As the classic Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been getting some recent media attention (NY Times), I thought it proper (in that British sense) to post a little Fry and Laurie tribute to the topic, which at once demonstrates the old chestnut, while taking us through the many flights of fancy to which our rhetorical contortions may lead. If anything, have fun watching Hugh Laurie in his pre-House career:
The convergence of media and politics has it’s benefits 🙂
This is great and all, but can “viral irony” equate to youth turnout during midterm elections? At least it’s good for a laugh.
Here’s the original ad being parodied above:
This blog post is part of a series on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on how social activism during the Civil Rights era is categorically different from activism using social media. Malcolm Gladwell’s controversial piece in this week’s New Yorker is shaking things up, as he’s advocating that social media doesn’t lend itself well to social activism. He cites examples of how social media only fosters surface-level, low-commitment actions based on weak ties and that social movements, like those pushing for civil rights, require hierarchies. I disagree. Others have, as well, as John Hudson has compiled over on The Atlantic. I’ll focus on Gladwell’s take on weak ties in this post, which I find problematic due to his sweeping generalizations of ties and their potential in guiding everyday life. The Nature of Ties Gladwell claims that social media fosters weak ties::
“There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.”
Others have critiqued this by stating that social media tools {like Twitter and Facebook} can foster more than weak ties. Network structures are combinations of both weak and strong ties. The organizational research of Brian Uzzi at Northwestern {see image above} found that there are dangers of being overembedded {too many strong ties leading to insularity} and being underembedded {too many weak  or arms-length ties leading to a lacking of social structure}. Gladwell’s critique on this front hinges upon characterizing all networks as underembedded networks. There’s another issue here, which is the content of the tie. Ties can be characterized as strong or weak, but they can also be multiplex, i.e., representing a complex relationship that has more than one channel. For example, a tie can be characterized by flows of different types of capital, e.g., social, economic, political, etc., with varying degrees of strength. Social media campaigns can and do tap into networks and use people’s multiplex ties to increase engagement. Hearing about an issue through someone in your network is often more persuasive than from media and advertising, so there’s great potential here, but going from a social media campaign to action, let alone social change, is far from automatic.
My next post will address the issue of motivation and social media. Gladwell doesn’t think social media motivates people, but drives participation. I question this puzzling sweeping generalization.
Yesterday afternoon, I saw Fincher’s The Social Network with fingers-crossed that Sorkin’s bantery dialogue wouldn’t cause me to cringe like a bad number on Glee. I’ll blog about the film on rhizomicon this weekend, but the film reminded me of several aspects of the sociology of online spaces I’ve been mulling over. The film depicted Harvard in 2003 where a hierarchical social order existed in the face-to-face realm. Mark Zuckerberg ran with the idea of taking the collegiate de Certeauean everyday, in all of its mundane glory…online
Facebook is perhaps the perfect Web 2.0 app. User-driven content, interactive information sharing within social networks, etc. etc. Facebook allows users to create multidimensional fielded networks, using Bourdieu’s concept of field/champs. Here’s a summary from an Economist article from last year on the sociology of Facebook, based on how people use the site.
Not surprisingly, we tend to interact with a finite number of other people in our social networks. I’m thinking that as we move into Web 3.0, there will be pressure towards…a diversity of ties. We will be able to interact with others not on the basis of extant contacts and networks, but on other dimensions that may even be latent, e.g., a penchant for music in 3/4 time or a love of books with socialist themes.
Last.fm allows users to find others that have similar musical tastes, find similar bands to those with profiles, and friend others. Here’s an analysis {in French} of a Last.fm network [Google translation] with great interactive visualizations. Each artist on Last.fm has users who like and listen to them. The data is being ported to other sites, such as Songkick, that uses feeds to populate a database of live shows. I think it’s a powerful concept to be able to find like-minded others who might be right next door or around the globe.
Web 3.0 or the semantic web won’t destroy Web 2.0, but will shift focus from user-driven content to the utilization of users’ data. This will push social networking away from user-defined networks and I feel it will foster more tie diversity, not necessarily in terms of demographics, although this is a possibility, but in terms of geography and psychographics. Will Facebook be able to adapt to a scenario of users’ forging multiplex ties based on data or will it get bogged down with user expectations of what the site means to them and those clinginging to the notion of privacy?
