In the 3-minute video below we see 100 people, filmed by Jeroen Wolf, from ages one to one hundred. The one-year-old mostly just stares, the remainder look into the camera and state their age.
What I find interesting is the uneven way that people age. As you watch the clip, people’s ages become increasingly difficult to pin down. You know that each person is about one year older than the last, but their appearance betrays this knowledge. One might look significantly older than the one before, or quite a bit younger. How old we look doesn’t ascend nicely in a linear fashion, but varies tremendously. No doubt this is based, in part, on genetics and life choices, but it is also dependent on opportunities and expectations related to ascribed identities and social structures.
Enjoy:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 54
kqazokm — September 28, 2012
Entertaining video, and interesting to see human variability. I don't see anything here that's suggestive of social construction though. What's the argument, exactly?
Sarah Jeanne Lombardo — September 28, 2012
There seems to be no people of color after 40.
Katy Warner — September 28, 2012
As a language junkie, I just want to express how much I love the sound of Dutch. HONDERD!
Vadim McNab — September 28, 2012
Yea, right.
And breaking your hip is also a social construction.
Cutting edge social science studies at its best!
What Does 90 Look Like? The Social Construction of Aging » Sociological Images « National-Express2011 — September 29, 2012
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Hbakker — January 3, 2013
To say that the notion of "social construction" involves something called "social studies" rather than "social science" is a gross misunderstanding of the word "science." Science is not limited to the most obvious aspects of a situation. Medical science got a lot of things wrong in the 19th century (and continues to get a lot wrong in the 21st century) but we still call it science.
(It will be even more scientific when we have cures for a whole range of horrible diseases.) To reduce everything to "breaking one's hip" is silly. Much of what we know in social science now was not at all obvious one hundred years ago. For example, it is now scientifically obvious that there is only one human race both biologically and sociologically. The animal classified as homo sapiens sapiens is the same all over the world culturally and structurally. The regularities that are characteristic of class, status and power have not changed significantly, although the forms that societies take have changed dramatically in the last 5,000 years. That is part of the reason why I consider Max Weber the "Einstein" of comparative-historical sociological Wissenschaft. I guess that is why I bothered to comment rather extensively below.
Aging With No Filter – Snowbird In Training — January 6, 2019
[…] The aging population (i.e., individuals 65 and over) around the world is growing. In the U.S. alone, one in seven persons is now an older American, and this number is expected to double by 2060. As we’ve previously discussed here at Sociology In Focus with other concepts (seasons, time, etc.) aging is also socially constructed. […]
your mom — March 18, 2021
I LIKE YOUR CUT G