Payments, Programs, and Elbow Grease
November 2nd, 2009
Susan Engel, psychologist and educational administrator, has her take on the cesspool of American education in yesterday’s NYT:
If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.
Her argument–which, to be fair, includes some good ideas–is typical of the public discourse regarding education. Economics, pedagogy, and commitment are all that matter. If we attack those deficiencies with our American can-do spirit, by golly, our kids will actually start to learn something.
There are few public debates in which I wish sociologists had a more prominent voice than education. Yes, we all know the American system is failing. But the public discourse completely neglects several important questions that critical sociology has addressed in detail over the past thirty years.
- Why do we continue to embrace a nineteenth century assembly-line method of education that has been completely belied by research into individual learning styles?
- If part of the function of education is to create well-adjusted adults, why do we segregate youths from the adult world by curtailing civil liberties and property rights? Why do we warehouse them in separate institutions in which they are forced to spend far more time with their peers (hardly a model of competent adulthood) than adults?
- Why do we not acknowledge that the hidden curriculum of norms and values is just as consequential as the pedagogical curriculum? Why do we not acknowledge that schools are a site in which many of society’s most troubling features–racism, sexism, homophobia, class discrimination, and the disparity of cultural capital–are formed and institutionally sanctioned?
I’m all for more competent and better compensated teachers. But the public discourse has only identified part of the problem. Until the conclusions of sociologists attain wider public knowledge, education reform will be doomed to ineffective conversations about where to put the money, where to put the accountability, and who needs the most elbow grease.
Class and SNS Revisited
October 16th, 2009
CNN takes a look at the MySpace/Facebook class divide:
A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.
More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.
Although it was published the day after Jon Stewart hilariously destroyed CNN’s fact-checking standards, I thought it was pretty solid overall.
I wonder, though, if Facebook’s astronomical growth during this calendar year is going to reduce or even eradicate the class gap. As Facebook zooms past MySpace faster than anyone expected, even data collected six months ago is already obsolete. A plausible hypothesis would be that MySpace will see a mass exodus similar to the Friendster emigration of 2004, and all classes will gravitate toward Facebook (until the privileged classes find another site to flock to and escape the commoners…)
Cross-sectional studies are limited no matter what the context, but the pace of change in SNS behavior means cross-sectional studies of SNSs have a frighteningly small window of relevance. What if the massive growth of Facebook in the past 6 months has closed the class gap? We can’t know.
Eszter Hargattai recently repeated her 2006 study, finding that although Facebook had surpassed MySpace in popularity, the class differences remained. (Note: As of this post, Eszter’s website is down.) So her data and the Nielsen data suggest that the class gap remained as of earlier this year. But it’ll be interesting to see whether data collected now continue to replicate these findings.
I’ll be doing some cross-sectional SNS data collection in January and February of next year. And I guarantee I’ll be rushing to get it to print before it becomes obsolete.
A Sociology of Happiness?
September 27th, 2009
Yesterday I attended a provocative conference entitled “Manufacturing Happiness: Investigating Subjectivity, Transformation, and Cultural Capital.” Some of the research included:
- How medical practices mitigate the unhappiness associated with languishing in waiting rooms using TVs and handheld computers, while simultaneously shaping patients to serve the practices’ own interests.
- How a large technological corporation offering countless benefits (I wonder what company that could be…) affects employee behaviors and attitudes.
- How self-help books articulate a model of happiness that is an internalization of Foucault’s panopticon, in which “the gaze of the anonymous other [is] reanimated in the mirror.”
- How those with pessimistic outlooks are exploited by so-called “indie” films that reinforce these beliefs, producing a “euphoric fatalism” in the consumer.
- How participants in the unconventional lifestyle of open marriages construct happiness through their deviant behavior.
It was a somewhat disjointed, but generally interesting series of presentations. Some recurring themes seemed to emerge:
- Happiness is usually constructed as external to the individual. The favorite culprit is money, but other externalities (family, health, time) are also equated with happiness.
