While in graduate school, I learned that data for sociology research could be found online. The Census had a website. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research had a website. Social media platforms were blooming with Myspace offering lots of activity to examine and Facebook launching. Still today in 2024, I continue to make use of both of these streams of data:
Datasets available online. The ability to look up accurate and detailed statistics is hard to overvalue. For example, I regularly access the Census website and The Association of Religion Data Archives for information. I experienced the flip-side in graduate school as well. On one research assistant project, I looked through World Health Organization statistics published in thick bound volumes by the United Nations. Presumably, some of these books still exist but the expectation is that such information should be available online.
Online activity as data. With the growth of the World Wide Web and social media, sociologists and others use what is online as research data. I have published a few works that draw on websites and online materials to examine patterns. Of course, online activity is not necessarily the same as offline activity but I think the so-called “virtual world” and “real world” overlap more than people sometimes think. Studying online activity can tell us about important online patterns and offline patterns.
On the other hand, I did not have any specific training in graduate school about how to access this data online. Navigating websites and datasets online requires experience and know-how. Developing datasets from online activity takes work. A lot of methodological writing and advice can apply to online data but collecting data online can be its own process. What about having programming skills to speed up data collection and analysis?
I am sure there is a lot of research to come that will use both of these data streams to good effect. I look forward to the findings about society and social relationships to come.
I often typed “hipster coffee shop” into the search bar as a shorthand because Yelp’s search algorithm always knew exactly what I meant by the phrase. It was the kind of cafe that someone like me – a western, twentysomething (at the time), internet-brained millennial acutely conscious of their own taste – would want to go to. Inevitably, I could quickly identify a cafe among the search results that had the requisite qualities: plentiful daylight through large storefront windows; industrial-size wood tables for accessible seating; a bright interior with walls painted white or covered in subway tiles; and wifi available for writing or procrastinating. Of course, the actual coffee mattered, too, and at these cafes you could be assured of getting a cappuccino made from fashionably light-roast espresso, your choice of milk variety and elaborate latte art. The most committed among the cafes would offer a flat white (a cappuccino variant that originated in Australia and New Zealand) and avocado toast, a simple dish, also with Australian origins, that over the 2010s became synonymous with millennial consumer preferences. (Infamous headlines blamed millennials’ predilection for expensive avocado toast for their inability to buy real estate in gentrifying cities.)
These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring…
My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map…
Simply existing as a coffee shop isn’t enough; the business has to cultivate a parallel existence on the internet, which is a separate skill set entirely. “It almost feels like, you must have a social media acumen, you must be savvy in this area that is adjacent to your business, but not directly embedded in your business, in order to be successful and visible,” Walsh continued. That means plenty of tagged photos on Instagram and positive user reviews on the business’s listing on Yelp or Google Maps…
The other strategy is to remain consistent, not worrying about trends or engagement and simply sticking to what you know best – staying authentic to a personal ethos or brand identity in the deepest sense. In a way, coffee shops are physical filtering algorithms, too: they sort people based on their preferences, quietly attracting a particular crowd and repelling others by their design and menu choices. That kind of community formation might be more important in the long run than attaining perfect latte art and collecting Instagram followers. That is ultimately what Anca Ungureanu was trying to do in Bucharest. “We are a coffee shop where you can meet people like you, people that have interests like you,” she said. Her comment made me think that a certain amount of homogeneity might be an unavoidable consequence of algorithmic globalisation, simply because so many like-minded people are now moving through the same physical spaces, influenced by the same digital platforms. The sameness has a way of compounding.
As a different kind of place, fast food restaurants are often criticized for their sameness. As part of a larger brand, individual locations feature similar food, aesthetics, and signs that provide familiarity for patrons.
Coffee shops are supposed to be the antithesis. They are cool while fast food is formulaic and bad for you. They offer sophistication rather than mass production. They allow space for quietly working or interacting with friends while fast food places are about efficiency and moving people in and out.
But, this piece suggests the Internet and a particular class of people have helped contribute to sameness across continents. These may be independent coffee shops but they are trying to respond to global patterns. Do customers really want a unique place or do they want some predictability? The McDonaldization (from sociologist George Ritzer) of space is worth considering more as physical spaces are shaped by Internet realities. People operate and interact in both realms. The suggestion here is that the Internet is driving the shaping of physical spaces and the reverse could happen as well.
My guess at how Peoria or a similar city could truly boom is that a major, well-known company moves its operations to the city. While the opposite might seem to be happening in cities like Peoria – such as Caterpillar moving out – imagine a Silicon Valley company making Peoria home. Such a move could be good for its employees and help improve the fortunes of a different area.
According to Know Your Meme, treating Ohio as a joke started in 2016 after the meme “Ohio vs the world” went viral on Tumblr. User @screenshotsofdespair posted a photo of a digital marquee in an unknown city that read, “Ohio will be eliminated.”
