Everyday Sociology Blog

To ”Commit Sociology”

By Jonathan Wynn

Recently, when the Canadian Government arrested men suspected of planning a terrorist attack, Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned the media not to “commit sociology” by asking for their motives. (It’s a reference to a W.H. Auden poem.) Best not to think too much, apparently, about the world around you.

In my Foundations of Social Theory class, we began the semester with the broad, big worldviews that many people often use unreflexively and to their own detriment: horoscopes, homeopathy, numerology, dousing, conspiracy theories, and the like. I hope you are equipped for the task of making sense of the world you’ll find around you: to “commit sociology.” 

Maybe you ascribe to one of those all-encompassing meta-theories: the astral alignments determining behaviors and the gods working in mysterious ways. What have you learned about sociology that will explain your everyday challenges? An engineering class may help your colleagues get jobs but it won’t help them understand the dynamics of the world they live in. The same could be said about journalism, food studies, and management classes. How could I not try to convince you that sociology, and theory, will?

The Sociology of Pranks

By Jonathan Wynn

For the last five years I’ve received many calls about pranks. I’m not a prank expert, but I did write an article about tricks tour guides use to tell historical stories. That perked up the ears of a New York Times journalist who quoted me in an article, “April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks.” Since then, I’ve been on the radio and in print every year saying something about the sociology of pranks.

This year, instead of just giving little quotes here and there to the media, I wanted to explain my thoughts about April Fool’s pranks more fully. Fellow Everyday Sociology blogger Sally Raskoff wrote about them last year, too. Yesterday, in a faculty meeting, one of my colleagues said that "sociologists don’t have much of a sense of humor," but Raskoff’s blog is indeed a funny April Fool’s themed post. I won’t spoil it too much, but she points to pranks as being about breaking norms and showing the importance of humor. I agree, and want to expand this idea a bit further.

Steubenville Meets the 24-hour News Cycle

By Jonathan Wynn

You are likely familiar with the Steubenville, Ohio case where two teenaged boys were recently convicted of raping a young woman. 

There have been some great sociological analyses about it. Sarah Sobieraj wrote an OpEd on the ”digital residue” of the case highlighting how social media drew the story out into the light of day, Evan Stewart wrote at The Society Pages on our male-dominated society, the UK’s Guardian discusses the town’s economic woes, and Lisa Wade wrote about the media’s response to the verdict.

Are You Normal or are You WEIRD?

By Jonathan Wynn

What if I told you that if you thought you were normal, you might just be weird?

Some friends of mine have a ten-year-old, and I pulled a book off their shelf to read it aloud. The title asks, Are You Normal? It’s a fun book, published by National Geographic and by Mark Shulman, intended to educate kids on how their favorite foods and activities compared with other kids’ tastes, activities, and home life. If you like your peanut butter chunky, for example, it means you are only like 25% of the population. If you are an only child, you might not be normal because only one in seven don’t have a brother or sister. And so on.

Argo, Whitewashing, and Race at the Golden Globes

By Jonathan Wynn and Teresa Irene Gonzales

Perhaps you’ve seen the award-winning film, Argo, which tells the improbable-yet-true tale of a CIA officer, Antonio Mendez, who, in 1979, pitches an incredible story to the Iranian government—that he is a filmmaker wanting to scout a location to film a sci-fi movie in Iran—to successfully smuggle six U.S. embassy workers out of the country. (You can read the full story here.)

The film received some criticism, however, since its release. On the one hand, the film downplays the role of the Canadian government and the heroics of the Canadian Ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor. On the other, Ben Affleck has come under fire for choosing to portray Mendez. Although his surname is briefly mentioned in the film, Mendez’s real-life ancestry and ethnicity is downplayed.  As others have noted, while meticulous care was taken to present “aesthetic accuracy” for most of the cast, this was not the case between Affleck’s Tony and the real-life Mendez. This can be seen during the final credit roll, where the audience is shown an image of the real Tony Mendez shaking hands with President Jimmy Carter.