- This happiness-as-external meme is relentlessly encouraged and exploited by producers, institutions, and organizations, financially as well as emotionally.
- Resolving tension between the personal self and the social self is conceived as a prerequisite for happiness. While some methods suggest that the key to happiness is to improve one’s social presentation skills (e.g., personal branders), other methods suggest that modifying one’s personal self to be more concordant with the social self is the answer (e.g., self-help gurus).
Throughout, I kept wondering what a sociology of happiness might look like. Though we imagine happiness to be an internal state, it seems that even happy people–whether they are genuinely so or merely report themselves as such–consider certain modes of social engagement (or lack thereof) to be a necessary component. It would be an interesting compliment to the nascent field of positive psychology to determine what social behaviors, interactions, and interpretations are associated with happiness, and to what extent the internal state is dependent upon the external stimuli. I imagine that many studies have addressed these questions indirectly, but I wonder if anyone has situated them in this context specifically.
MySpace and Income
September 3rd, 2009
The Harvard Business Review recently published the above map in an article attempting to locate MySpace’s centers of activity. The colors represent relative rates of use: red states have 20% or more MySpace logins than we’d expect from their populations of Internet users, and orange states have 10-20% more. Dark blue (20+% less) and light blue (10-20% less) have fewer logins than expected, while green states are more or less consistent with expected rates (+/- 10%).
The author of the article suggests correlations with political affiliation and “media centers,” but I was interested in testing the class division hypothesis, so I pulled the three-year median household income data from the Census:
|
Relative MySpace Use |
N |
Median HH Income |
|
20+% more |
14 |
$45,545.36*** |
|
10-20% more |
5 |
$43,700.20*** |
|
+/- 10% |
14 |
$48,948.64*** |
|
10-20% less |
6 |
$53,213.67 |
|
20+% less |
11 |
$56,935.63*** |
The results were significant (F = 7.18, p < .001), and the post-hoc showed that the dark blue, heavily underrepresented group was responsible: states that have far fewer MySpace logins than expected (20+%) have a significantly higher median household income than states with as many or more logins than expected (green, orange, and red states).
A bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but interesting nonetheless.
The author also reported that three states had over 50% more logins than expected: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi; these three states have the sixth-lowest, third-lowest, and lowest median household incomes by state, respectively.
A Tale of Two Posts
July 7th, 2009- ReadWriteWeb, via iStrategyLabs:
- Grant McCracken (who mined a database of “politicians, captains of industry, heads of cultural institutions, celebrities, journalists, and academics” and was stunned by their collective lack of Facebook presence):
How fickle are kids these days? Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period.
Or maybe they are MFFB (missing from Facebook) on purpose. Maybe, they don’t believe in Facebook. They don’t believe in social networking in the digital age. It is possible for intelligent people to take this position. Recently I heard four people at a big time advertising age try to persuade me that Facebook is really just for kids, that it’s a passing fancy, that not very far from now it will disappear from fashion. Their position: Ignore Facebook. It will go away.
I can’t tell you how embarrassing this is for an anthropologist to listen to. I have done the research, and this much is clear. Facebook is here to stay. It has changed selfhood and the social world permanently. (One example: millennials are hard to manage these days because the social network has replaced the corporation has their primary “safety net.” Now that they have Facebook, a job at a big corporation matters much less.) Facebook has changed the structural properties of our culture. We can ignore it. It will not go away.
As the former article points out, Facebook use is still increasing among all age groups. It’s just that fewer seem to identify as high school and college students. There’s no indication of how this identification is measured (Primary network? Any academic network? Self-reported educational status in the profile?). And although 35% of all Facebook users are under the age of 25, 79% of users in this dataset have a current enrollment of “unknown.” Far too many methodological questions to qualify as a substantive finding, much less to justify the stereotypical invocation of young “fickle” whippersnappers.
