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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.

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A great Marxist rant, from class struggles all the way to false consciousness. Too bad that typical Carlin profanity and patriotic irreverence makes it inappropriate for classroom use…

[Edit: I showed it to them anyway. Got some good discussion out of it too.]

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I’m not entirely sure how the sociologically uninitiated might be able to last four minutes without his or her lack of training exposed. I can think of a number of slips that would be an instant betrayal.

“I agree with Parsons that…”

“Blind reviewers are freaking awesome.”

“What does Karl Marx have to do with sociology?”

“My department and I are totally not having any funding problems at all whatsoever.”

Or, my personal favorite:

“I disagree with your macro-level social structural theory. Because, you see, my wife’s friend’s boss…”

(You know how in movies, the villain will sometimes have a button he can push that will open up a trap door, so a misguided opponent or truant subordinate can fall to his or her death? When I’m a professor, I’d like to have trap doors beneath every student’s desk. And a red button marked “Ecological Fallacy.” So as soon as a student attempts to refute a sociological argument based on an individual personal experience, I can push the button and make the student fall into a pool of sharks with lasers attached to their heads. I defy anyone to explain how this would not produce positive educational change.)

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Geohashing, an obscure xkcd pastime which involves going to random coordinates generated by md5 hashing, the date, and the opening status of the stock market, appears to have just gotten far more interesting. The official wiki reports a warning for other geohashers intending to go to the spot designated for June 14th in the San Francisco area, as several avid fans of xkcd were met by an angry rancher and firearms.

“Apply this!”

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Obviously, this rubric ignores sociology’s standing a priori as the superior academic discipline. But the beginning of a corrective argument is contained in the mouseover:

On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

This analogy should be extended and applied to all of the aforementioned fields.

(As mathematicians like to say before they rub one out, “Q.E.D.”)

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