“It is big, it is strange, it is unexpected.”

Schell spends the first six-and-a-half minutes of the lecture below talking about the surprising wins in technology this year.

Club Penguin, a flash game for kids, being bought by Disney for 350 million dollars.

Guitar Hero.

Webkins. “What?” “Really?”

He spends next 22 minutes trying to explain why these games have been so successful. Including:

Anything you spend time on, you start to believe, “This must be worthwhile. Why?  Because I’ve spent time on it.  And therefore it must be worth me kickin’ in 20 bucks because look at the I’ve spent time on it.  And now that I’ve kicked in 20 bucks, it MUST be valuable, because only an idiot would kick in 20 bucks if it wasn’t!”
…

What these all have in common is that these are all busting through to reality… We live in a bubble of fake bullshit and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real.

…

Pockets turn the law of divergence inside out… remember the swiss army knife! …and this is why everyone hates the ipad.

And then, from about 21 minutes forward, he gives an account of what he thinks the future will look like. It’s, um, chilling.

Enjoy!

See also: Do We Play Farmville Because We’re Polite?

And also, he makes the same point we made in a previous post about how the new Ford Hybrid has made driving green into a game.

Via Text Relations.

Wandering around Las Vegas, Gwen and I happened upon a High School Musical-themed book complete with a little gadget that allows small children (3+) to practice texting.  The gadget allows children to press 1, 2, or 3 to send a pre-fabricated message to High School Musical characters, who send pre-fabricated messages back, and so on.

Kids, of course, like to do what they see adults doing.  That’s why they like getting play vacuums and lawn mowers.  It’s not inherently fun, it’s just fun to copy.  So it makes sense that, in a world where adults text, little kids would want to text too.

Just like play vacuums and lawn mowers, however, a toy phone to text on is training children how to be adults or, in this instance, teenage girls; ones who flirt with boys, spend a lot of time socializing on their cell phones, and use text-speak (the book includes a lingo dictionary explaining, for example, that LOL means “Laugh Out Loud” and WAZ UP means “What’s up?”).

Front:

Back:

Thanks to Jordan G. for help on this one.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Most of us are clear on the idea that patriarchies are defined by sexism: the valuing of men over women.  In our American patriarchy, however, this is matched and perhaps even superseded by something called androcentrism: the valuing of all-things-masculine over all-things-feminine.  We know we live in an androcentric society because masculinized things (playing sports, being a doctor, being self-sufficient) are imagined to be good for everyone (we encourage both our sons and daughters to do these things), but feminized things (playing with dolls, being a nurse, and staying at home to raise children) are considered to be good only for women.

This means that men are teased and ostracized for doing feminized things, as we have demonstrated in advertising for McCoy Crisps, Hungry Man, Solo, Chevy, dog food, Miller beer, beef jerky, cell phones, Dockers, the VW Beetle, and alcohol (see here, here, here and here).

This tendency towards androcentrism means, also, that companies can count on both women and men buying masculinized products, but only women buying feminized products.  It’s smart business, then, to masculinize everything.  In a New York Times article, for example, Patton reports that Mercedes masculinized its SLK in response to a finding that “too many” women were buying it, something that threatened to feminize the car:

Mercedes says that 52 percent of the registered owners of first-generation SLK’s are women and 48 percent are men; the company would prefer the figures to be more on the order of 60 percent men and 40 percent women…

The standard thinking in the industry is that lots of women will buy a car that appeals to men, but many men — certainly those who wish to avoid the girlie-men label — won’t buy one associated with women.

This logic helps explain the, admittedly tongue-in-cheek (I think), hyper-masculinization of the Honda Odyssey in this commercial, sent in by Nancy N. She writes:

The choice of the black car, the music, and lighting all direct the viewer to think, “this isn’t just a mini-van, this is a man-van, and you aren’t a pansy if you buy it.”   …[It is] “technology packed “… with distinctly harder edges. Overall, Honda is trying very hard to override the notion of a “mom car” to sell to a broader audience.

See also: “how to give the perfect man hug” and “how I sit on the bus”.  And for more examples of androcentrism, see our posts on the phenomenon in  sports (see here and here), cartoons, schools (see here and here), and Cosmo.

Dr. Grumpy re-tells the fascinating story of the importation of camels to North America for use as beasts of burden.  He begins:

Following the Mexican-American war, the United States found itself in control of a large desert, covering what’s now New Mexico & Arizona, and parts of Texas, California, and several other states. The U.S. Army needed to establish bases and supply lines in the area, both for the border with Mexico and the continuing wars with Indian tribes.

The railroad system was in it’s infancy, and there were no tracks through the area… The only way across was to use horses. But horses, like humans, are heavily dependent on water. This made the area difficult to cross, and vulnerable to attacking Apaches.

And so in 1855 Jefferson Davis, then U.S. Secretary of War (later to become President of the Confederacy during the Civil War), put into action an idea proposed by several officers: buy camels to serve in the desert. Congress appropriated $30,000 for the endeavor, and officials were sent to Turkey to do just that.

The next year they imported somewhere between 62 and 73 camels and, with them, 8 camel drivers all led by a man named Hadji Ali. Enter the U.S. Army Camel Corps.

