Category Archives: Sociology

Plans for purchase of Wheaton Grand Theater; hope for larger economic impact

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Many older American downtowns are looking for ways to bring in new business and revenues. One way to achieve this is to pursue entertainment opportunities. Here is how this is currently playing out in Wheaton, Illinois where there is a perspective buyer for the Wheaton Theater:

Downtown property owner and lifelong Wheaton resident Jim Atten said he has “verbally agreed” to buy the theater, constructed in 1925, from Elmhurst-based Suburban Bank and Trust.

“It’s going to take a while to do, but our plan is to turn it into a performing arts and movie theater,” Atten said…

Atten said, if the purchase goes through, an extensive fundraising effort will be launched to make a dent in the necessary repairs and remodeling in the building, which he estimated could be about $5 million…

The theater closed in the 1990s and after an unsuccessful attempt by the Wheaton Grand Theater Corp. to revive it by hosting concerts, the deed was given up to the bank after coming up short on a loan payment.

Last year, Wheaton voters rejected a proposal to let the city use $150,000 in public funds each year to renovate the building…

Still, [Wheaton mayor] Gresk said the expected purchase is a “wonderful, huge first step.”

We’ll see how this moves forward. The benefits of a theater for a smaller downtown could be large: theaters can generate money themselves but can also attract other business as theater goers eat and shop nearby, festivals could make use of the space (think film, music, art, and theater festivals), and this building could serve as an example of how to effectively remodel and utilize older spaces. Smaller downtowns need spaces like this to succeed, partly to help provide energy and people for all of the downtown but also to make good use of storefront space that might be difficult to fill with other uses.

The first laptop met with distaste because it was associated with the gendered job of secretary

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The “first recognizable laptop” created in 1982 ran into some problems such as its hefty price tag and its association with typing and who did the typing in many offices:

But Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Handspring (makers of the Treo), was there in 1982 and he told a different story at the Computer History Museum a few years ago during a panel on the laptop. For him, the problems were not exclusively in the harder domains of currency and form factor. No, sociological and psychological reasons made the GRiD Compass hard to sell to businessmen…

This is an amazing fact. We had this product. It was designed for business executives. And the biggest obstacle, one of the biggest obstacles, we had for selling the product was the fact — believe it or not — that it had a keyboard. I was in sales and marketing. I saw this first-hand. At that time, 1982, business people, who were in their 40s and 50s, did not have any computer or keyboard in their offices. And it was associated with being part of the secretarial pool or the word processing (remember that industry?) department. And so you’d put this thing in their office and they’d say, “Get that out of here.” It was like getting a demotion. They really were uncomfortable with it…

The second reason they were uncomfortable with it is that none of them knew how to type. And it wasn’t like they said, “Oh, I’ll have to learn how to type.” They were very afraid — I saw this first-hand — they were very afraid of appearing inept. Like, “You give me this thing, and I’m gonna push the wrong keys. I’m gonna fail.”

In Hawkins telling at least, there was no way around these obstacles. “We couldn’t solve this problem. It took a generational change, for the next younger group who had been exposed to terminals and computers to grow up,” he continued. “That was an amazing technology adoption problem you would have never thought about.”

This is a great example of underlying sociological issues that might not be considered fully when making and marketing a new product. On one hand, this was an exciting new technology but on the other hand, existing social factors made it difficult for businessmen to grab the opportunity this technology represented. Ideas about gender and who was supposed to be a typist, viewed as a lower status position, influenced technology adaptation.

Also, this story could lead into the history of secretaries and typists. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the field of secretaries started turning away from men to women. Like other gendered occupations with a majority of women, secretary became a lower status position with relatively lower pay.

A lot of web traffic comes through the “dark social,” not through social network sites

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Alexis Madrigal argues that while social network sites like Facebook get a lot of attention, a lot of web traffic is influenced by social processes that are much more difficult to see and measure:

Here’s a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked into gear, and thereafter the web’s users began to connect with each other more and more often. Hence Web 2.0, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not strawmanning here. This is the dominant history of the web as seen, for example, in this Wikipedia entry on the ‘Social Web.’…

There are circumstances, however, when there is no referrer data. You show up at our doorstep and we have no idea how you got here. The main situations in which this happens are email programs, instant messages, some mobile applications*, and whenever someone is moving from a secure site (“https://mail.google.com/blahblahblah“) to a non-secure site (http://www.theatlantic.com).
This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you…
Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site…
If what I’m saying is true, then the tradeoffs we make on social networks is not the one that we’re told we’re making. We’re not giving our personal data in exchange for the ability to share links with friends. Massive numbers of people — a larger set than exists on any social network — already do that outside the social networks. Rather, we’re exchanging our personal data in exchange for the ability to publish and archive a record of our sharing. That may be a transaction you want to make, but it might not be the one you’ve been told you made.