Bananas, Nessy, The Secret, and Social Theory

By Jonathan Wynn

My usual first day of class gambit is a framing story or activity that lightens the mood, avoids jumping right into the material and yet still provides a window into the key ideas for the class.

 I’ve started my Sociological Theory courses with all sorts of odd topics: “overdosing” on homeopathic medicine (which you cannot actually overdose on, since it is little more than sugar tablets in fancy packaging), the numerology of September 11^th, horoscopes, and the Lincoln/Kennedy conspiracy. I also bought some dowsing rods (two metal bars that supposedly locate water or whatever they are “attuned” to) for students to test their ability at finding water.

Shopping and Crowds

By Jonathan Wynn

I like crowds. I remember feeling emotionally overcome as part of the group when I was in the front row at a Radiohead concert in Madison Square Garden or at the greatest comeback in NFL history. Being caught up in the moment, succumbing to the mass and losing a sense of one’s own individualism was something sociologist Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence: the emotional energy binding a group and a person. He was more interested in religious rituals, but I thought of this concept when watching this YouTube video of frenzied shoppers on Black Friday:

Twinkies & Big Macs: Thinking Sociologically About Black Friday

By Jonathan Wynn

There were Black Friday protests at my local WalMart in Western Massachusetts, organized by unions and worker’s rights advocates. If you watched the news you may have seen one in your town too. Protesters object to the fact that the company offers low-pay, limited-benefit jobs while the Walton family holds as much wealth as the bottom third of the U.S. population. This follows reports from Hostess (makers of Twinkies), claiming a worker’s strike gave them little choice but to shut down production, and liquidation seems eminent. Hostess feels the pinch from owing over a billion dollars to creditors, including their workers’ pensions but also to hedge funds (like Silver Point Capital) that own 30% of the company’s debt).

Of course, you can still buy Twinkies at WalMart. While some lament the potential loss of the yellowcake confection (according to a book on Twinkies, some of the ingredients are "more closely linked to rocks and petroleum than any of the four food groups," and the primary sweetener is high-fructose corn syrup), we don’t talk too much about the working conditions of the folks that make them. Liquidation of Hostess would not only eliminate jobs but worker’s pension plans as well, even though workers already made significant concessions and the CEO pocketed a 300% increase in his compensation package.

Sociology of Music

By Jonathan Wynn

Of all the singing shows on television, I find NBC’s The Voice particularly charming. If you haven’t seen it, here’s how it works: a bunch of contestants audition to join a team led by one of four superstars. Each team leader is a respected star in their music genre: CeeLo Green as the epitome of R&B, Christina Aguilera is the standard-bearer for Pop, Adam Levine serves as the tattooed Rocker, and Blake Shelton is the rugged representative for contemporary country music. Green, Aguilera, Levine and Shelton pick their “teams” through contestant auditions, hoping to mold the raw singers into talented artists.

“What is Sociological About Music?” William Roy and Timothy Dowd answer this question by saying, among other things, that we could examine the interactions between musicians and fans, the passion of audiences, the way certain people play particular instruments, the communities that support, produce and transmit music, or how particular scenes develop and change. One of the more straightforward ways to think sociologically about music, or really any art form, is to think about how conventions of art genres are formed and reinforced from person to person (a la Howard Becker’s classic Art Worlds).

Women, Gaming, & Violence

By Jonathan Wynn

What happens when a woman wants to study images of women in the gaming world?

Anita Sarkeesian’s blog, Feminist Frequency, is a great resource for anyone thinking about gender in media and technology. Her YouTube clips on female types in movies are short, pithy, and smart. Sociology has a long history of analyzing different constructed typologies, something I wrote about here, and Sarkeesian’s video about the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope (think Natalie Portman in the film Garden State) is as good an example as any of how characters are crafted and reproduced in the digital age.