This past Sunday’s Chicago Tribune featured a book excerpt where two music critics debated the merits of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the psychedelic, late 1960s, Sgt. Pepper vs. Their Satanic Majesties Request era. An interesting read if only for the suggestions that the Rolling Stones laughed their way through the psychedelic era while the Beatles, Paul McCartney in particular, couldn’t stop themselves from wanting to be accepted by the British establishment.
Author Archives: legallysociable
The next biggest US TV network: Univision
Amidst lower ratings and numerous articles about how to avoid TV all together, the big four American TV networks have some major competition: Univision. With already decent ratings and a growing Hispanic population, Univision may just be the network of the future:
With double-digit ratings growth this season, Spanish-language broadcaster Univision is off to a better start than any of the major English-language networks, and the future is promising as well.
The new census is expected to show a nearly 45% increase in the number of Hispanic Americans since 2000, to a total of 50 million. This couples with continuing audience erosion at the major networks and Univision’s recent deal with Mexican programer Grupo Televisa, which locks up the source of much the network’s popular programing for at least another decade.
Just a few years ago, the notion of Univision catching and surpassing them would have had mainstream network executives rolling with laughter. They’re not laughing now.
And they’re not talking publicly about it either: When asked to comment, the Big Four nets refused.
So while the big 4 networks are chasing edgy 18-49 year olds (or older viewers), Univision is capitalizing on the big demographic changes taking place in America.
How will the big 4 networks respond? They have been having troubles for years, losing viewers to cable and other media. Might we see some crossover programming from Univision and other Spanish-language stations reach the air through older broadcast networks?
College courses created by students include looks at Mad Men and Seinfeld
The University of California-Berkeley has a program called DeCal. In the program, college students teach other college students for college credit. One recent article about the program highlights how some of the courses take a longer look at television shows:
That’s because the popular show based in the 1960 is the subject of a fall course.
It’s a two-unit class that meets once a week in the school’s DeCal program. It focuses on the “thematically, symbolically and historically rich television series.” DeCal classes give a platform to students who want to dig into atypical subjects, according to the university. This fall’s topics range from a class on the “Sociology of Seinfeld” to longboarding. DeCal is run by the students themselves, but the classes give real college credits…
The teachers…say they are covering the following themes:
- contemporary culture
- politics of the 1960s
- the role of women, class and society
- the family unit
Students have more than just a television show to watch as homework, they are also given supplemental reading assignments.
I can imagine one category of reactions to the article: “of course, when you let students teach their own courses for credit, you will end up studying television shows.”
On the other hand, there are courses like this at other schools where media content, film, movies, and other cultural products, are analyzed. As one of the student teachers suggests, Mad Men could be read/watched as saying important things about our culture. Not only does it offer some reflection on early 1960s life, it also could be read as how people in 2010 view that era.
Overall, teenagers (8-18 years old) and emerging adults (18-25) consume a lot of media-produced stories like Mad Men. Courses like this might help them better understand what they are viewing and how it lines up with the real world.
(I would be curious to know what kind of evaluations these kinds of courses receive. Do students perceive that they learned more or less in a student taught course? And then, did they actually learn more or less?)
Sociology, among other disciplines, under review in Iran
When I first saw the story a few days ago that the Iranian government wanted to review certain disciplines in Iranian universities, I wondered if sociology made the list. Indeed it did, among other academic fields of study:
Iranian Ministry of Science and Technology announced that 12 disciplines in the humanities will have to be revised before any further developments are approved in those fields.
Abolfazl Hassani, head of Education Development at the Ministry of Education, told reporters today that the fields of “law, human rights, women’s studies, economics, sociology, media, political science, philosophy, psychology, education, administration as well as cultural and artistic administration” are under review…
He added that the contents of these sciences as taught at present are not consistent with religious principles and are based on “Western culture.”
Hassani went on to say: “It is imperative that we revise the contents of these disciplines in view of our religious and indigenous ideology and principles.”
Why exactly are these disciplines under review? One guess is that these disciplines may be considered subversive in that they suggest ideas and values that don’t line up with the ideas and values of the Iranian government. This does seem to be the general nature of a lot of sociology: an interest in questioning why things are the way they are when they might be otherwise.
Displaying human remains at museums
Museums typically want to display historical items – but certain objects raise more concerns than others. One sociologist has highlighted how museums have reconsidered displaying human remains:
In a book published yesterday, Tiffany Jenkins, a sociologist, highlighted how uneasy museums are becoming when it comes to displaying human remains. Jenkins gave examples including the Museum of London, which removed bones showing the effects of rickets, and Manchester University Museum, which took the head of an iron-age human, Worsley Man, off display; in 2008, it briefly covered its mummies with sheets.
This can be a complicated issue. But I would guess that feelings regarding the display of human remains are a cultural phenomenon which differs from culture to culture. Typical American practices of dealing with remains (burial or cremation) differ from other cultures, both now and historically. And what is valid as museum material also is affected by cultural values and history.
Mortgage interest tax deduction being discussed
With the federal government looking for more money, a budget deficit commission has been discussing possible changes to the tax code to bring in more revenue. One option among a number of options: limiting or revoking the mortgage interest deduction.
Whatever this commission recommends, I can imagine the political fights that may ensue.
Another consequence of financial crunch: public housing repairs
The New York Times reports that public housing repairs have fallen even more behind due to the financial crunch affecting many governmental bodies: “Public housing is falling apart around the country, as federal money has been unable to keep up with the repair needs of buildings more than half a century old.”
While the story goes on to address particular cases in Baltimore and New York City, it’s hard to know from the story about how much of an issue this is. How much worse is the issue compared to five years ago? The only figure cited about a national figure for repairs was derived from a 1998 study. In Chicago over the last few decades, public housing repairs were frequently behind and more funding was requested even when economic times were good.
Brand favorites by political party
AdvertisingAge reports on the favorite brands of Republicans and Democrats. There are some differences between supporters of the two parties:
The Republican Top 10: Fox News Channel, History Channel, Craftsman, Discovery Channel, Johnson & Johnson, UPS, Fox, FedEx, Lowe’s, Cheerios.
The Democrat Top 10: Google, Sony, Discovery Channel, UPS, Craftsman, Johnson & Johnson, Cheerios, History Channel, FedEx, Amazon.
Some interesting differences, particularly the presence of Google and Fox News Channel. Do these company’s political contributions match up with their favored status among each party?
Several academics question intellectual property and originality
Several professors have recently published books questioning accepted ideas about intellectual property. One professor illustrated his approach in a recent “reading” of his new book in front of a bookstore audience:
But they didn’t hear a single word written by Mr. Boon.
Instead, he read from a 1960s sex manual, an Italian cookbook, and Bob Dylan’s memoir, among others. He had grabbed those books, more or less at random, from the store’s shelves an hour before the event. So why not read from the book he actually wrote? “I didn’t see a need to,” says Mr. Boon, an associate professor of English at York University, in Toronto. That’s because, he says, the same concepts could be found elsewhere, albeit in slightly altered form.
Not coincidentally, that’s the case he makes in his book, In Praise of Copying (Harvard University Press). Mr. Boon argues that originality is more complicated than it seems, and that imitation may be the sincerest form of being human. He writes: “I came to recognize that many of the boundaries we have set up between activities we call ‘copying’ and those we call ‘not copying’ are false, and that, objectively, phenomena that involve copying are everywhere around us.”
He read from the cookbook because recipes aren’t protected by copyright law (unless they contain a “substantial literary expression,” according to the U.S. Copyright Office). He read from the memoir because of Dylan’s liberal borrowings from traditional folk music. And he read from the sex manual because, well, sex is all about reproduction, isn’t it?
While these are just a few academics with books on the subject, it does seem to tap into a growing movement (perhaps led by younger generations?) where originality is redefined as putting existing together in new ways, more of a mash-up than original idea. Whether this will catch on with a larger audience or pass legal muster remains to be seen.
But it does raise an interesting question: how many of our thoughts and ideas are original?
How suburbs dealt with parking meters and related issues
The Infrastructurist has a discussion of whether parking prices in the city should be raised in order to encourage less driving and therefore, less congestion.
While this may be an interesting argument, my research into several suburbs showed that they solved this problem without much argument back in the 1950s and 1960s. As suburban downtowns faced more competition from strip malls and large shopping centers, downtown business owners argued that city-owned parking meters were driving away customers. Why would a person go to the trouble of shopping in a suburban downtown when free parking was plentiful at shopping centers? Within a few years, these suburbs removed their parking meters in an effort to improve local business.The possible business gains far outweighed the possibility of some municipal revenues from the parking meters.
When I first encountered these debates, they seemed a bit strange – were people really avoiding suburban downtowns just because of some small parking fee? Even if downtown parking were free, it seems that suburban residents would (and did) tend to choose shopping centers anyway, for reasons that outweighed parking concerns. (Of course, there is a lot of complaining about finding close shopping spaces at the mall – but, at least those spots are free. However, one could make an argument that they are not free as the parking costs get passed along through the business rents and leases and to higher prices for consumers.)
I left reading about these debates thinking that the parking meters were a last straw that suburban downtowns tried desperately to grab at to attract shoppers. Ultimately, many suburban communities were unsuccessful and the parking meters played a limited role.