I think McCracken, though, misses the forest for the trees. Whatever alterations to self, society, and culture have resulted from Facebook are not unique to Facebook. They are ultimately a product and component part of a larger revolution in digitally mediated communication. Young people can and will abandon Facebook if sufficiently alienated (see: Friendster) or attracted to a more innovative competitor (see: MySpace). They are not fickle, but the particular forms and shapes of this larger social trend are. The stubborn advertisers may be able to ignore Facebook if it goes the way of its predecessors, but not if Facebook is able to achieve a stable presence like Microsoft or Google, and they can’t ignore the communicative consequences of this digitally mediated revolution.
Regardless, with SNSs having emerged from subcultural obscurity only a few years ago, MySpace having been dominant 18 months ago, and Facebook having grown from 42 million to 72 million U.S. users in the past 6 months, it seems rash to attempt to articulate any more than the broadest outlines of social change at the moment. As with historical events, the most compelling narratives will only emerge several years after the effects reverberate through society. As sudden and unpredictable as the rise of SNSs have been, they are likely to be understood only in the context of future developments as far beyond the event horizon now as MySpace and Facebook were in 2002.
Twitter:Iranian Revolt::CNN:Gulf War?
June 15th, 2009
[An uncredited photo from the Iranian government's assault on Tehran University.]
I’ve been riveted to the ongoing revolt in Iran. While many mainstream media outlets dropped the ball initially, even those few with brave reporters on the ground have been hampered by a foreign media crackdown. Much of the news is coming from elsewhere.
The Iranian government quickly clamped down on Internet and cell phone use, but intrepid participants have found workarounds. Messages, photos, and videos have been posted on Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, and all have been instrumental in spreading the extent of the violence and conveying crucial information.
A group of bloggers, most notably Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic Monthly, and the NIAC’s blog, have been live-blogging since Saturday morning. They are soliciting e-mails from readers with contacts in Iran and publishing these eyewitness reports. They’re also posting links to Farsi-language material, soliciting readers who speak Farsi to translate, and posting the translated texts.
But the most important source of information has been Twitter. Lists of Iranian Twitter users have been compiled and published on the above blogs, and sources on the ground are relying heavily upon Twitter to broadcast their messages. The obvious pun that “the revolution will be twittered” has been mentioned dozens of times, but it is undoubtedly accurate.
Until now, Twitter has been known more for its relentless hype, its appeal to shallow trend-seekers looking for the Next Big Thing, its appeal to narcissists who want to broadcast what they bought at the grocery store, and its appeal to self-absorbed reporters looking to scoop one another, self-absorbed politicians trolling for votes, and self-absorbed celebrities broadcasting the minutiae of their lives to fawning fans.
It’s indisputable, though, that this weekend has been Twitter’s finest hour. It’s no longer possible to conclude that Twitter is exclusively a domain for the narcissist or the status-seeker looking to connect with followers. Without Twitter, the extensive reporting that exists on the above blogs could not have happened. While CNN slept, Twitter thrived. Twitter has staked out a place in the geopolitical order, and while the outcome of the Iranian revolt is still in doubt, Twitter has established a usefulness far exceeding the expectations of its many detractors.
The paradox of the social network site is that the initial framework is provided by the organization, but its actual substantive use is determined by the users. Narcissistic users make a narcisstic site, and substantive use makes a substantive site. Twitter has taken a step toward substantive use, and with the continuing turmoil that exists in Iran, a significant re-definition of Twitter may well follow.
[Edit: Twitter plans to go offline for 90 minutes' maintenance tonight at 9:45 PDT. Please protest if you are on Twitter. #twitterfail]
[Edit 2: Maintenance has been postponed to a more conducive time for Iran. #twitterwin]
12 Steps to Fabricating a Moral Panic
May 27th, 2009
Teens and Texting (New York Times, 5/26/09)
Step 1: Select an act, norm, or condition to become stigmatized. The group or subculture primarily associated with this topic should ideally have little to no political power, and already be associated with other deviant behaviors (e.g., teenagers).
Step 2: Write a title stating the topic and its association with harm, but be sure to insert a qualifier (e.g., “may”) so everyone thinks you’re being objective. Then dispense with any objectivity in an opening paragraph that can be read over an ominous soundtrack on the evening news.