Two thoughts about this:

1. Here is how I might interpret this argument from a sociological point of view: Internet traffic is heavily dependent on social connections. Whether this is done on sites like Facebook, which are more publicly social, or through email, which is restricted from public view but is still quite social, the interactions people have influence where they go on the web. In this sense, the Internet is an important social domain that may have some of its own norms and rules as well as its own advantages and disadvantages but it is built around human connections.

2. This sounds like a fantastic business and/or research opportunity; what is going on in this “dark social” realm? Could there be ways at getting at these activities that would help us better understand and analyze the importance of social connections and interactions and could this information be monetized as well?

McMansions in Zion National Park?

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McMansions are often associated with sprawl but what happens when such homes are proposed for national park land?

There are 11,640 pieces of private land inside U.S. national parks. From Yosemite to Yellowstone, many have homes either built or being built on them. The land was owned before the national parks existed or ended up inside them as the parks expanded, according to the National Park Service.

Will Rogers, president of The Trust for Public Land, asked how big of an issue this is, he said, “It’s a really big deal. It’s like putting a fast food chain in the middle of the National Mall.”

He’s particularly concerned about what critics call a “McMansion” being built on a bluff overlooking a valley in Zion. Julie Hamilton was shocked to see it during a hike. “All of a sudden there’s this big house up on hill,” she said. “It’s like, are they going to build more? What’s happening here?”

What’s happening is budget cuts. In the 1960s, Congress established the Land and Water Conservation Fund — $900 million a year paid for with offshore drilling royalties from oil companies. That money was historically used to buy up private lands in national parks when landowners decide to sell. But two-thirds of the oil money is now routinely spent by Congress on other programs, leaving the parks unable to compete with wealthy buyers.

What if the homes being built weren’t McMansions but more modest structures? How about a green McMansion? Would these be more acceptable or is this really about any private development at all within national parks?

I suspect this is one of those cases where McMansion is a very effective to term to use because it contrasts strongly with the image of national parks. National parks equal pristine, rural land. McMansions evoke the idea of sprawl and SUVs. It is one thing to talk about homes or perhaps cottages, a term that might evoke images of Thomas Kinkade-like residences, but another to call them McMansions.

Cell phone users now comprise half of Gallup’s polling contacts

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Even as Americans are less interested in participating in telephone surveys, polling firms are trying to keep up. Gallup has responded by making sure 50% of people contacted for polling samples are cell phone users:

Polling works only when it is truly representative of the population it seeks to understand. So, naturally, Gallup’s daily tracking political surveys include cellphone numbers, given how many Americans have given up on land lines altogether. But what’s kind of amazing is that it now makes sure that 50 percent of respondents in each poll are contacted via mobile numbers.

Gallup’s editor in chief, Frank Newport, wrote yesterday about the evolution of Gallup’s methods to remain “consistent with changes in the communication behavior and habits of those we are interviewing.” In the 1980s the company moved from door-to-door polling to phone calls. In 2008 it added cellphones. To reflect the growing number of Americans who have gone mobile-only, it has steadily increased the percentage of those numbers it contacts.

“If we were starting from scratch today,” Newport told Wired, “we would start with cellphones.”…

Although it may be a better reflection of society, mobile-phone polling is more expensive, says Newport. They have to call more numbers because the response rate is lower due to the nature of mobile communication.

As technology and social conventions change, researchers have to try and keep up. This is a difficult task, particularly if fewer people want to participate and technologies offer more and more options to screen out unknown requests. Where are we going next: polling by text? Utilizing well-used platforms like Facebook (where we know many people are turning every day)?

Illustrating the tensions of gentrification in Venice, California

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A sociologist has written an analysis of the tensions in gentrification as it has taken place in Venice, California:

Andrew Deener, a University of Connecticut assistant professor who lived in Venice for six years while receiving his Ph.D from UCLA, describes the tension facing Venice – and many American cities – between cultural diversity and urban grime and the recent influx of wealthy residents that have renounced the suburban lifestyle but may still expect many of its benefits – like clean streets, low crime rates and good schools.

In his book “Venice – a Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles,” that was released in July, Deener attempts to relate the new issues facing Venice to explain a cultural phenomenon that is taking part throughout the country – new wealthier residents sometimes clashing with established lower and middle-class residents.

