A blogger named Aluation posted this graphic showing how the New York Times changed the first line of a story about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  The change subtly shifted the blame for the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge from the police to the protesters.  In the first version of the story, police allowed them onto the bridge and then “cut off and arrested” them.  In the second, there was a “showdown” in which demonstrators “marched onto the bridge.”

Adding interest, the author of the piece was changed from “Colin Moynihan” to “Al Baker and Colin Moynihan.”  Who is Al Baker?  He is the guy in charge of the police bureau at the Times.

This is a great example of how important language is in framing events.  The difference isn’t dramatic, but a close look at the wording reveals a clear difference.

It’s also a great example of the power of certain individuals and institutions to shape how the rest of us understand reality.  We should be especially suspicious of the change in the authorship of the story.  When reporters have “beats,” they have to maintain good relationships with important sources on those beats. They rely on the same sources, over and over, to provide inside scoops.  If they alienate important sources, they have a much more difficult time doing their job.

What I’m trying to say is… there is good sociological theory, based on strong evidence, to suggest that an important person in the New York police department saw this story, called Baker, and told him to change the wording.  In which case, Baker might have done so to avoid alienating a source on which his job depends.  I’m not saying that’s what happened, I’m just saying that these kinds of things do happen.

Thanks to Jay Livingston for the tip.

For another example of framing, see the captions on a slideshow covering survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

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.

While men have always had sex with men and women have always had sex with women, the idea that a person could be of a particular homosexual type (as opposed to someone who did homosexual acts) only emerged in the late 1800s (in Western culture anyway).  Even then, it took a very long time for the idea that gay people might be among us to filter through popular culture.  Only after an active gay liberation movement made homosexuality more visible did people actually start to look for it in people they knew.

Accordingly, things that look very “gay” to us today, didn’t look that way before homosexuality became part of our consciousness. In a previous post on this topic, I discuss a vintage soap ad in which two naked men in a public shower have a conversation about “hard” water and “lathering” up.  It seems to have clear gay undertones today (maybe overtones), but it wasn’t meant to suggest homosexuality then.  Likewise, a series of military recruitment posters, sent in by Katrin, might very well trigger the “specter” of homosexuality today, but likely would not have inspired giggles at the time.

More at Scribd.

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.

What happens after we throw something in a garbage can? From the user’s perspective, it disappears once the trash collectors pick it up (if you live in an area with municipal trash collection, of course; I grew up in a rural area where everyone had to deal with their own trash). Where does it go? Sometimes items are taken to a dump not far from where it was thrown away and either buried, bulldozed into large heaps, or incinerated.

But Carlo Ratti, an architect who works with the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, directed a project to find out just how far garbage can travel, with the goal of helping us understand the “removal chain” that conveniently disappears our trash for us as well as we’ve come to understand the global supply chains that bring us items in the first place. His team asked 500 people in Seattle to tag items they would be throwing out anyway with small tracking chips. They tagged a total of 3,000 objects, everything from tin cans to cell phones to sneakers. And the results showed that some of the items we get rid of can go on a rather dramatic journey, traveling thousands of miles:

The Trash Track website contains information about the methodology and ideas behind the project.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the tip!

Cross-posted at The Oreo Experience.

With the summer over, it’s time for Hollywood to pull out a new season of films. Here’s some of what’s coming up this fall and winter. For each trailer, I note what white people get to do and what non-white people get to do.

Let us begin:

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star

Things White People Get to Do: Be part of a loving family, be content with simple things, be blissfully unaware, be sweet, be naive, be oddly cool, progressive parents, live in a small town, live in a big city, parody Almost Famous, be hot, be regular looking, be super hot with a regular looking boyfriend, be the hero.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: be threatening, drive a car.

Contagion

Things White People Get to Do in This Movie: Play craps, have a family, be an expert, cry convincingly, deliver bad news, be unable to accept bad news, probably be the focal point of a conspiracy, populate towns.

Things Not-White People Get to Do in This Movie: Play craps, provide and clarify exposition.

Main Street

Things White People Get to Do: Fake an American accent, come up with a plan, be taken advantage of by the boss, be savvy about the boss, believe a stranger, be troubled, look out for the troubled, work in an office.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: Believe a stranger.

Warrior

Things White People Get to Do: have tattoos, cage fight, announce fights, reconnect with parents, gamble, join the military, lose a home, offer help, make up for lost time, walk around the house in matched undies and undershirt, throw tires around, be an adorable father, kiss the girl, be a war hero, cheer supportability, go head to head.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: walk through frame, lose a fight

I Don’t Know How She Does It

Things White People Get to Do: Have a career AND a family and be totes supes adorbs about it.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: n/a

Straw Dogs

Things White People Get to Do: Watch old movies, be in old movies, be way too aggressive, terrorize innocents, be a cheerleader, have sex, have a nice date, disrespect their partners, sexually harass women, fight back against bullies, go to church, rise to the challenge, wield a tire iron, use boiling water effectively.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: n/a

Drive

Things White People Get to Do: be really good at driving, set up dirty deals, be mobsters, live in a big city, meet guys in elevators, be a stunt person, be a loving single mom, get their hands on more money than they were expecting, kiss the girl, bash someone’s head in, wear freaky masks, slit some throats, be the dad the dad couldn’t be.