Texting May Be Taking a Toll
They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.
Step 3: Cite statistics inappropriately, such as invoking the mean of a non-normal, non-symmetrical distribution doubtlessly skewed by extreme outliers. Use large numbers to stun consumers with little understanding of scale. If the rate of change is mostly fueled by recent developments (e.g., the ubiquity of the cell phone and proliferation of unlimited texting plans), cite this unsustainable rate of change, knowing that many consumers will erroneously apply linear extrapolation.
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
Step 4: Identify the potentially harmful consequences. These consequences should ideally encompass several potential areas of harm (e.g., physical, mental, developmental, psychological, moral). Lumping these consequences together in a list near the beginning of your story is particularly effective.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
Step 5: Assemble a cast of authority figures sympathetic to the possibility of harm, When possible, refer to them by their full and impressive titles, to further establish that they Know Stuff.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif. …
Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years …
Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif. …
Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington …
Step 6: When citing empirical evidence offered by experts, rely upon the most unrepresentative methods possible, such as small purposive samples. Rather than offering relevant information, such as the outcomes of tests of statistical significance, use vague descriptors of quantity, such as “many” or “most.”
… Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day. …
… Ms. Yager recently gave an anonymous survey to 50 of her students; most said they texted during class. …
… Dr. Joffe says parents tend to be far less aware of texting than of, say, video game playing or general computer use, and the unlimited plans often mean that parents stop paying attention to billing details. “I talk to parents in the office now,” he said. “I’m quizzing them, and no one is thinking about this.” …
Step 7: Rather than relying upon empirical evidence, however, most expert testimony should reflect unverifiable or unverified opinion. Examples include broad, overgeneralizing theories, stereotypes masquerading as broad, overgeneralizing theories, or normative assumptions masquerading as broad, overgeneralizing theories. As these statements are the “substance” of your story, cite as many as possible. To preserve a veneer of objectivity, at least one expert must have crammed his or her opinion with qualifiers and weasel words.
… “Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.” …
… Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm. …
… Professor Turkle can sympathize. “Teens feel they are being punished for behavior in which their parents indulge,” she said. And in what she calls a poignant twist, teenagers still need their parents’ undivided attention. “Even though they text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” she said. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.” …
… Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said it was too early to tell whether this kind of stress is damaging. But he added, “Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorders, so we have some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs.” …
Step 8: Do not interview or otherwise acknowledge any of the millions or tens of millions of participants who do not suffer negative consequences. Instead, locate multiple outliers, and pretend that these participants are representative.
… Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honor student in Bethesda, Md., used to text on her tiny LG phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard. A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs. …
… Greg Hardesty, a reporter in Lake Forest, Calif., said that late last year his 13-year-old daughter, Reina, racked up 14,528 texts in one month. She would keep the phone on after going to bed, switching it to vibrate and waiting for it to light up and signal an incoming message. …
Step 9: Interview a social control agent who can testify to the unchecked proliferation of your topic, and his/her institution’s current inability to halt it. [Note: The social control agent may be replaced in certain instances by a victim/concerned parent-turned-moral-entrepreneur.]
Teachers are often oblivious. “It’s a huge issue, and it’s rampant,” said Deborah Yager, a high school chemistry teacher in Castro Valley, Calif.
“I can’t tell when it’s happening, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said. “And I’m not going to take the time every day to try to police it.”
Step 10: Include an example of how your consumers can take matters into their own hands. The most effective way is to select an outlier clearly requiring intervention and showing that the intervention has been responsible for the amelioration of negative consequences. If done properly, many consumers will overreact to this uplifting story and impose draconian measures upon those not actually threatened by the menace.
Mr. Hardesty wrote a column about Reina’s texting in his newspaper, The Orange County Register, and in the flurry of attention that followed, her volume soared to about 24,000 messages. Finally, when her grades fell precipitously, her parents confiscated the phone.
Reina’s grades have since improved, and the phone is back in her hands, but her text messages are limited to 5,000 per month — and none between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays.
