroughly sociological, recognizing that all of Blyleven’s accomplishments are not fully his own and in fact the result of lots of cooperation and assistance from others along the way.

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley talked about this recognition that we all stand on the shoulders of others when he did a special video chat with our intro undergrads here last spring—but he added a twist. Conley talked about how he always asks his own intro students how they had come to their academic success and being enrolled at his/their prestigious institution. His white students, Conley told us, typically talk about how hard they had worked in high school and throughout their lives; students of color, in contrast, usually tell him about all the people who had helped them along the way. Hall-of-famers in the making? Circle them, Bert!

“I am a blogger no longer.” That’s what Marc Ambinder wrote last fall in announcing that he was leaving the Atlantic Monthly.com to become the White House correspondent for the National Journal.

The announcement made waves on the Internet because he is one of the first and most successful electronically-based political reporters the web has ever known.

Ambinder described blogging as an “ego-intensive” process where one has to put one’s self in the narrative even when doing straight reporting of the news. Ambinder set this in contrast to good print journalism which he described as “ego-free,” “let[ting] the story and the reporting process… unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening.”

Even more to the core of his frustration were concerns about writing and editing: “I loved the freedom to write about whatever I wanted but I missed the discipline of learning to write about what needed to be written. I loved the light editorial touch of blogging but I missed the heavy hand of an editor who tells you something sucks and tells you to go back and rewrite it.”

What editors wouldn’t love to hear that? But Ambinder’s post and his job change also got us thinking about was how, in the social sciences, we don’t just have editors, we have a whole community of scholars who contribute to our thinking, who review our work, and who confirm and help disseminate our ideas and information.

The community-driven, collaborative nature of the scientific process can be cumbersome and time-consuming—basically, it’s on the other end of the spectrum of blogging. That’s often frustrating, especially when we think we have something of real value to contribute to public discussion and debate right now (!).  It all takes a lot of time and rarely culminates in definitive conclusions or easy answers. But it’s what we do and what (we believe) our communities need. When it works, it sings; its value is obvious, immediate, palpable.

Sociologists love all things “social,” and we use the word all the time in Contexts. We’ve used it in titles—“the good, the bad, and the social” (Fall 2010), “all politics is social” (on our cover Fall 2008), and, of course, “understanding people in their social worlds” (Contexts’ tagline). Another place the term pops up regularly these days is in media, news, and communication technologies—all of which we now call, almost without thought, “social media.”

A recent interview with Financial Times (FT.com), Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg illustrates. FT reports that, “In sweeping terms and with no sense of irony,” Zuckerberg will tell anyone who’ll listen:

Our goal is to make everything social.

The Internet wunderkind goes on: “If you look five years out, every industry is going to be rethought in a social way. You can remake whole industries. That’s the big thing.”

The reporter summarized their interview, writing, “Zuckerberg uses the word ‘social’ a lot, and it’s not always obvious what he means. He is not simply talking about telling your friends what you had for breakfast with a status update. To Zuckerberg, a more social world is one where nearly everything—from the web to the TV to the restaurants you choose to eat at—is informed by your stated preferences and your friends’ preferences, and equipped with technology that lets you communicate and share content with people you know. What Zuckerberg is talking about is a new way of organising and navigating information.”

From an academic standpoint, it’s easy to be critical—”social” seems to be reduced to individual choices or friendship circles, and ideas about networking and communication are so easily put into service for big business. And then there are all the complexities of what it means to socialize on an individual basis through technological means that can, themselves, be isolating.

That said, for sociologists who often complain about the lack of an informed, sociological perspective in mainstream media and public discourse, this pervasive attention to the social should be seen as an opportunity. Not just in terms of how we use social media (though obviously we are trying to do that here at TSP), but in terms of expanding conceptions of “the social” and perhaps even bringing a more socially-oriented—dare we say, sociologically-oriented?—perspective into mainstream media and public discourse. Probably won’t hurt in the classroom, either.

What makes a social science blogger or blog post unique? Too often, not enough. Social scientists who only offer up their personal opinions about the daily news end up being just another voice in the crowded echo chamber. What we need are social science bloggers who can insert real knowledge and the unique perspective of their disciplines, data, and insight into the mix.

Chris Kelty makes this point (and others) in his recent post about blogging in anthropology. Kelty also offers some great tips on how social scientific bloggers can make more meaningful, substantive contributions. We especially like Kelty’s suggestion to blog about a journal article you’ve read recently:

“Think,” he writes, “how pleased you would be if someone blogged about your research… This exercise hones two valuable skills: a) the ability to communicate what an article says and why it is important better than the article does itself and b) the ability to do so in a language and tone that flatters the author, provokes your audience to [consider social science] thought, and doesn’t take you longer than a couple of hours.”

Does this sound a little like our citings posts? Hopefully so.