consumption

I was at the Pittsburgh airport last week and I saw this concourse map and I thought to myself, “Wow, they used pink and they’re not trying to signify WOMAN!  That’s something else!”

Then I looked closer and noticed that this concourse map was specifically for the shopping in the concourse.  Notice it’s a map of the “AirMall”:

Sigh.

Rebecca H. sent us a link to the Clorox website and I thought “Holy Moly! There is actually a MAN on a cleaning product website!” (in the lower right):

Then I looked closer and realized that the man in question is a gay man famous for being on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Sigh.

Two opportunities for suffocating stereotypes to be undermined; two opportunities lost.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I schedule my posts for mid-morning, but I write most of them between midnight and 5am.  It’s 3:24am right now.

The New York Times developed an interactive graphic, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that allows users to see what proportion of Americans are doing what at any given time of the day.

At about 3:24am, 95% of Americans are sleeping:

The interactive graphic allows you to look at the data by race, gender, parental status, education-level, employment, and age. Below are screen shots of the data for each age group.

People aged 15-24:

People aged 25-64:

People 65 and older:

Click overto play with the data. It’s oddly fascinating.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Many of us live in consumption economies unlike any in human history.   Consuming is a daily chore.  Acquiring is easier than ever.

What do you have?  How much of it do you need?  Do you have things that you don’t want?  How do you manage the stuff that enters your home?  Does it go?  Or does it stay?  Do you dispose of the disposable and semi-disposable goods?  Or do you try to recycle them, even if only within the boundaries of your home?  How do the shelves and drawers, the nooks and crannies of your living space, obscure our answers to these questions?  What would it look like if we had to look at it all, all at once?

Chinese artist Song Dong convinced his mother to allow him to display every item of her home as an art exhibit (article here).  She had lived in the same house for nearly 60 years.  He arranged her belongings, in a museum, around a dismantled piece of the house.  The result raises questions about consumption, economy, and the things in our lives.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Elizabeth M. and Toban B. sent in a clip from the British TV show “That Mitchell and Webb Look” that has a humorous take on how advertisers target men and women:

Via Visual Economics. Though often presented as the domain of economists, sociologists have a lot to say about patterns of consumption and their effects. Though patterns of consumption and their effects are often presented as the domain of economists, sociologists have have a lot of interesting things to say about this topic.

Of course, some have wondered, if sociology sucks, why do economists keep on doing it?

Reminiscent of work by Anna Lappé and the Small Planet Institute‘s “Take a Bite out of Climate Change” initiative, I stumbled across  Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews in Environmental Science and Technology. Looking past the fancy equations you see data presented like this snippet of Figure 1, documenting the green house gas emissions associated with household food consumption, allowing for a comparison of impacts between food groups.

The article presents data that systematically compares the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles,” finding that the production cycle accounts for the majority of emissions. In other words, changing the type of food you eat (e.g., less red meat) does more good for the environment than buying local.

Jason S. sent in this clip of a convention for (parents of) infants, toddlers, and tweens called Baby and Tweens Celebration L.A. It’s an example of the hyper-consumerist mentality that now surrounds child-raising, at least for the upper-middle classes and higher. It’s also an example of the way that young children, especially young girls, are encouraged by some forces to think of themselves as “princesses.” Many parents (literally) buy into this idea of what a (girl) child should be like. It has not been this way throughout history and is not this way across cultures.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR6DpbDoyuc[/youtube]

Related posts: baby couture magazine, babies are born 2 shop, future trophy wife and milf t-shirts, boob job piggy bank, Strawberry Shortcake in the City, bangs for baby, beauty spending over a lifetime,  modernizing the fairy tale, and girl culture.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

I came across a series of photos that reminded me of Menzel and D’Aluisio’s book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, that looked at how globalization, migration and rising affluence affect the diets of communities around the globe.  See also photo galleries 1, 2, and 3 in Time Magazine.

From photographer, Mark Menjivar, You Are What You Eat is a series of photographs looking at the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States. Nothing was added or taken away.

What type of insight do we gain by looking at our refrigerators?