Step 11: Edit the story and sprinkle with qualifiers—enough that you appear to be objective, but not so many that your consumers perceive that the menace is largely fabricated. Every qualification should be immediately followed by a return to fearmongering.
The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.
Step 12: Submit to your editor, and wait for the inevitable flood of copycat stories from other media sources to legitimate your topic. Congratulations, you’ve just created a social problem where none existed before! Rinse and repeat whenever you feel like imposing your normative biases upon hegemonic society.
Learning to Like Facebook
May 6th, 2009
My thesis, Learning to Like Facebook? Effects of Cultural and Educational Capital on the Use of Social Network Sites in a Population of University Students, is now available for download.
Abstract: This study explores the reasons why university students prefer to join or participate frequently in one social network website (SNS) over another. Drawing from previous research into motivations and environmental factors influencing SNS behavior, a theoretical model of SNS selection and frequency of use is constructed and evaluated. Random sampling methods are used to generate a population of students from a midwestern, urban, public university with an enrollment of nearly 16,000. Subjects responded to a questionnaire soliciting information regarding personal characteristics and SNS behaviors, and additional data was extracted from a content analysis of SNS profiles. The results show that attachment, age, and educational capital are the primary factors associated with SNS preference, while the effect of cultural capital is minimal. Limitations and implications are discussed.
“I’m Well-Adjusted.” “No, I’m Well-Adjusted.”
April 1st, 2009
David Gibson at the Complexity and Social Networks Blog hypothesizes about Facebook and (anti) social capital:
I predict that we will eventually want to add something that I am tempted to call anti-social capital, which is a snarky (and imprecise) term for the absence of ties of a certain type, namely those whose main consequence is that you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online. It’s not hard to foresee why someone without such connections would fare better at school, in the workplace, and in their family relations than someone with them, other things being equal.
In fact, most studies so far–see Ellison et al. (2007), Steinfield et al. (2008), and Valenzuela et al. (2008)–have reached the opposite conclusion: that Facebook users have higher social capital than non-users, among several other beneficial social and psychological characteristics (e.g., life satisfaction). Tufekci (2008) found a major difference between users and non-users was their attitudes toward social grooming: users enjoyed those types of interactions or at least accepted their usefulness, while non-user attitudes “[ranged] from incredulous to hostile.”
There have, of course, been studies finding negative social or psychological characteristics associated with SNS use, particularly narcissism (e.g., Buffardi & Campbell 2008). But these negative findings, if true, are not incompatible with the positive findings of social capital (I don’t know about you, but socially competent narcissists abound in my circle of acquaintances).
My quibble with Gibson’s formulation is his premise that “you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online.” We all spend an obscene amount of time engaging in technologically-mediated interactions (8.5 hours per day, according to this recent study), regardless of age. If we don’t have time for those activities, we make time, and if we don’t spend a lot of time online, it’s because we’re staring at a different screen.
My question is, if we all spend hours each day staring at our screens, what type of screens will those with high social capital prefer? Those that provide the most interactive potential, like cell phone and computer screens. Meanwhile, those with low social capital will eschew SNSs, use their computers for non-interactive ends, or prefer other mediated activities that require no direct interaction (e.g., watching television).
Tufekci’s research supports this perspective, as he found that there was no difference in the amount of time spent on the Internet between SNS users and non-users, but the ways in which they used the Internet varied significantly. Both groups were users of the “instrumental” Internet, performing practical non-interactive tasks such as shopping or research, but only SNS users participated heavily in the “expressive” Internet, which includes e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, and reading others’ blogs. SNSs are just one of the ways that people with high social capital leverage our gizmos to interact with others.
That’s why I find it kind of silly when people prophecy that technologically-mediated interaction means the death of the face-to-face interaction. The people who spend the most time interacting with others via screens are also the ones who spend the most time talking your ear off in person. As long as we keep being in each other’s physical presence, those with high social capital will keep talking–to our face and through screens–while those with low social capital won’t.