“Urbanites generally give lip service to their search for diversity, but when they see what it means to share spaces – especially with individuals of different socioeconomic backgrounds – they become more cautious and critical,” Deener found.

This sounds like a typical gentrification process. Wealthier or higher-class residents are attracted to Venice because of its lower prices compared to other nearby locations and its gritty nature. However, when these new residents move in, they tend to want amenities more in line with their lifestyles and tastes, which eventually cleans up the grit, and the amenities plus their wealth tends to raise property values, which forces lower-income residents out. It may not be that Venice can retain its gritty character forever; neighborhoods and communities do change over time and local leaders and residents would have to fight hard to keep the community the way it is. At the same time, it is not surprising that existing residents may not greet incoming wealthier residents with open arms as their presence can change the community into something different.

Other cities want to copy the success of New York’s High Line but this isn’t easy to do

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According to the BBC, a number of cities around the world would like to learn from New York’s High Line:

In Shoreditch, east London, the idea of building a new park on top of the old railway arches at the Bishopsgate Goods Yard, abandoned since the mid 1960s, is being considered.

Chicago is proposing to redevelop 2.7 miles (4.3 km) of disused elevated railway line into the Bloomingdale Trail. Its fellow US city Philadelphia is looking at transforming the Reading Viaduct into an elevated linear park. And in Rotterdam, Netherlands, another old elevated track is being considered as a site for a park and shops. The High Line itself echoes Paris’ Promenade Plantee, inaugurated in 1993…

James Corner, the British landscape architect who designed the High Line, is working on the transformation of London’s Olympic South Plaza into part of the future Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Corner is also working on a proposal to redevelop Liverpool’s 1980s Everton Park.

A competition to design London’s answer to the High Line has just been won by a project to grow mushrooms in unused mail tunnels under Oxford Street. It’s unlikely to be built, but it was this kind of radical thinking that made the High Line a hit.

This is not uncommon: cities often look to other cities to see what has worked. New ideas can be risky, particularly ones that require a large outlay of money (the article says New York’s High Line cost $112 million but will add about $900 million in tax revenue over 20 years). Therefore, if this can work in New York and other cities would not only like to have similar success (not only creating an exciting public space but also one whose benefits spread to nearby locations) but also want to “catch up” with one of the world’s leading cities, undertaking similar projects can be attractive.

However, I wonder about two related factors that might be necessary to remember when learning from the High Line:

1. Just because this worked in New York City doesn’t necessarily mean that it can work elsewhere. Different cities have different conditions and contingencies. Simply replicating the project may work – and it may not.

2. These new projects need to be representative of the city they are in, not simply an imported item from New York City. In other words, they have to have some or a lot of local flavor and influence. Otherwise, the High Lines become another commodified space like shopping malls and generic tourist markets.

I’m guessing these other big cities are aware of these issues but this makes it a much more difficult process as leaders and residents think through how similar physical spaces might turn out to be very different places when constructed in different cities.

19% of Americans now religiously unaffiliated but many are still religious or spiritual

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Pew reported yesterday that the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation continues to rise to over 19%. However, there is a complex story taking place with this group: many are still religious or spiritual, this may be more about generational change, and it could be that those who rarely go to church are now more willing to say so.

However, a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, conducted jointly with the PBS television program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, finds that many of the country’s 46 million unaffiliated adults are religious or spiritual in some way. Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68%). More than half say they often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58%), while more than a third classify themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious” (37%), and one-in-five (21%) say they pray every day. In addition, most religiously unaffiliated Americans think that churches and other religious institutions benefit society by strengthening community bonds and aiding the poor.

With few exceptions, though, the unaffiliated say they are not looking for a religion that would be right for them. Overwhelmingly, they think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics…

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans – sometimes called the rise of the “nones” – is largely driven by generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones. A third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation (32%), compared with just one-in-ten who are 65 and older (9%). And young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives…

In addition to religious behavior, the way that Americans talk about their connection to religion seems to be changing. Increasingly, Americans describe their religious affiliation in terms that more closely match their level of involvement in churches and other religious organizations. In 2007, 60% of those who said they seldom or never attend religious services nevertheless described themselves as belonging to a particular religious tradition. In 2012, just 50% of those who say they seldom or never attend religious services still retain a religious affiliation – a 10-point drop in five years. These trends suggest that the ranks of the unaffiliated are swelling in surveys partly because Americans who rarely go to services are more willing than in the past to drop their religious attachments altogether.

So while the number of atheists and agnostics has risen in the last few years, the number of non-affiliated Americans has risen even more as more people are less interested in identifying with religious institutions.

