As you may be aware, much of the Red River valley here along the North Dakota/Minnesota border is facing a 500 year flood set to peak on Friday. This is not a flood where lives are at risk like the one resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Nonetheless, it is a flood bigger than the 1997 flood that caused serious damage, led to displacement of hundreds of families, and drew national coverage. It is a flood that will require the placement of more than 2 million sandbags in the Fargo-Moorhead area, filled and transformed into dikes by over 10,000 volunteers yesterday alone. As a lifelong East Coaster, I am a stranger to floods. I also currently reside in a downtown apartment building and work on a campus that are both highly unlikely to be affected by flood waters. And, as a sociologist, I’m naturally inclined to view social activity with a particularly distant lens.
So, here are a loose collection of my observations:
-My employer, Concordia College, canceled classes yesterday and today not because of any risk, but simply so that students and staff could help with the flood preparation. Moreover, the administration sent out a message on Saturday saying that all students were expected to show up at 9 am on Sunday to volunteer. Now, I’m very impressed with Concordia’s great expectations for their students, but, frankly, I’m stunned. I have great pride in my alma mater, but I know they would never, ever say that they expected (encouraged, maybe) students to do anything on a weekend –nevermind the intense manual labor of sandbagging and dike-building. I’ve been considering what might explain the difference between the two and find it difficult to say. Is it a Midwestern thing? Is it a social capital thing derived from Concordia’s status as a relatively homogeneous, Lutheran-affiliated school? Is it because Skidmore students tend to have a higher class status and approach college with a consumer model?
-The organization of sandbagging is remarkable. They have developed Sandbag Central (pictured here),
Sandbag Central
which uses a huge machine to fill many sandbags quickly. I showed up at the Fargodome to volunteer yesterday and, after filling out a form and signing a waiver, was immediately shuttled via two different buses to help build dikes. I literally have no clue where I was or whose homes I was protecting; we were just dropped off in the location where labor was needed. What’s interesting is how Fargo authorities have developed a rationalized system that makes the most efficient use of volunteer labor.
-The rhetoric of the flood and dike-building is fascinating. Though no human life is at risk, during the entire week leading up to the flood, residents have anticipated it with immense fear and growing panic. I would dare say that some of my fellow volunteers even got a pleasurable rush from the emergency scenario. On my first shuttle bus, I was seated next to a bunch of college guys (not Concordia students!) who had done shots of Jager before showing up to build dikes and had no shortage of homophobic puns about the activity. At the actual dike-building site, there was no expert or official clearly in charge, so there was hyper-masculine jostling for a leadership role. Volunteers got into minor squabbles about the proper method of laying sandbags, engaged in unnecessary demonstrations of manly strength, and attempted to out-veteran each other (“You may have been here for 1997, but let me tell you, I was here for the ’73 flood”). There was also an overwhelming sentiment that real success was achieved by common folks, not by the government. “This is how houses get saved, not by the government spending money — and that’s all they know how to do.” By contrast, I think in a similar situation in New York City, there would be much greater trust in the government, but also a sense of entitlement that it was the responsibility of the government to protect us.
Anybody who reads this with regularity has probably come across me proclaiming my love for the article links in Bookforum. I’m not sure how they dredge the web for their content, but they never fail to uncover something interesting.
The biggest challenge our new technologies pose for children and families is one of opportunity costs: too many of us are spending too much of our time in front of the screen instead of with each other in face-to-face communication, and this has adverse effects for families and for our culture.
I’m of two minds on this. Before I left for work today, I set my daughter up on a site called Strip Generator a site that allows her to make her own comic strips (don’t worry, she’s under supervision: no calls to Child Protective Services). I think new technology allows for a flowering of creative expression and I try to expose her to experiences on-line that engage her in creative production. But I must admit to wondering about the costs. Do these new technologies create habits that undermine face to face engagement. A possibility that I’m especially interested in as a political scientist who thinks about social capital and civic engagement.
As we think about how we deal with technological innovation in our own world, Rosen encourages us to think about how the Amish approach technology:
The Amish are a good (albeit rigorous) model for this. They are not opposed to every technology; but before they decide to incorporate one into their community, they first ask whether it will bolster or undermine the core values of the community.
This of course greatly offends libertarian sensitivities. Who is “the community” to tell me whether I can use a new technology. But if there are great social costs to new technology, we need to make it apparent. The literature thus far doesn’t seem to suggest a decline in face to face interaction as Internet usage increases, but we’re still at an early stage in this scholarship. there’s more thinkin’ and researchin’ to do.
I can hear my Internet and Politics students groaning 🙂 Stop hand wringing and let a 1,000 gadgets bloom! But I get paid to hand wring….so (not sure what the onomatopoeia for “hand wringing” is.
Many of us post to Facebook, perhaps unaware of what can happen to that content and who has rights to it. All of this came to a head a few days ago, as Facebook’s new terms of service (TOS) came to light and were met with a range of reactions from dismay to outrage.
I’ve been reading Convergence Culture and being in Jane Jacob’s adopted home, I couldn’t help but think of how the social space of Facebook relates to how social interactions are shaped by governance and polity in online realms, as well as the idea of a commons that is a privatized space, as opposed to a public one.
While I’m resigned to the fact that there is no privacy online and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that Facebook is being used by collections departments to locate unstealthy credit defaulters (true story), I do bristle at the idea of content being appropriated by companies hosting these web commons.
Why? I’m using the private space of Facebook, why should I feel that what I post is still my intellectual property? Am I being unreasonable? After all, I push the boundaries of fair use quite a bit.
Can social network sites really be sites of democratic action, when they can ultimately be censored, not as a matter of public policy, but rather corporate TOS? On the other side of the Web 2.0 fence, how much freedom should an organization grant users?
I feel that what any site engaging in Web 2.0 should do if they want to use content posted by users is…to simply ask them for permission. It’s simple good manners and building of social capital. I do think privatized social spaces or commons can be used for civic engagement, but I find emerging technologies being developed up here in Canada that allow content to be fed from multiple sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) into one location to be rather interesting. More on this in a future post. I feel the overlap of Web 2.0 with open source will make us all rethink ownership and privacy and force organizations to ponder what intellectual property really means, what the risks are in terms of what the courts are stating, and how to implement processes. Or not. That devil inertia.
Earlier, I referenced this Wired article from last year on WikipediaScanner. The site tracks edits of Wikipedia entries to known IP addresses within firms and organizations. Wired has compiled a list of notable “salacious” edits from the past. Here’s a news story discussing the PR and search engine optimization (SEO) implications of WikipediaScanner.
While most edits are innocuous, some raise eyebrows.
I’m interested in this because I feel that transparency will be increasingly important as Web 2.0 develops and we shift to 3.0, 4.0, etc. Some of the things I’m working on is the implications of anonymity in social media and how it relates to business/organizational practice. Some issues that aren’t well defined are:
Policies regarding transparency versus secrecy (open source versus Apple)
Managing public perceptions and organizational attitudes towards risk
What are the proper features/applets (materialities of communication) that foster “collaboration and community” across different contexts? Should these be staged?
What are the preconditions for online communities be self-regulating?
Nuances of online community culture self-reproduction
While anonymity and fluid identity was prevalent in Web 1.0, back when nobody knew you were a dog:
in Web 2.0, users are seeking the experiences of the 4Cs: conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. I think in many instances that transparency facilitates the 4Cs through building social capital and trust. Additionally, communitas and shared meaning systems, as well as the materialities of communications (applets, features, etc.), also foster/enable the experiences/practices in the 4Cs, but I don’t think all of these are invariant preconditions in all contexts.
If we believe Plato that the images and stories we feed our children affect them for life, then that photo is setting the coordinates of citizenship for the next generation.
As Allen reminds us, we still live in an area that is less characterized by overt racism and more reflected by a deep inter-racial distrust that prevents us from sacrificing for one another. It’s hard to separate out the inter-cultural distrust that exists between so-called red and blue America. Robert Putnam’s revealing work on inter-racial trust (which I’ve also done some work on ) uncovers a troubling, but intuitive, pattern: the greater the racial diversity of an area, the lower the level of social capital.
in her book, Allen cites the city of Charlotte, which is fourth in Putnam’s study of 40 regions in the level of church attendance, but 39th in the level of inter-racial trust. This ability for in-group citizenship is offset by the inability to engage in inter-group citizenship. The need to bridge these divides was an early theme of the Obama campaign. It is probably what propelled him past his pastor problems into the Democratic nomination. I wonder whether that early promise could be realized if he managed to capture the white house. Would an Obama victory have any effect on inter-racial distrust? How?
Social capital blog posts on the new rankings on volunteering from the Corporation for National and Community Service. They find that, not surprisingly, racially homogeneous cities like Ogden, UT and Iowa City, IA, have the highest rates of volunteering while Miami, FL, has the lowest rate of volunteering in the nation at 14.5% (my hometown represents!)
A quick look at the rankings highlights low rates of volunteering in California, Texas, and Florida. Not coincidentally, places with high numbers of Latinos. What do we make of this? Does it mean that Latinos do not volunteer? Can low volunteering rates be explained away by other factors that correlate with high Latino populations? Income? Hours worked?
I think one of the issues is the way this study defines volunteerism. What it doesn’t show are more informal ways of community building. Where does helping a neighbor or family member move a dresser or helping put together a family bar-b-que fit into the larger scheme of volunteerinng? From my experieince growing up in the Cuban-American community in Miami, it seems that lots of things that Anglos might do through formal institutions like the Church are done informally through extended family networks. The larger question then become whether those informal activities are “civic” in the same way that formal volunteering seems to be.
Here’s an interesting challenge to the growing view in social science that racial proximity decreases social capital and lowers support for race-based policies. In a good Colorlines article about anti Affirmative-Action initiatives that will appear on a number of state ballots in the fall, the author reports on demographic voting data from Michigan’s 2006 Civil Rights Initiative:
Statewide, Michigan is about 78 percent white, 14 percent Black, 4 percent Latino and 2 percent Asian, with most people of color concentrated in a handful of urban areas. For example, while Wayne County, home of Detroit, is less than 50 percent white, a handful of other counties are nearly 98 percent white. Wayne County was one of only three counties where a majority voted against Proposal 2. The other two, Washtenaw and Ingham, include the state’s two largest universities and have among the state’s most diverse communities. In general, across the rest of Michigan, the whiter the county, the higher the support for the ban.
Interestingly, support for the anti-Affirmative Action measure was not correlated with county unemployment rates, a proxy for income levels.
The latest issue of the Journal of Urban affairs has an article by David Imbroscio arguing against what he calls the dispersal consensus in low-income housing policy. The intent of this set of policies is to spread out the urban poor into middle-class suburban neighborhoods.
I haven’t yet read the article, but it makes sense that the heterogeneity created by a dispersal policy might create some problems. An interesting set of case studies are the Paris suburbs. The article, references French Sociologist Loic Wacquant’s work on, what he calls, anti-ghettos or heterogeneous places that work to reduce the solidarity fostered by ethnic enclaves. Here’s a telling passage from the article discussing anti-ghettos:
the layout of the French suburbs (hinders neighbourly and community relationships that could, for example, encourage religions to develop. They are designed in a way that makes it difficult for immigrant workers to mix and to enjoy leisure time, encouraging them to save in order to become future homeowners.
The recent discussions about suburban poverty suggests that perhaps an anti-ghettoing is occurring in the U.S. as well. I’d be interested in knowing how and why do integrating suburbs avoid this anti-ghettoing process. How do dispersal policies help to ameliorate the loss of bonding social capital that is bound to occur?
James Q. Wilson’s piece in Commentary brings up an interesting point regarding Robert Putnam’s recent work on the relationship between diversity and social capital. In his useful essay, he refutes Putnam’s recent argument in the June 2007 issue of Scandinavian Political Studies that diversity’s beneficial traits in the military, religious and athletic institutions also apply to neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, however, the pertinence of the military, religious, or athletic model to life in neighborhoods is very slight. In those three institutions, authority and discipline can break down native hostilities or force them underground. Military leaders proclaim that bigotry will not be tolerated, and they mean it; preachers invoke the word of God to drive home the lesson that prejudice is a sin; sports teams (as with the old Brooklyn Dodgers) point out that anyone who does not want to play with a black or a Jew is free to seek employment elsewhere.
But what authority or discipline can anyone bring to neighborhoods? They are places where people choose to live, out of either opportunity or necessity. Walk the heterogeneous streets of Chicago or Los Angeles and you will learn about organized gangs and other social risks. Nor are these confined to poor areas: Venice, a small neighborhood in Los Angeles where several movie stars live and many homes sell for well over $1 million, is also a place where, in the Oakwood area, the Shoreline Crips and the V-13 gangs operate.
I agree with Wilson that neighborhoods provide a more vexing challenge that other organizations. But too often, this becomes the end point of the conversation on diversity and neighborhoods. It starts from the baseline assumption that human nature tends towardshomophily (the tendency to stick to one’s own) and no amount of social policy can change it. But we wouldn’t accept this line of reasoning for a whole host of issues. It is my four year old’s nature to want five scoops of ice cream instead of one, but we as a society expect her to be socialized out of that innate desire by the time she reaches adulthood.
Wilson has a point in his essay that the state’s efforts to create an integrated society comes with unintended consequences. Social ruptures tend to follow explicit interventionby gove rnment to force groups from different racial, income and/or ethnic groups to share collective goods. The phenomenon of white flight in the 1970’s was accelerated by court ordered desegregation. Individuals are resilient and entrepreneurial in their efforts to carve out the type of existence they want. For large majorities of people, what they want is to live with others like them.
This is not just racial. People pay for security. I live in the suburbs partly because I know that odds are my daughter will grow up free from fear, in a reasonably good school system, with clean air and water. The fact that others want for these goods is an issue of concern for me, even an area of academic study, but when pressed, I can always fall back on the common refrain “I have to look out for my family.”
But I don’t accept the “either or” proposition that either places are safe and homogeneous or dangerous and diverse. At the risk of sounding like a bad parent, I would be willing to give some ground on safety and education for my child to get some diversity in return. Partly because of the growing literature on diversity that extols its virtues in a number of settings (the military, the workplace, the university, etc.)
Social capital scholars should be looking for communities that have both reasonably high levels of racial, ethnic and class based integration and positive social indicators (low dropouts, low crime rates, etc.). Even if true that hunkering is the default, we should not be content with describing the reality in this instance. We should be using the tools of social science to identify instances where hunkering is overcome. I laid out a methodological agenda for doing this at a paper I presented at the 2008 Western Political Science Association Conference this past year.
About ThickCulture
A multi-disciplinary blog about what makes cultures "thick": public discourse, multiculturalism, technology, and civic engagement. Read more…
is facing a 500 year flood set to peak on Friday. This is not a flood where lives are at risk like the one resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Nonetheless, it is a flood bigger than the 1997 flood that caused serious damage, led to displacement of hundreds of families, and drew national coverage. It is a flood that will require the placement of more than 2 million sandbags in the Fargo-Moorhead area, filled and transformed into dikes by over 10,000 volunteers yesterday alone. As a lifelong East Coaster, I am a stranger to floods. I also currently reside in a downtown apartment building and work on a campus that are both highly unlikely to be affected by flood waters. And, as a sociologist, I’m naturally inclined to view social activity with a particularly distant lens. 
Many of us post to Facebook, perhaps unaware of what can happen to that content and who has rights to it. All of this came to a head a few days ago, as Facebook’s new terms of service (TOS) came to light and were met with a range of reactions from dismay to outrage. 
