Monthly Archives: January 2012

Sociologist talks about the downside of choosing your own news

Posted on by

A sociologist suggests you may be missing something by only choosing what news you want to read:

It’s in no sense odd to find American academe wrangling over journalism. Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review and Clay Shirky of New York University have recently been hammering away at each other, seeking to determine whether investigative journalism can only be conducted by highly resourced news machines (like the Guardian’s) or by a more individual, digital-first approach (like… um… the Guardian’s). But what’s sociology got to contribute here?

Plenty, Klinenberg says, outlining the fundamental bargain that underpins newspaper life. You, the reader, want crosswords and cartoons, recipes and TV programme guides. You want all the stuff that journalists serve up with a sigh (because, well, it’s not exactly journalism, is it?). And, in return, as part of the deal, journalism is allowed to have a civic purpose – to report and analyse the workings and frailties of democracy – beyond quick ways to whip up a cottage pie.

That bargain, sealed in print, means you can’t have one without the other. Put your cash on the newsagent’s counter and you get some things you desire and other things, from Cardiff or Chad, that you didn’t know had happened until you turned to page five.

Of course, like any other neat thesis, there are readers and editors who don’t quite fit. But the nature of print – flipping from column to column, noticing stories that intrigue you, naturally expanding your spheres of interest – isn’t “versioning” at all – it’s more eclectic. An iPad or Kindle version works within narrower bounds. A Facebook version is even more selective, tailored to your most immediate demands. And the logical version at the end of this line is utterly simple: no deals, no bargains – just what you want, electronically provided on the basis of past predilection.

This is part of a larger question about the consequences of people only being exposed to certain points of view. Only selecting news that we want to read can be self-reinforcing as then we only seek out certain kinds of stories, limiting our view of the world.

I wonder, though, about blaming this issue on the medium. How much does having a newspaper in hand really increase the odds that someone will read something that didn’t plan to? Can’t people simply pick out parts of the newspaper that they want to read as well? Further, was there ever really a “golden age” where average citizens always tried to engage with alternative points of view? I would guess not though that doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile ideal. We need citizens (and journalists) who can understand our complex world which transcends simply “left” or “right” understandings. Perhaps the Internet makes this easier in some ways but I would guess the Internet could be changed to meet these challenges or people’s behaviors could be altered.

This reminds of an argument I was reading last night. People could argue, rightly, that all media viewpoints are biased in some way. However, this doesn’t mean that we can just throw out all news sources and say they don’t have something of value. What should be consistent across different sources are facts and then there can be disagreement about the interpretation of these facts. Of course, what is considered “fact” may be up for grabs as well – see the recent debate over Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.”

The builder behind Lego’s architecture series

Posted on by

Perhaps you have seen them in the store: Lego kits that allow you to build the White House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and many other buildings. Here is some background on the man who designs these kits:

Tucker is a serious sort, with a vaguely brooding air — not impolite, but not comfortable with niceties. He does not flinch from saying that he is an artist and that the Lego is a real medium. “I have zero interest in this as a toy,” he said, holding up a brick. He did not seem like the type who sets out on a Lego-based career path. And he wasn’t. He’s 40 now, but five years ago he was designing high-end residential homes until the real estate market started going stagnant, he said, and clients started drifting away and canceling new projects. He and his business partner split up, and so, rudderless, he moved back in with his parents.

“Six months into my hiatus, I sat down and wrote up a list of everything I wanted to do in this life,” he said. “Didn’t matter what it was — race car driver, dentist, architect. Then I looked at the list and refined it, and through a process of elimination I realized I wanted to work with my hands and I wanted to be my own boss — because I don’t take authority figures especially well. Also, I wanted to do something with architecture. The thing is, how could I be an inspiration to others if I was working in a medium most people can’t do?”

Here’s what he did: He drove to a Toys R Us in Highland Park and loaded eight shopping carts with Lego kits. He then came home, sat on the floor, spread the pieces out at his feet and, because he hadn’t played with Legos since he was a kid, reacquainted himself. He built samples and took them to a Lego convention in Washington, where he caught the eye of Lego brass.

He found Lego at the right time: After going through a rough patch in the late ’90s, the company was ready to refocus on design, and by 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, sales were up 40 percent, making it the rare company that not only weathered the recession but didn’t feel it. Tucker, meanwhile, rounded up licensing agreements with building owners. “I got a sense he didn’t have many contacts, so I set him with the people in other important buildings,” remembered Randy Stancik, the general manager of the Skydeck at Willis Tower, where Tucker’s Willis Tower kit has long been the most popular tchotchke in the building’s gift shop.

Tucker’s relationship with Lego is complex. He is not a Lego employee. With his wife, Brittny, he runs Brickstructures, which has a long-term contract that says he can only design kits for Lego. He also distributes the Architecture series in North America himself, using Lego’s warehouse in Wood Dale (though Lego distributes the series internationally). When I asked who owns the rights to the kits, he said it’s a gray area.