I wonder if there is another explanation at work here: in general, Americans now have less trust in all institutions. Here is where things stood in October 2011:

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed barely 10 percent of the public trusts the government. But it doesn’t stop there: Trust in public institutions like corporations, banks, courts, the media and universities is at an all-time low; the military is one of the few exceptions.

Perhaps this is a package deal. And perhaps this was part of the oddness of the 1950s; the prosperous era suggested Americans could trust institutions (and church attendance and membership went up) but the zeitgeist started going the other way in the 1960s.

Washington D.C. the wealthiest city/metropolitan area in the country

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According to 2011 American Community Survey data, Washington D.C. is the wealthiest metropolitan area in the country:

D.C. area residents have a median household income of $86,680, well above the national average of $50,502.

The large salaries may be attributable to the nearly 47 percent of workers who hold college degrees, making Washington one of the most highly educated areas in the country.

The list also shows more adults in the area were able to find employment during a down economic time. Just 5.8 percent of the workforce were unemployed in 2011.

Only 8.3 percent of Washington homes are living below the poverty line — the fifth lowest ranking in the country.

Here is some common traits of the wealthier cities in the United States:

The biggest factor in determining a city’s income, according to Alex Friedhoff, a Research Analyst at Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Program, is the underlying industries that employ the most residents, as well as the type of jobs. High-tech jobs, particularly those related to computers and information technology, tend to pay higher salaries and are more likely to be located in areas with affluent residents. On the other hand, most of the jobs in the lower-income metro areas tend to be in retail, service, agriculture and low-tech manufacturing.

A review of the employment characteristics of the different cities confirms this. Included among the richest cities are the information technology centers of Boston and Boulder, the finance hub of Bridgeport-Stamford, and the San Jose region, better known as Silicon Valley, home to some of the largest chipmakers and computer parts manufacturers in the world. Nationwide, 10.7% of workers are employed in professional, scientific, and management positions. Of the 10 wealthy metro regions, nine have a larger proportion of workers in that sector. In Boulder, 21.9% fall into that category.

In the poorest economies, there is a much higher proportion of low-end manufacturing and retail jobs. In the U.S. as a whole, 11.6% of workers are employed in retail. In the 10 poorest metro areas, eight exceed that number by a wide margin, including Hot Springs, Arkansas, where 17.3% of its workforce is employed in retail.

Based on these listed traits, perhaps we can make this conclusion: cities that have better adapted to the new information age economy based on innovation, computers, and highly educated workers are doing the best in terms of income. Places that haven’t been able to attract this kind of industry are playing from behind.

An important note about these stories: while headlines suggest this data is about cities, it is really about metropolitan regions. So when Washington D.C. is cited as the wealthiest city, this is not quite true; the region is the wealthiest. While some might that the city itself is necessary for the whole region to exist or thrive, a lot of this wealth plus many of the jobs are actually suburban. Don’t confuse the two though this often happens in the media.

Politicians trying to woo the ambigiously defined middle class

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Amidst an election cycle where all sides want to woo the middle class, several researchers suggest that providing an exact definition of the middle class is difficult:

“You can’t define middle class, but you can ask people, ‘Do you still feel middle class?’ And more and more people don’t,” said Tim Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin…

“The whole attraction of middle class … is it doesn’t mean anything,” said Dennis Gilbert, a sociology professor at Hamilton College who studies class issues. “Middle class means anybody who might vote for you.”…

Still, experts say the term middle class has a cultural connotation that goes beyond the number on your paycheck or tax stub.

Kevin Leicht, director of the Iowa Social Science Research Center at the University of Iowa, said many Americans think of a middle-class life as being one in which you have a stable job, own your own home and occasionally buy something substantial like a new car. You also either went to college or have the aspiration of sending your children to college.

I would disagree with Gilbert and agree with Leicht and Smeeding. When asked, Americans do tend to feel they are middle class, the recent economic crisis notwithstanding. The middle class in America is more of an idea than a clearly-defined category that people move in and out of. Cultural categories can be powerful, perhaps even more so than economic realities.

Recently, the Brookings Institution defined six likely life stages a middle-class person goes through and in 2010, a government task force tied being middle class to six outcomes. It is not impossible to set such criteria for measurement purposes but they do not match up with everyone who would call themselves middle class.

Speaking of politicians looking for middle-class votes, I haven’t seen journalists or scholars discussing how this wooing developed in American political history. How long has this wooing been taking place? Is this primarily a post-World War II phenomenon or does it have a longer history? I wonder if the middle class only matters here because it is in this period of history that politicians think there are a large number of voters to be swayed in this category…