Co-Thickculturite, Don Waisanen had a great post a while back about the political effect of public signage. here’s another jarringly effective example of what I’ll call “engaged public space.”
This tally of military suicides is outside the studio of Brooklyn artist Sebastian Errasuriz. Its power comes from its simplicity.
BTW, if you have some free time, check Don out on the latest Sociology Improv podcast.
Also, take some time to read through fellow-Thickculturan Russell Stockard’s compelling reflections on his current trip to Haiti.
Finally, if you need some bedtime reading material, here’s one of my articles just published in the Journal of Public Deliberation.
At some point, I had to post about language, translation, and meaning. As some of you recall from an earlier post, I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit’s compelling book about the socio-political impact of disaster, A Paradise Built in Hell. Combining, among other disciplines, philosophy, psychology, and the sociology of disaster, Solnit masterfully explains the way disasters, despite the devastation and anguish wrought, can create community, solidarity, and, however, briefly, utopia. Suffice to say, that the mutual aid and altruism often exhibited during disasters is transformed through initiative into a democratic participation, empowering enough to threaten and even change governments.
The only part of my visit to Haiti more frustrating than the incompetence, tone-deafness, and indifference of the international disaster recovery leadership to the experience of the Haitians on the ground has been my inability to pick up Haitian Creole.
Now some would say that if had been sitting in a classroom five or six hours a day to learn the language of the people of Haiti, I might be functioning pretty adequately now. The first week I was running around with an NGO and interpreters or speaking English (or Spanish or French). Given that I had severed my day-to-day ties with the organization whose work induced me to travel to Haiti, the next week I was pondering whether it made any sense to continue my stay, since I no longer had a platform to interact with people who interact with other people in international organizations. How could I interact directly with the stricken Haitian people or even Haitian activists or NGOs trying to make a difference?
The last week, my third, was one where two American activists I had contacted would be arriving in Haiti. Both included, if not featured, communication among their skill sets, including fluency in Creole. At least I had to remain until I had a chance to speak with them, to meet the people behind the websites. I had been poring through the websites learning about Haitians who were taking matters into their own hands, making decisions, and building the community that would be needed to break through the inertia that has settled over the country like smoke over Port-au-Prince.
What do Rebecca Solnit’s take on disaster and activist-advocates and Creole have in common? In reading an op-ed from Sunday’s New York Times, “Found In Translation” by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, I learned that while many novelists have been honored to see their works translated into other languages, the novel itself is a translation from the planned book that lives only in the writer’s brain to the actual book that winds through a process of cutting, condensation, and compromise before it ends up in print.
The opportunity that many Haitians and their advocates and allies see to build the Haiti that has been deferred since the triumph of the revolution in 1804 involves translation of that idea, updated to 2010, into a reality. While the symbols of that finished work might include still and moving images, dance and other nonverbal communication, the heavy lifting will be done through words, and those words have to be in Creole. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough Creole to quote poetry, folk wisdom, and even jokes, but I do suspect that a particularly Haitian form of deliberation and democratic participation couldn’t occur in translation. Maybe a kind of Whorfian hypothesis applies here – in a nation that overthrew slavery and colonialism, the language used by the rebels must have been one of the keys to success as it influenced cognitive processes.
I’m glad that I have essentially finished Paradise (since I’m most of the way through her account of Hurricane Katrina, the last of the disasters Solnit details) in order to translate her point into the work-in-progress that is the earthquake recovery. And, now I’ve translating the frustration at the conditions here in Haiti to the patience needed to learn Creole.
At some point, I had to post about language, translation, and meaning. As some of you recall from an earlier post, I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit’s compelling book about the socio-political impact of disaster, A Paradise Built in Hell. Combining, among other disciplines, philosophy, psychology, and the sociology of disaster, Solnit masterfully explains the way disasters, despite the devastation and anguish wrought, can create community, solidarity, and, however, briefly, utopia. Suffice to say, that the mutual aid and altruism often exhibited during disasters is transformed through initiative into a democratic participation, empowering enough to threaten and even change governments.
The only part of my visit to Haiti more frustrating than the incompetence, tone-deafness, and indifference of the international disaster recovery leadership to the experience of the Haitians on the ground has been my inability to pick up Haitian Creole.