Camels at an Army Fort:

(source)

Illustration of camels in camp:

(source)

Camels on the go (1850s):

(source)

Says Dr. Grumpy:

They led supply trains all over, from Texas to California…

But there were problems. The Americans had envisioned combined forces of camels and horses, each making up for the deficiencies of the other. But horses and donkeys are frightened of camels, making joint convoys difficult and requiring separate corrals. The army was also unprepared for their intrinsically difficult personalities- camels bite, spit, kick, and are short-tempered. Horses are comparatively easy to handle.

Then came the start of the American Civil War, which focused military attention to the east. With troops pulled out of the American desert, and horses better suited to the eastern terrain, the camels were abandoned.   Though Weird CA suggests that they were used in the war, Dr. Grumpy reports that most simply escaped into the desert.  For a time, there was a wild camel population in the U.S.

Meanwhile, a former-solider and Canadian gold prospector, Frank Laumeister, figured that camels would be great pack animals for his new line of work. He bought a herd in 1862, but they didn’t work out so well in the rockier terrain. Plus:

The Canadians, like the Americans, discovered they weren’t easy to handle. The same problems of difficult disposition and spooking horses came up. In addition, they found camels would eat anything they found. Hats. Shoes. Clothes that were out drying. Even soap. And so, after a few years, the Canadians gave up on the experiment, too.

Laumeister on one of his camels:

Our original head camel driver, Hadji Ali, eventually got out of the camel business, but he never left America. He became a citizen in 1880, married a woman named Gertrudis Serna and had two children. He died in Arizona in 1902, having spent 51 years of his life in the U.S. You’ll find his tombstone in Quartzsite, Arizona labeled with the name “Hi Jolly,” the Americanized pronunciation of his full name.

(source)

The last sighting of a wild camel in North America was in 1941 near Douglas, Texas (source).

Kai Wright at Colorlines discusses an “arresting” graph demonstrating downward class mobility among black and whites.  The bars represent the proportion of parents’ children that end up in the bottom fifth of income earners by race and income of the parent.  On the far left, you see that 31% of whites and 54% of blacks born into the bottom fifth remain the bottom fifth.  Poor black children, then, are more likely than poor white children to stay poor.

The remainder of the bars represent downward mobility.  You can see that, in every case, black children are more likely to be poor as adults than white children, no matter what class they were born into.  Among those born into the middle fifth, the statistically middle class, 16% of whites and 45% of blacks end up in the bottom fifth of income earners.  For the richest white Americans, the chance of ending up poor is statistically zero; while nearly one in ten of black children born rich will end up poor.

Wright summarizes:

…economic mobility is not the same for everybody in America, and to the degree we can talk about a genuine black middle class, it’s not a terribly secure one.

This time of year Americans are incited to eat, eat, eat as much delicious holiday-themed food as possible, and then to lose, lose, lose the weight we gained with diet plans, gym memberships, appetite suppressing pills, and tummy tucks.  Somehow I don’t think it’s random that I received a coupon for a scale designed to measure the weight of my person as I exited Target this holiday season.

NEWS:

We would like to express our gratitude to Michael Kimmel and Abby Kinchy for nominating us for the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award.  We’re grateful, also, to Chris Uggen, Doug Hartmann, Philip Cohen, Myra Marx Ferree, who wrote supporting letters, and to all of our Readers who submitted supporting anecdotes and words of praise.    We are committed to continuing the work we’ve been doing thus far and hope to make the website increasingly easy to use and helpful to instructors.

An original essay by Gwen, Family Movies: Where Are All the Girls (based on a post here at SocImages), was featured at BlogHer.  There she talks about the data on who produces these films alongside analyses of Bee Movie and the new Disney adaptation of Rapunzel, Tangled.

Always a fun treat, two of our posts — the baby worshipper and Target trampling — were featured on BoingBoing this month (here and here).

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

In other news…

FEATURED READER:

This month we received an email from Robin who inquired:

I was just reading your blog, and for the 100th time probably, asked myself “Who is Dmitriy T.M.? What do they do for a living/for pleasure that they come across so many interesting and varied images??”

I would love to see an interview with Dmitriy on your blog. For real, I want to know who this mysterious person is!

Well Robin, the mysterious Dmitriy submitted to an interview and sent along a revealing self-portrait!  Enjoy!  :)

Lester Andrist, at The Sociological Cinema, alerted me to a 9-minute short film revealing “Hollywood’s relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims.”   Created by Jaqueline Salloum and Dr. Jack Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs, it is a stunning and disturbing collection of clips.  The depictions are grossly prejudiced and relentlessly violent.  Andrist summarizes:

The Media Education Foundation also made a full length documentary based on Shaheen’s book.  The 5-and-a-half-minute trailer is a good indication of its content.  It contains many similar disturbing depiction, including a discussion of Disney’s Aladdin, but also points to how Arabs are frequently shown as buffoons (“rich and stupid,” “oversexed,” and “uncontrollably obsessed with the American woman”).

See also our posts on how Arabs are portrayed in video games and Reel Injun, a documentary about the representation of American Indians in Hollywood.