Is this a success story from the new American economy? Alas, it seems like there is only one such job available…

Some additional thoughts:

1. I’ve wondered this for a long time as a Lego fan: why are these sets so expensive?

2. Does Lego have a larger goal of helping people understand the world’s great architecture? If not, why not bill these as educational products? Then you might really see these fly off the shelves.

3. If I had to guess, I would say these sets are bought primarily by highly educated people. Perhaps we can apply Bourdieu to this: lower-class people buy them because they are fun to play with and make a nice decorative piece while the middle- and upper-classes appreciate the aesthetics (squared off as they may be) and knowing about great architecture.

4. Are Lego creations considered art by the broader art community?

Columbia anthropology class about Occupy Wall Street

Posted on by

I’m sure this new anthropology class at Columbia about Occupy Wall Street will get a lot of attention:

Columbia University will offer a new course for upperclassmen and grad students next semester. An Occupy Wall Street class will send students into the field and will be taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, a veteran of the Occupy movement.

The course begins next semester and will be divided between class work at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork that will require students to become involved with the Occupy movement outside of the classroom…

Appel is a staunch defender of the Occupy movement, in her blog she said that, ““it is important to push back against the rhetoric of ‘disorganization’ or ‘a movement without a message’ coming from left, right and center.”

Appel told the New York Post that while her involvement with the movement will color the way she teaches it will not prevent her from being an objective teacher.

This class will receive criticism for three reasons:

1. The professor has been involved with the movement.

2. It will draw attention from conservatives who will argue that liberals are continuing to use college classes to indoctrinate America’s youths.

3. People will see it as a waste of time and money as this expensive college should be teaching “useful” things. (This is similar to criticism about classes about Jay-Z or Lady Gaga.)

At the same time, the class has a number of advantages:

1. The professor may be connected to the movement but it is a unique opportunity for students to have an entry point into this group. I would bet the professor could get the students unique access to certain people or events that would lead to a better class experience.

2. The class addresses an important current phenomena. Whether you agree with the purposes of the movement or not, it is something worthy of study to understand why and how it developed and whether it will lead to change. How many people want to sit in a class about dry material when they could be learning about something happening right outside?

3. This is a chance for students to gain research experience in a unique setting. Aren’t colleges pushing research experiences for students?

From my point of view: I think a key here is that students develop their critical thinking and research skills in the course. This does not necessarily mean agreeing with the Occupy Wall Street movement but students should leave the course with a better understanding of the issues, the protestors, and how to do research.

Picking the white doll or black doll in Mexico

Posted on by

The Mexican government has started a conversation about racism based on a video that shows an experiment where children have to pick between a black and white doll:

Is Mexico’s an inherently racist society? Does the culture overwhelmingly favor those with light skin over those with dark skin? And if so, is that a legacy of European colonialism or present-day images in television and advertising?

These are among the thorny questions emerging in online forums in Mexico since a government agency began circulating a “viral video” showing schoolchildren in a taped social experiment on race.

The kids are seated at a table before a white doll and a black doll, and are asked to pick the “good doll” or the doll that most resembled them. The children, mostly brown-skinned, almost uniformly say the white doll was better or most resembled them…

Mexico’s National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, in mid-December began circulating the video, modeled on the 1940s Clark experiments in the United States. The children who appear in it are mostly mestizos, or half-Spanish, half-Indian, and a message said they were taped with the consent of their parents and told to respond as freely as they could.

See the full video here.

This reminds of Jane Elliott’s famous blue-eyed, brown-eyed experiment with a third-grade class (highlights here). One of the most powerful parts of this exercise is the fact that these are supposedly innocent children who are quite capable of reflecting the racist attitudes of society. Similarly, the doll video suggests that even young children know full well about race and what skin color is valued more.

I can only imagine the outcry if a US government agency released a video like this…

Considering the effects of a “flush tax” in Maryland

Posted on by

Officials in Maryland are discussing a different way of finding revenue: raising the “flush tax.”

Maryland’s already got a flush tax, it runs about $2.50 a month for sewer customers, and $30 a year for homes on septic systems. The money raised goes to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay.

Citing the continued damage to the watershed, Md. Governor Martin O’Malley told reporters he’d consider doubling or tripling the tax…

“Right now, there’s a flat flush tax, such that a senior citizen living in the 1600 block of North Avenue pays the same flush fee as a single person living in a giant McMansion.”…

“The Governor dropped a bomb last year in his State of the State address where he proposed banning developments of five or more homes on septic systems,” says Michael Harrison, Director of Government Affairs for the Homebuilder’s Association of Maryland. Harrison says such a ban wouldn’t hurt the big national builders, but local, small scale developers who work in rural areas.

This is not an uncommon situation: a government official suggests raising or enacting a new fee tied to growth and builders respond negatively. While I can understand how raising the fee might impact future building, it seems like it would be difficult to argue that bigger houses shouldn’t have to pay a higher “flush tax.” As the tax currently stands, it is more about paying a fee per lot of development rather than for the usage of the sewers.

The talk of septic systems in suburbia reminds me of the possible problems as laid out in Adam Rome’s book The Bulldozer in the Countryside. Despite the issues with septic systems, building sewers out to more rural areas can be quite expensive for smaller communities so septic systems can seem cheaper in the short-term.

Crumbling McMansions as “wildlife habitats”

Posted on by

Mix together a few recent stories about animals encountering people in the suburbs and you can reach an interesting conclusion: McMansions could become “wildlife habitats”.

Great news for folks who have watched the value of their exurban McMansions circling the drain over the past few years: These fringe habitations can be returned to nature to find new life as wildlife habitats. It’s basically the real estate version of composting.

Okay, so there’s not really an official effort to make subdivisions into sanctuaries, but apparently nobody told bears that. In Hopatcong, N.J., a cable TV repairman recently descended into 85-year-old Frank Annacone’s basement and found a 500-pound black bear slumbering there. The folks at Gothamist dubbed it the “Reverse Goldilocks Bear,” and in a true case of lopsided justice, it was quickly tranquilized and subjected to an “examination” (yikes) before being released back into the wild. (What did Goldilocks get, a good scare and a few hours of community service?)

It’s not the first time wild animals have done the “creative reuse” thing on the outer edges of civilization. BldgBlog has dredged up tales of bobcats lounging around foreclosed exurban mansions, bees that turned a California home into a honey factory, and a pack of coyotes that squatted in a burned-out house in Glendale, Calif.

These sort of animal/human interactions are no small issue in some suburbs. In this area, discussions about coyotes were hot not too long ago.

Trying to imagine McMansions as wildlife habitats is an interesting exercise. One far-fetched solution: some wealthy activist buys up a large McMansion neighborhood and turns it into a preserve. Perhaps people would even pay money to tour the odd preserve. This sounds like it could be a Hollywood thriller where some poor visitors end up trapped in this dystopian world. (Imagine Jurassic Park without dinosaurs and in a neighborhood of crumbling McMansions.) A second option: someone creates art that depicts crumbling McMansions returning to nature and full of animals.

If anyone has images or stories of full neighborhoods that have been “returned to nature,” I’d be interested in seeing them.

Cam Newton as sociologist?

Posted on by

A commentator in the Wall Street Journal suggests Cam Newton is a sociologist:

All very true, all very interesting, but this was not the part of Fleming’s article—the cover story for ESPN the Magazine’s annual Next issue—that got the most attention on Thursday. That part would be Newton’s refusal to blame the weirdly harsh pre-draft assessments—ESPN’s own Mel Kiper Jr. compared him to former Bengals bust Akili Smith—on any latent prejudices against black quarterbacks. “I can’t sit up here and look at it like, oh man, my critics are racist,” Newton told Fleming. “I blame JaMarcus Russell and to some degree Vince Young. If you have the opportunity to make that kind of money doing something you love to do, why would you screw it up?” Which, admittedly, is an attention-grabbing thing to say.

It was also deemed a mistake by the sport-pundits whose job it is to deem statements like this mistakes. But as Bomani Jones notes in a terrific column for SB Nation, both Newton and his critics seem to miss the point. “The real danger is in the foolishness of the quote and its underlying sadness,” Jones writes. “It’s stupid because the knocks on Cam were based in the same madness that sent his mentor, [Warren] Moon, to Canada seven years before Russell was born. And it’s heartbreaking because, in spite of the progress the world claims it has made with regards to race, the young man who could be the NFL’s future blamed his own unfair treatment on two men who had to fight the same battles.”

Of course, as long as Newton continues to break records and be brilliant, he can—and will—be able to write his own narrative, in his own words. At the very least, it’s refreshing to have a new star who’s as interesting to talk about—and listen to—as he is to watch.

As far as I can tell, the only reason Newton gets dubbed a sociologist is because he brings up the issue of race. Interestingly, he downplays the racial explanation and goes to more individualistic explanations (i.e., two earlier quarterbacks failed). But it is interesting to note that discussing topics of race gets equated with the field of sociology.

While there is no doubt that Newton could have made a bold statement about how black quarterbacks are treated, I wonder if his statement says more about whether athletes can talk about race or feel like they should than about Newton. At this point in his career, what would Newton gain by taking on people like Mel Kiper Jr.? As a rookie, Newton may not want to be outspoken about a controversial social issue. Would his endorsement opportunities go down if he talked about race? Would sportswriters keep hammering on this? I’m not saying Newton is right by downplaying the larger structural forces that make success possible. However, certain athletes don’t address larger issues like some do. For example, Michael Jordan was criticized by some who thought he could have used his celebrity and standing to push for certain things. Jordan, a savvy businessman, chose not to. Newton may be following a similar path.

In the end, I would guess most sports fans and commentators don’t really want to address racial issues even though it clearly matters. On the whole, they would typically suggest sports transcends racial barriers and on-the-field performance is the only thing that matters. Also, the last time I can remember this being a big debate in the NFL with Rush Limbaugh on ESPN, it didn’t work out well.