Now some would say that if had been sitting in a classroom five or six hours a day to learn the language of the people of Haiti, I might be functioning pretty adequately now. The first week I was running around with an NGO and interpreters or speaking English (or Spanish or French). Given that I had severed my day-to-day ties with the organization whose work induced me to travel to Haiti, the next week I was pondering whether it made any sense to continue my stay, since I no longer had a platform to interact with people who interact with other people in international organizations. How could I interact directly with the stricken Haitian people or even Haitian activists or NGOs trying to make a difference?
The last week, my third, was one where two American activists I had contacted would be arriving in Haiti. Both included, if not featured, communication among their skill sets, including fluency in Creole. At least I had to remain until I had a chance to speak with them, to meet the people behind the websites. I had been poring through the websites learning about Haitians who were taking matters into their own hands, making decisions, and building the community that would be needed to break through the inertia that has settled over the country like smoke over Port-au-Prince.
What do Rebecca Solnit’s take on disaster and activist-advocates and Creole have in common? In reading an op-ed from Sunday’s New York Times, “Found In Translation” by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, I learned that while many novelists have been honored to see their works translated into other languages, the novel itself is a translation from the planned book that lives only in the writer’s brain to the actual book that winds through a process of cutting, condensation, and compromise before it ends up in print.
The opportunity that many Haitians and their advocates and allies see to build the Haiti that has been deferred since the triumph of the revolution in 1804 involves translation of that idea, updated to 2010, into a reality. While the symbols of that finished work might include still and moving images, dance and other nonverbal communication, the heavy lifting will be done through words, and those words have to be in Creole. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough Creole to quote poetry, folk wisdom, and even jokes, but I do suspect that a particularly Haitian form of deliberation and democratic participation couldn’t occur in translation. Maybe a kind of Whorfian hypothesis applies here – in a nation that overthrew slavery and colonialism, the language used by the rebels must have been one of the keys to success as it influenced cognitive processes.
I’m glad that I have essentially finished Paradise (since I’m most of the way through her account of Hurricane Katrina, the last of the disasters Solnit details) in order to translate her point into the work-in-progress that is the earthquake recovery. And, now I’ve translating the frustration at the conditions here in Haiti to the patience needed to learn Creole.
My biggest disappointment with the Obama administration by far is that he has turned out to be a conventional (and somewhat effective) campaigner. What I expected from his presidency was the same rhetorical innovation he showed during his campaign. As a candidate, he was adroit as “breaking the third wall” of politics. He used his mix of revivalism and cerebralism to deconstruct the more absurd elements of politics. When an opponent would attack him, he’d say “this is what they’re trying to do….this is how politics is done in Washington.” It was wildly effective, it allowed him to be “in politics” but not “of politics.”
Now that is party is less than a month away from a pretty serious bloodletting in Congress, the president is back on the trail. But instead of returning to his deconstruction of politics theme, he’s decided to campaign as an insider. What’s worse is that he’s pretty much campaigning on the maddeningly erroneous Democratic belief that you can somehow reason with voters. The reason the Republicans were so effective in maintaining power for eight years was because they made no distinction between different types of Democrats…in their rhetoric, the Democrats were all godless liberals who hate America and want it destroyed.
I thought Obama was a candidate that understood the past rhetorical mistakes of the Democrats. I expected that after labor day, President Obama and the Democrats would take a page out of the Republican playbook and tie the Republicans to the Tea Party movement. He’d come out and connect the Republican party to their extremist elements. Perhaps a more sophisticated, less blatant version of Congressman Alan Grayson’s “Taliban Dan” ad against Republican Daniel Webster in a Florida House race.
The ad is incredibly unfair, taken out of context and really just unseemly politics. Perfect! Grayson might not survive, but at least he’s trying to weave a narrative about the other side. They are dangerously illiberal in their beliefs. I expected the Democratic party, under Obama’s leadership, to try to get the county to envision what it would be like to have people like Rand Paul, Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell in the Senate. Instead, the president keeps trotting out this stupid analogy of a car in a ditch and the Republicans doing nothing to help the Democrats get the car out of the ditch. Towards the end of this speech to the DNC here:
This is a poor rhetoric on so many levels. First, it seems like whining. Second, the public already has a low opinion of Republicans. The problem is not that they think Republicans can’t do a good job, the problem (speaking as a Democrat) is that they don’t fear Republicans. The public thinks (and of course I’m generalizing) that Republicans will come in a at least keep their taxes low and won’t be too much of a burden on business. Since politics is screwed up anyway, why not put in place the party that at least won’t harm my bottom line?
As someone who worked in the Democratic party and is still sympathetic to it, it maddens me how god awful the Democrats are at hand-to-hand political combat. It’s not that difficult, Democrats. Stop painting the Republicans as ineffectual do-nothings and paint them as dangerous. Something to be feared. Give Karl Rove credit. In 2002, the Republicans squeezed the Democrats like an anaconda. If you were a Democrat, you couldn’t get out from under the label of “soft on terrorism.” If you’re a Republicans, you can define yourself however you want and you’ll get no real pushback from the Democrats. The president refers to Republicans as “sipping on a slurpee” while the Democrats take action. That doesn’t scare me. Instead, the Republicans have won the rhetorical war by paining the Democrats as scary… (e.g they are running up the national debt). Did you ever stop to think that maybe most of the public is OK with slurpee sippers in Washington? They certainly aren’t going to be afraid of slurpee sippers. They might be scared of gun-toting, fundamentalist, witchcraft practicing, evolution denying, gay bashers.
I’m from New Orleans and have been studying the city in the five years since Hurricane Katrina hit. One of the ongoing stories has been about how to restore and improve medical care in Post-Katrina New Orleans. The immediate aftermath of Katrina saw many potential patients receiving care in the cities to which they had evacuated. Not so in Haiti, where the doctors have come to the patients.
Two days ago, I went to the field hospital set up by MĂ©decins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) to see my housemate, Joris. This was a hospital without walls, at least the kind that don’t flap in a strong thunderstorm like the one that hit the day after my housemate suffered an injured shoulder in a motorcycle accident. According to the statistics reported in an article last month in the Los Angeles Times, of 20, 000 surgeries from 2001 to 2008 performed by Doctors Without Borders in remote or impoverished areas such as Haiti, only 0.2 percent resulted in fatalities. This demonstrates that such procedures can be performed in resource-poor regions with little or no technology.
One technological limitation that affected Joris was the absence of an MRI machine. The MRI could tell doctors about the extent of damage to the meniscus in his shoulder, something the X-ray device available to them couldn’t do. As a result, Joris left Port-au-Prince to return to his country of origin and citizenship, Belgium, for an MRI. He hopes to be back before the Haitian presidential election in the second half of November. It is his opinion that medical care is better after the earthquake than it was before January 12.
What if MSF/DWB came to New Orleans? They did do an assessment soon after Katrina struck the city. Customarily, they operate in less developed countries such as Haiti, where they have been since 1991. While Haiti’s health care has improved because of their work, New Orleans needs a Lobbyists Without Borders to advocate in the state capital in Baton Rouge for healthcare for people without many resources.
I’m from New Orleans and have been studying the city in the five years since Hurricane Katrina hit. One of the ongoing stories has been about how to restore and improve medical care in Post-Katrina New Orleans. The immediate aftermath of Katrina saw many potential patients receiving care in the cities to which they had evacuated. Not so in Haiti, where the doctors have come to the patients.
Two days ago, I went to the field hospital set up by MĂ©decins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) to see my housemate, Joris. This was a hospital without walls, at least the kind that don’t flap in a strong thunderstorm like the one that hit the day after my housemate suffered an injured shoulder in a motorcycle accident. According to the statistics reported in an article last month in the Los Angeles Times, of 20, 000 surgeries from 2001 to 2008 performed by Doctors Without Borders in remote or impoverished areas such as Haiti, only 0.2 percent resulted in fatalities. This demonstrates that such procedures can be performed in resource-poor regions with little or no technology.
One technological limitation that affected Joris was the absence of an MRI machine. The MRI could tell doctors about the extent of damage to the meniscus in his shoulder, something the X-ray device available to them couldn’t do. As a result, Joris left Port-au-Prince to return to his country of origin and citizenship, Belgium, for an MRI. He hopes to be back before the Haitian presidential election in the second half of November. It is his opinion that medical care is better after the earthquake than it was before January 12.
What if MSF/DWB came to New Orleans? They did do an assessment soon after Katrina struck the city. Customarily, they operate in less developed countries such as Haiti, where they have been since 1991. While Haiti’s health care has improved because of their work, New Orleans needs a Lobbyists Without Borders to advocate in the state capital in Baton Rouge for healthcare for people without many resources.