Things Not-White People Get to Do: be a felon.

30 more movie trailers after the jump:

more...

Last month I posted a video from the PBS series on U.S. inequality, showing the misperceptions many Americans have about the level of economic stratification in the U.S. In a new segment in the series, PBS looks at the often hidden health impacts of this economic inequality:

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Full transcript available here.

In light of the mean-spirited Obama-wants-everyone-on-food-stamps meme, and the Heritage Foundation’s mocking attack on poor people as air-conditioned, Xbox-loving couch potatoes, let’s consider something else about poor single parents — especially poor mothers: their Google searches.

That’s right, in addition to refrigerators, apparently almost everyone in America today has Internet access — often at their local public libraries.

And yet they still complain about their little problems. They type searches into Google like, “help paying electric bill,” “hair falling out,” and even — presumably so they can laugh at the poor suckers who actually work for a living — “walmart jobs.”

The old “misery index” was just unemployment plus inflation. Maybe the new index to watch is Google searches for “help for single mothers.” Here is the trend for that search, along with one of the searches that most closely follows its trend, “walmart jobs.” The temporal correlation between these two — the amount they rise and fall together over time — is .96 on a scale of 0 to 1.

You can see the full list of 100 searches most correlated with “help for single mothers” by following this link.

After the poverty report came out last month, comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted, “One in six Americans is living in poverty, but the other five are more concerned about the changes to Facebook.” Whether you’re in the first group or the latter one — or neither — it’s worth pausing for a minute to think about the lives of people Googling things like, “help with rent,” “iud side effects,” “cheap dinner ideas” and “get a credit card with bad credit.” (The searches all correlate with “help for single mothers” at .94 or higher.)

A similar list comes up in the correlations with searches for “food stamps.” Here it is graphed with “housekeeping jobs,” correlated at .97:

The list of correlated searches is similar, including a preponderance of women’s health terms (“clots during period”) economic crises (“light bill”), and ideas for climbing out of an economic hole (“medical assistant jobs,” “dispatcher jobs”).

On the plus side, both of these trends peaked in mid-2010, for now. So maybe things have stopped getting worse quite so fast. Or maybe they just lost their Internet access at the library due to budget cuts.

Am I being selective, not reporting the searches like “loving this cool TV,” and “food stamps rule”? Not intentionally, but you never know. The links to the searches are above, and the data is free.

Post under “No comment” by Sarah Richardson at Ms.:

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.

HAPPY October! Here are some highlights from last month…

New Contributor:

We’re pleased to announce that Wendy Christensen, visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College, has joined us as a regular contributor. She studies the families of men and women in the armed forces, especially the ways that the military “recruits” family members into support roles.  Her first post on war-themed advertisingwas picked up by BoingBoing! Keep your eye out for posts or follow her on twitter.

News, Publications, and Appearances:

Thanks to Rebecca Pardo and the team at Impact,  I had the super fun experience of talking about hook up culture on MTV Canada last week.  That’s a first for me!

I also got to play a part in a CNN story about the difference between nerds and hipsters. Great idea for a story and well written by Aaron Sagers.

Contributor Caroline Heldman continues to report on the cheerleader who was forced to cheer for the man who she alleges sexually assaulted her.  After losing a court case against the school, she was required to pay the school’s $35,000 in legal fees.  An outcry led to an overturning of that requirement.  More at Ms. magazine.

I’m looking forward to visiting Pacific Lutheran University this month (October 25-26). I’ll be talking about both hook up culture and my research about U.S. discourses on “female genital mutilation.” I’d love to see you there!

I’ve also just scheduled talks at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and Harvard in March.  More on those later!

We were also linked from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Feministing, The Frisky, and BoingBoing (as mentioned above).  We bask in the attention.

Progress on Course Guides:

Mary Nell Trautner — University at Buffalo, SUNY — has developed a fantastic new Course Guide for instructors teaching Sociology of Gender. We hope you think it’s as awesome as we do!

Gwen is also hard at work on her Introduction to Sociology Course Guide and I’m working on a Research Methods guide that’ll be ready soon.

We’d like to collect as many Course Guides as we can, even different takes on the same course.  So, if you’re interested in writing on, please see our Instructors Page. There’s other good stuff for instructors there too.

Best of September:

Our fabulous intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from last month.  Here’s what she found:

• Christie Barcelos, Exclusion and American Yoga
• Margo DeMello, Capitalism, Animals, and the Ownership of Icons (with Toucan Sam!)
• Dave Paul Strohecker and David Banks, QR Codes and Digital Exclusivity
• Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Innovation Trap: How the iPhone Isn’t Saving America
• Wendy Christensen, United We Buy: Using Patriotism and War to Sell Products
• Gwen Sharp, How to Avoid Harassing Asian Women
• Gwen Sharp, Openly Breastfeeding on Sesame Street
• Lisa Wade, Exposing the Artificiality of Women in Fashion
• Lisa Wade, Race-Themed Events at Colleges (trigger warning)

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd