Category Archives: Entertainment

A new off-Broadway play criticizes making the American Dream about buying mini-McMansions

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It has become common in recent years to link the economic crisis to the purchases of McMansions. Here are a few lines from the new off-Broadway play “Heresy” illustrate this:

Chris’ college roommate, Pedro (Danny Rivera), and tarty call girl lady friend Lena (Ariel Woodiwiss) appear as witnesses for the persecuted campus radical. With the help of Pontius’ blowsy socialite wife, Phyllis (Kathy Najimy), the negotiation for Chris’ freedom devolves into a boozy cocktail party and a well-meaning but exasperating political debate. The characters spout off arguments like, ”The American Dream has been reduced to mean a mini-McMansion bought with an unaffordable mortgage,” and ”The American dream has dwindled into a vulgar, materialistic view of life.” And so on.

A lot of commentators have argued that the American Dream has become equated with consumerism. I remarked recently to one of my classes that this seems to be an odd interpretation of the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” suggested in the Declaration of Independence.

But, there is little doubt that owning property was an important consideration for the American colonists and that owning a home today is one key marker of “making it” in America. I suspect the real issue here could be two things:

1. Buying and consuming more than one needs. It is one thing to be self-sufficient or comfortable and another to be excessive.

2. There are issues when individuals care more about acquiring and protecting their own possessions as opposed to caring about and contributing to the larger community. This has been a tension throughout American history.

Another note of interest: what exactly is a mini-McMansion and how does it differ from a McMansion? McMansions are usually thought to be quite large, probably somewhere between 3-10,000 square feet. Thus, a mini-McMansion would be smaller but the average new home in the United States is around 2,500 square feet so is this typical new home automatically a mini-McMansion?

Games about infrastructure: street cleaning and the construction of power plants

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Perhaps everything can go through the gamification process: I recently ran into two games that tackle issues involving infrastructure.

1. Here is a new street cleaning game recently released in Germany:

The game – known as Kehrmaschinen-Simulator 2011 in its homeland of Germany – puts the player behind the wheel of a street cleaning truck and promptly serves some of the dirtiest gutters and asphalt surfaces a city could provide.

Sadly, racing your sweeper at high speeds is not an option. What you can do is drive slowly, move the sweeping apparatus in a wide variety of ways, and – like a good street sweeper must – keep the streets clean. You can also get intimately familiar with the more mundane aspects of the street sweeping profession, from filling up the water tanks to turning on the truck’s various lights to checking your email…

Overall, the game provides what it promises: the player gets to clean city streets. How appealing that is depends on your personality.

“They say war games teach kids how to use guns and kill people and be violent; I don’t really believe in that,” one reviewer notes. “But if you do, maybe you should feed your kid some street sweeping games so he can get ready for his future job.”

The 15 minute video will give you a better idea of what the game is about.

2. We recently played the board game Power Grid for the first time. The idea of the game is that you have to build power plants, power them with resources you have to purchase, and then expand to new cities (which costs you) and also buy more powerful power plants (which also costs you more) to power more cities at a time. For an involved board game, the Amazon reviews are positive (4.5 stars out of 73), the review from Dice Tower is positive, and Board Game Geek offers a lot more information.

My takeaway comes with a caveat: anything can be made fun if done well. However, I do like thinking about infrastructure and city-building anyway so I may have more interest in such games.

Why not also pitch these games as learning opportunities? Give people the idea that playing a game might also be educational and these things might fly off the shelves. Power Grid requires a good amount of math to balance out how much new plants, resources, and city connections will cost versus how much a player will take in each turn based on their number of powered cities. While it is difficult to model complex events exactly in a game, these sorts of games could give kids and adults a better awareness of what it takes to clean streets or provide power. These are not unimportant tasks; I don’t think most citizens want dirty streets and dark houses.

Reality TV is making us smarter and turning us all into “miniature anthropologists”

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Here is a summary of a recent argument that reality TV makes us smarter as well as turns all of us into anthropologists:

Reality TV has long been the bastard child of the television industry. Ever since its highfaluting sociological roots with PBS’ The American Family, MTV’s groundbreaking The Real World, and even CBS’ watershed Survivor, the viewing public has treated reality television as if it is going to end civilization even as they tuned in to watch in droves. The general animus in the public spirit and the media (even the entertainment media) is that reality TV would somehow cause every museum to go bankrupt, every opera to close its curtains for good, and every breathing American to start desperately launching into fisticuffs like they were trying to be cast on some sort of exploitative documentary program. All these years later, we still have Survivor and, while there may be more useless step-and-repeats at insignificant events, thanks to all the Real Housewives and Mob Wives and Basketball Wives and the rest of the sundried wives that grace our tube, the world hasn’t ended.

What if reality TV is making us smarter? That’s the argument Grant McCracken makes in Wired magazine. In an excellent essay, he says that watching reality shows, no matter how massaged by producers and edited for effect, turns us all into miniature anthropologists. Not only do we learn things from different cultures other than our own (he uses learning about fashion via Project Runway), but it also makes us look beyond the surface of what we’re watching to find the true meaning. “Culture is a thing of surfaces and secrets. The anthropologist is obliged to record the first and penetrate the second,” McCracken says. “Once we’ve figured out what people believe to be true about themselves, we can begin to figure out what’s really going on in this culture. In this case, the surface says, ‘reality TV is a dumbing down.’ But the secret says ‘not always.’ Sometimes, reality TV contributes to a smartening up.”

From the original article, here is how McCracken thinks ethnography will help us figure out what is really happening when watching TV:

A key feature of anthropology is the long, observational, “ethnographic” interview. Anthropologists believe one of the advantages of this method is that no one can manage appearances, let alone lie, successfully for a long period of time.

So while the Kardashian sisters may wish to create an impression – and the producers edit to reinforce that impression – over many episodes and seasons, the truth will out. Whether they like it or not, eventually we will see into Kardashian souls. That these souls are never as beautiful as the sisters themselves is, well, one of the truths that reality TV makes available to us, and here it performs one of the functions normally dispatched by religious or moral leaders.

I don’t disagree that reality TV can be a decent place to see sociological and anthropological ideas and concepts. However, I think there are a few assumptions made in this argument that aren’t necessarily true:

1. That TV can show how complex the real world is. Editing cuts out a lot but even then, there is only so much that can be shown or taken in through one screen. The social world is incredibly complex and difficult to understand even when living in it, let alone in viewing it.

2. That viewers are watching in a critical way and not just for entertainment and spectacle. Lots of cultural products, such as television, can be viewed critically and viewers can learn something (even if it is about a small part of the world, as suggested in #1 above), but I’m not sure most are. People aren’t going to pick these things up by osmosis and they need to learn how to look for them.

3. That the goal of the producers of reality TV is to really tell a story versus to make money. From a more Marxist point of view, why shouldn’t we just assume reality TV, like the rest of TV (news, sports, scripted shows, etc.) is solely about making money?

4. That these shows are heavily scripted/edited/intentionally pushed in certain directions. If this is “reality,” it is a very skewed and not “natural” reality. And there are lots of stories about how producers and participants intentionally create scenes and images.

5. That ethnography is the same as sitting in a chair watching TV. Indeed, there is a name for this, armchair anthropology, and it is not the same as experiencing something personally. Imagine the difference between being in the crowd at a political rally and watching it on TV. There is a different level of understanding and interaction available in the embodied activity versus the more passive viewing from a distance. It is not that you can’t learn from this more distant viewing but it is not the same as being there ethnographically.

Reality TV is not a substitute for real sociological and anthropological research. If reality TV does become the last word for most people on social life, that is when we should be worried.

Young children should avoid secondhand TV watching but what about adult secondhand media consumption?

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A new study in Pediatrics suggests there are detrimental effects to young children from secondhand TV:

The study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics, finds that a child between the ages of 8 months and 8 years takes in nearly four hours of this “secondhand TV” which could have consequences on his or her well-being.

“Too much television can stop children from learning how to entertain themselves,” said Rutgers University Sociology Professor Deborah Carr. “And if they get used to having that background noise all the time, it’s very distracting. It’s distracting when they’re working on their homework, it keeps them from sleeping and stops them from engaging in conversation and and doing other things, like playing outside. The children, and the parents for that matter, can never invest 100 percent in what they’re supposed to be doing if the television is on in the background all the time.”

According to the study, background TV was especially common in certain populations. Children under the age of 2, African-American children, youngsters living in poverty and kids will less-educated parents had the highest levels of exposure, up to five hours a day. Meanwhile, exposure ranged from two and a half to three hours per day among white children and those from more affluent families.

Aside from the obvious distraction television can create for children, there are other consequences of too much “secondhand TV.” “If the television is constantly on in the background, children may absorb lessons that are not age appropriate,” said Carr. “Also, another issue is if you watch a half-hour of television, ten minutes of that time is going to be advertisements. Those advertisements are usually for unhealthy foods or toys that parents can’t afford or things of that nature. So, I think another problem is not just the programming, but this exposure 24/7 to advertisements.”

I suspect a lot of people today consume “secondhand” media. For example, here are some 2010 figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation:

With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today.  And because of media multitasking, the total amount of media content consumed during that period has increased from 8:33 in 2004 to 10:45 today.

Is multitasking that different from secondhand exposure? Recommendations in a reputable journal like this notwithstanding, this sort of media usage is becoming more normal for lots of ages. For those beyond young childhood, if such exposure doesn’t lead to more distraction, at the least, being bombarded with advertisements is a potential issue.

Just wait till we all get our Google glasses and then see how much media we can consume…

What television show will assume the role of “sociological experiment of our time”?

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MTV’s Jersey Shore will run only one more season. This reminded me that I have seen several sites refer to the show’s sociological nature. Two examples:

1. From Gawker.  A number of their recaps have included this claim about the show (including this March 9, 2012 post): “the greatest sociological experiment of our time.” As it is probably meant to be, this is quite hyperbolic.

2. From the New York Post:

We are gathered here this evening to celebrate and memorialize the death of an era in MTV history: The Jersey Shore era. As both a former employee of Lord Viacom MTV Networks (full disclosure: from 2008 – 2011) and a viewer, it feels as though a chapter in its life has come to a close. The pages have turned and the sun is setting on our tanned up guido friends. And for a few years, this sociological experiment defined MTV and defined the audience it cultivated. We all watched in slackjawed horror/glee the day it all began, and now we must lay it to rest. And so with it goes the days of MTV’s most polarizing programming. Let us reflect.

I’m not quite sure why this show was repeatedly tied to sociology. Perhaps some simply couldn’t understand why the show had good ratings considering the content. Perhaps it is because a lot of people wanted to hold up the show as a mirror to make claims about the excesses and ills of our larger society.

But we could also ask which shows might take up this spot in the future. I hear that Honey Boo Boo character is getting a lot of attention but there is no shortage of reality TV shows that portray interesting characters in interesting situations. Was Jersey Shore really more emblematic of American life than other shows?

New cultural gatekeepers: paid online reviewers

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After recently discussing buying Twitter followers, the New York Times explores another new online realm: paid online reviewers who only give extremely positive reviews.

In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50…

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.”

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

I am most intrigued here by the possible change in relationship between a reviewer and an author. The article suggests there is some sort of “sacred” distance between the two: the reviewer is free to criticize the work without recrimination. Some reviewers have attained elite cultural gatekeeper status, people who guide decision-making for millions of people. Think of critics like Siskel and Ebert and Robert Christgau who are seen as authoritative figures. Hence, people are upset when they learn that a positive review they saw wasn’t an “honest” opinion but rather a business transaction.

However, let’s not forget that these reviewers also make careers out of their thoughts – they may not have sold out to a corporation or a product but they do have a financial interest. I would argue that this distance between reviewer and author/creator has never really been so sacred and there are plenty of areas where we are used to paid reviewers. If you follow a reviewer enough, you can often learn what they do or do not like. Indeed, some reviewers have become outspoken proponents of certain movements and not others. Is this based on a completely rational, detached perspective? Of course not. Don’t many reviewers interact with the people who are producing the products they are reviewing? Think of blurbs on the back of books: are these truly unsolicited comments or from people who are truly judging the merits of the book? More crassly, commercials often present “reviewers” or “real people” or people made to sell certain products. Perhaps this is simply a sign of our times and will become normal as there is clearly a market for good reviews.

It will be interesting to see how websites like Amazon, heavily dependent on user reviews, works through this issue. I always try to read both the five star and one star reviews when considering a product. Additionally, there are other issues: the ratings can be about the product itself or a particular aspect of the product or about people’s expectations for the product or the shipping or the customer service or something else. I think Amazon could include a few extra questions, as other websites do, that would help one sort through the variety of reviews. Overall, the system is not perfect and we should be aware that we may not be getting the “unvarnished truth,” but at least it is better than going off anecdotal evidence from a friend or two…right?

21st century problem: “Who inherits your iTunes library?”

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If you have made a will, don’t forget to include your digital music and ebooks:

Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.”

Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files—but they don’t actually own them…

Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. “The law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century,” says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who’ve died, but the regulations don’t cover digital files purchased.

Another reason to buy the physical version if you really like the music or book.

Thinking more broadly, this extends to a whole host of digital content. What happens to your Facebook information if you die? Your Dropbox account? Accessing your email? Stories about these circumstances tend to stress the lack of formal legal or corporate agreement of what should be done. How about a “dead digital user bill or rights”?

Evidence: TV shows can lower fertility rates

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An article about the cultural power of television discusses several studies that show TV programs can lower fertility rates:

Several years ago, a trio of researchers working for the Inter-American Development Bank set out to help solve a sociological mystery. Brazil had, over the course of four decades, experienced one of the largest drops in average family size in the world, from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 children in 2000. What made the drop so curious is that, unlike the Draconian one-child policy in China, the Brazilian government had in place no policy to limit family size. (It was actually illegal at some point to advertise contraceptives in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.) What could explain such a steep drop? The researchers zeroed in on one factor: television.

Television spread through Brazil in the mid-sixties. But it didn’t arrive everywhere at once in the sprawling country. Brazil’s main station, Globo, expanded slowly and unevenly. The researchers found that areas that gained access to Globo saw larger drops in fertility than those that didn’t (controlling, of course, for other factors that could affect fertility). It was not any kind of news or educational programming that caused this fertility drop but exposure to the massively popular soap operas, or novelas, that most Brazilians watch every night. The paper also found that areas with exposure to television were dramatically more likely to give their children names shared by novela characters.

Novelas almost always center around four or five families, each of which is usually small, so as to limit the number of characters the audience must track. Nearly three quarters of the main female characters of childbearing age in the prime-time novelas had no children, and a fifth had one child. Exposure to this glamorized and unusual (especially by Brazilian standards) family arrangement “led to significantly lower fertility”—an effect equal in impact to adding two years of schooling.

In a 2009 study, economists Robert Jensen and Emily Oster detected a similar pattern in India. A decade ago, cable television started to expand rapidly into the Indian countryside, where deeply patriarchal views had long prevailed. But not all villages got cable television at once, and its random spread created another natural experiment. This one yielded extraordinary results. Not only did women in villages with cable television begin bearing fewer children, as in Brazil, but they were also more able to leave their home without their husbands’ permission and more likely to disapprove of husbands abusing their wives, and the traditional preference for male children declined. The changes happened rapidly, and the magnitude was “quite large”—the gap in gender attitudes separating villages introduced to cable television from urban areas shrunk by between 45 and 70 percent. Television, with its more progressive social model, had changed everything.

Four quick thoughts:

1. Such shows (TV and radio) have been used deliberately by public health organizations to fight AIDS. It is one thing to hold training sessions and open and maintain clinics but it is another to have successful soap operas that promote certain behaviors.

2. These situations provided some fascinating natural experiments. I occasionally ask students this very question: how might you set up a natural experiment to test the effects of television? In the United States, outside of some ultra-controlled environment a la The Truman Show, it is difficult to quickly answer this question.

3. Sociologist Juliet Schor nicely explains the mechanism behind this in The Overspent American. Mass media presents average residents a new, commonly known reference group to which they can compare themselves. Instead of primarily comparing themselves to neighbors or acquaintances, viewers started seeing what “middle-class” or “normal” look like on television and then work to emulate that.

4. Media output is not simply entertainment – something is being promoted. Being able to watch and experience this critically is crucial in a world awash with media and information.

Board games that teach about housing discrimination

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Americans may like the real estate game Monopoly but it lacks one real-life phenomenon that a few games over the years have included: housing discrimination.

The Pop-Up City blog drew our attention last week to a great project from Toronto artist Flavio Trevisan, who has created a board-game-as-artwork enticingly titled The Game of Urban Renewal (OK, this is enticing to us, at least). The project reminded us that there is something of a history to board games dramatizing low-income and discriminatory housing policy. An earlier such game – one that looks like an antecedent to Trevisan’s, although he had not heard of it – makes a brief cameo in the House & Home exhibit currently showing at the National Building Museum.

That 1970 predecessor, called Blacks & Whites, was produced by the magazine Psychology Today, and was created to teach white players about what life was like for blacks in an era when all the housing rules were stacked against them. Not surprisingly, Blacks & Whites never went mass market (it doesn’t even appear to have gotten enough traction to have widely offended racists of the era)…

If you visit the exhibit, the game garners only a brief mention (and scanned image). But the most telling details are on the board itself and in the instructions. Blacks & Whites is organized like a Monopoly board, with properties increasing in value as you move around it. The property clusters have fantastically blunt names: the “inner ghetto,” the “outer ghetto,” “lower integrated” and “upper integrated” neighborhoods, “lesser suburbia,” “greater suburbia,” “newer estates” and, lastly, “older estates” (namely, Bethesda and Georgetown!). The board mimics the concentric housing rings of many cities as you move out toward the suburbs, from the all-black “inner ghetto” to the all-white “older estates.”

According to the instructions, the game tries to emphasize “the absurdities of living in different worlds while playing on the same board.” “White” players get a million dollars from the treasury to start the game; blacks get $10,000, and they’re restricted in where they can buy properties. Blacks and whites also draw from separate opportunity card decks.

You mean Americans don’t want to be reminded about social ills when playing their board games? At the same time, I bet it could be done if the game properly balanced between playability and concept. Pedagogically, games can be a great way to teach. By putting players into new situations and showing them what it takes to win and lose, certain values can be imparted. This reminds me of George Herbert Mead discussing how children learn about social interaction and adult life through playing and creating games and debating rules. These games also sound similar to social simulations that are occasionally used in classrooms or by some groups. Think of Monopoly: it is a game yet it also could be viewed as expressing some of the basic values of capitalism. In contrast, more recent Euro style games are built around different concepts. Perhaps some enterprising sociologist can properly achieve the gamification of an important social issue.

Now that I think about it, imagine what Simcity could be like if it had a more complex societal element. The biggest social issues that come up in Simcity are crime, education, traffic, and pollution yet there is little about social class (though one can build low, medium, and high rent residential, commercial, and industrial properties), race, immigration, discrimination, and religion/ideological differences. Similar to Monopoly, the game is geared toward accumulating higher levels of money and land values. Perhaps all of these real-life issues would be difficult to model but I bet it could be incorporated into the gameplay.

Sociological study: NYT obituaries have more celebrity deaths over the decades

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Here is a unique place to look for American’s obsession with celebrities: examine the “Notable Deaths” section of the New York Times since 1900.

Sociology researchers at the University of South Carolina analyzed obituaries in the New York Times from the same 20 randomly selected days in 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975 and 2000. From this sample, they ranked how much attention was given to the deaths of people in certain occupations in each year. They found that obituaries of entertainers and athletes marched steadily to the top in rank — from seventh in 1900, to fifth in 1925, to third in 1950 and first in 1975 and 2000; in 2000, celeb athletes and entertainers accounted for 28 percent of obituaries in the newspaper, the researchers said.

Meanwhile, the researchers said the number of obituaries for public figures in manufacturing and business halved over the century. Similarly, religious obituaries fell from fourth place in mid-century to last in rank, and the researchers said they did not find a single notable death article for a religious figure in their sample for the year 2000.

“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” lead researcher Patrick Nolan said in a statement from the University of South Carolina. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival,” added Nolan, who details the research in the journal Sociation Today.

So have celebrities replaced some of religion?

It would also be interesting to see whether the New York Times did this consciously and if so, how exactly this conversation went. Did readers actually suggest they wanted to see more celebrity news in the deaths section?