history

Over at Everyday Sociology, Karen Sternheimer discussed one of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in his book, Outliers.  She explains:

While the American ethos of success suggests that it is the result of talent and hard work, Gladwell examines factors that sociologists refer to as social structure—things beyond our individual control—to understand what else successful people have helping them on their journey. Let’s be clear: skills and hard work are important, but so is timing.

One of the examples Gladwell uses is the strange concentration of wildly improbable success in birth cohorts (people born around the same time).  Sternheimer summarizes Gladwell’s argument as to how timing and geography shaped the ascendence of Gates and Jobs:

Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested [and talented] in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers, the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post.

Sternheimer goes on to argue that members of Generation X may have a special advantage over earlier and later cohorts.  This figure shows that the number and rate of births peaked between the 1950s and then dropped precipitously during the period in which Generation X was born:

Those of us born in Generation X, then, would have had the advantage of schools designed and staffed for many more kids, leading to small class sizes and more resources for each kid.  Sternheimer writes:

As Gladwell describes, children born after booms… have the benefit of smaller class sizes. An unprecedented number of schools were built for Baby Boomers in the years before I was born. When my cohort was ready to go to school, there were newly-built buildings waiting for us, especially for people like me who lived in well-funded suburbs…

When I was in elementary school in the mid 1970s, there were so few students that many classes were combined: first and second graders had the same teacher, as did third and fourth graders. Looking back, this provided me with some unusual opportunities.

Being able to think through this intersection of biography and history is how C. Wright Mills describes as “the sociological imagination.”

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

Nielson recently released new data on teen media use.  Among the many findings, I was struck by the rapid rise in text messaging in just two years:

There’s a whole sociological literature on the adoption of technology, but I don’t know it. Does anyone out there familiar with it have any insights?

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

This nine-minute 1938 promotion video for White Sands National Monument is a stunning example of how incredibly short our attention spans have become.  Or is it just me?  Or maybe they found this mindnumblingly slow in 1938 also?

The introductory title pages finally fade away so that the substantive material can begin at about 40 seconds in.  40 seconds!  I was dying from boredom at about second 15!  See how long you can stand to watch it:

Via Weird Universe.

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

Jamy B. snapped this photo of an ad for a U.S. Army “live action” show in the D.C. metro:

The show is called “Spirit of America” and the slogan along the top reads: “Celebrate the spirit, strength and history of our nation!”   The inclusion of a white woman and a black man alongside what appears to be a white man, suggests that the ad-makers want us to understand that the “spirit of America” involves racial and gender inclusiveness.  Of course, this is in contrast to historical fact.   Being “patriotic,” I guess, means erasing historical injustices.

Frankly, I have some sympathy for the promoters of this event.  Inclusiveness is a nice idea.  Unfortunately, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place in trying to bring together ideology and reality.

NEW! Simon H. sent in a British poster (found at Free Market Fairy) urging men to sign up to serve in World War I. In this case, the British Empire is portrayed as a family of nations, all happily working together with the same patriotic aims:

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

Kristyn G. sent in this excellent image showing the clear division of the world into two paths: that of the sexually active flirt, destined to a life of shame and loneliness (by age 40), and the good girl who can become a happy mother and grandmother:

Apparently it appeared in a “social hygiene” manual in the early 1900s.

Also see these trailers for old movies about teens gone wild.

NEW! Awesome reader Maria found the boys’ version:

Last week the New York Times featured an article and graphic (via) illustrating the way in which the increasing energy efficiency of electricity-drawing technologies correlates with an increase in overall use of energy nonetheless due to a rise in our consumption of those technologies.

But, “Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980”:

One culprit of the rising electricity use is video game consoles:

Noah Horowitz, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calculated that the nation’s gaming consoles, like the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the Sony PlayStation 3, now use about the same amount of electricity each year as San Diego, the ninth-largest city in country.

But an even bigger culprit are those giant plasma screen TVs:

The energy-efficiency of video game consoles and televisions are both unregulated, compared to the efficiency of those appliances showing increasing energy efficiency in the first figure (refrigerators, air conditioners, and clothes washers).

So, consumption, overall, is going up:

The corporations that build TVs, game consoles, and other unregulated appliances are, of course, resisting any federal laws regarding their efficiency.  According to the article, there was little will under the Bush administration.  We will have to wait and see what happens now.

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

World War II was, among other things, an engine for the development of new technologies.  After the war, however, companies needed new markets for their products that would allow them to continue to reap profits.  We’ve posted below on this effort as related to food.  The 1948 ad below, for a scent-reducing and slimming camisole, is a great example of this in that the text makes it explicit (via):

Text:

During the war, The Springs Cotton Mills was called upon to develop a special fabric for camouflage.  It was used in the Pacific to conceal ammunition dumps and gun emplacements, but the Japanese learned to detect it because of its lack of jungle smells.  To overcome this, when the fabric was dyed, it was also impregnated with a permanent odor of hibiscus, hydrangea, and old rubber boots.  The deception was so effective that when Tokyo fell, the victorious invaders hung a piece of this fabric on a Japanese flagpole.

This process is top secret, and the fabric is now available to the false bottom and bust bucket business as SPRINGMAID PERKER made of combed yarns… the white with gardenia, the pink with camelia, the blush with jasmine, and the nude dusty.

If you want to avoid dancers’ diaphoresis* and the steatopygic stance, kill two birds with one stone by getting a camouflaged camisole with the SPRINGMAID label on the bottom of your trademark.

* Commonly known as Rhumba Aroma.

And also, a quick google search shows, “ballerina bouquet” and “skater’s steam.”

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

Larry Harnisch, of the Daily Mirror, who spends a lot of time at his job going through the L.A. Times‘ archives, found this story from 1969:

Of course, most airlines had strict requirements for flight attendants’ physical appearance, including weight limits and guidelines for hair and makeup. But Renwick argued that her hair was much shorter than many White flight attendants’ hair. Many in the African American community felt she was being punished not for the length of her hair, but for wearing it in a natural style instead of straightening it.  United eventually paid her $5,000, “endors[ed] the Afro hairstyle,” and offered her her job back, and offer she did not accept.

Also check out our recent post on Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair.

In a completely unrelated post, I found this advertisement for the movie Staircase on Larry’s blog:

Text:

What makes a man live with another man? What makes them claw at each other…humiliate each other…yet never leave each other?

Under the title “Staircase” it says “the story of a marriage made in hell.” Larry says, “Rex Harrison and Richard Burton play two hairdressers who live together…”

Larry’s post also includes a review from September 26, 1969, that contains the following memorable phrases (the image is too small to read if I post it here, so click over to Larry’s post to see it):

…a pair of querulous old queans [sic]

They are bitchiness itself…

…two failed half-men…

…the boys’ ghastly mothers…

…what, with the deepest of ironies, is called the gay world.

That’s something else, eh?