At the time, the joke was Ohio was secretly plotting to take over the world, hence the photo calling for its silencing. By the time 2020 rolled around, jokes about the state had evolved…
Now, most memes about the state are saying “so Ohio” or “only in Ohio” about something bizarre or random. It’s usually tied to images, GIFs or videos that highlight something ridiculous. The memes imply that Ohio is a place where strange things happen. Ironically, it’s actually been named one of the “most normal” states in the U.S.
Describing the internet trend, Know Your Meme explains how the memes have essentially re-branded Ohio. Now it is “an American middle place, existing as a capitalist wasteland of chaos and mayhem, akin to creepypastas, lore and randomness, becoming an imagined epitome of American signifiers such as Breezewood, Pennsylvania.”
The Ohio memes have become so near-constant that they’ve taken on a life of their own. To date, the hashtag #Ohio has 33 billion views on TikTok, while #OnlyInOhio has about three billion. In some cases, people have made memes about the memes.
And then there could be places and communities that are known but cannot embody all of America. Could New York City all about America or does its status as the leading global city and its particular history and character mean that it cannot embody all of the United States? (Perhaps normal American cities are Cleveland.)
A recent Gallup poll found that 28% of Americans worry frequently or occasionally that they will be murdered, according to a Nov. 16 news release. That’s a near-record high…
This heightened apprehension has had a detrimental effect on the daily lives of Americans, causing them to curb commonplace activities.
Four in ten Americans — the largest number in three decades — are afraid to walk within a mile of their homes alone at night, according to the poll. The last time concerns about walking alone were so high was in 1993, when nationwide crime was near an all-time high, according to a 2016 report from the Brennan Center for Justice…
Violent crime in the U.S. peaked in 1991 at a level of 758 offenses per every 100,000 people, according to the FBI. Since then, it has precipitously fallen, though there have been occasional upticks…
Research has shown that there is no connection between crime rates and levels of concern about crime, Barry Glassner, a sociologist and author of “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things,” told McClatchy News.
Perceptions and reality are two different things. Sociologists need to study both as perceptions can drive a lot of actions, policy, and beliefs. Simply repeating the actual numbers will not necessarily convince people.
While television news and politicians are implicated at the end of the story, I wonder about the role of social media. It is relatively easy to share stories of single events. Social media collapses the broader social world by amplifying smaller patterns and individual occurrences. Does it spread fear about crime (among other fears)?
Additionally, how much is this tied to long-standing anti-urban sentiments in the United States? If the majority of Americans live in suburbs but perceive crime to be a problem in cities, this can intersect with their existing ideas about cities.
If you’re in your 30s or your 40s, and you’ve already built your clout and you’ve made your place in the world and you’re now being told you’re going to have to go start over somewhere else, you probably find that idea profoundly exhausting. But go talk to a 13-year-old. Are they exhausted by the idea that they’ll have to be online? No. They’re thrilled. Ask an 8-year-old what he wants to be when he grows up; he’s going to tell you he wants to be a YouTuber. Don’t sit here and tell me that the social web is over. The social web is being reborn, and I’m sorry that that makes you tired.
The global town square is dead. Long live 45 different global town squares.
Yes, and no one is brave enough to write that maybe it’s a good thing that now there are 16 different places to post. Weren’t we all supposed to be upset that there were these monolithic platforms and that we were all governed by their rules? We had no recourse if a content moderation decision went against us. Weren’t we supposed to be upset about the concentration of power? Well, now we have what we asked for. There is no longer a concentration of power in social networks. And so, instead of saying social networks have no future, I think the more interesting question to ask is: What is the future of these platforms that are being born?
The idea here is that the social media realm is fracturing into a lot of other smaller spheres. This has happened before in other media forms; television went through a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s where the number of channels and content expanded and audiences fractured or in print when texts were rare and controlled and then exploded with the printing press.
Something or some setting will likely arise for Americans to share their opinions if social media fails to play this role. But, whether it is a long-term space that hosts robust discussion as opposed to simply sharing thoughts is another matter.
Social media platforms are having a field day with microapartments and tiny homes like Mr. Marshall’s, breathing life into the curiosity about that way of living. The small spaces have captivated viewers, whether they are responding to soaring housing prices or to a boundary-pushing alternate lifestyle, as seen on platforms like the Never Too Small YouTube channel. But while there is no precise count on the number of tiny homes and microapartments on the market, the attention on social media has not necessarily made viewers beat a path in droves to move in, perhaps because the spaces sometimes can be a pain to live in…
Viewers of microapartment videos are like visitors to the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay who “get inside of a cell and have the door closed,” said Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California.
Social media users want to experience what it’s like at the “anomalously small end” of the housing scale, she explained…
Pablo J. Boczkowski, a professor of communications studies at Northwestern University, said that despite the belief that new technologies have a powerful influence, millions of clicks don’t translate into people making a wholesale lifestyle change.
Perhaps it will take a long term social media effort for people to adopt tiny homes? What could be curiosity at the beginning could become normalized as more and more people are exposed to popular images. If such tiny homes are still drawing a lot of views and engagement in a few years, could this add up to something?
Still, I would not be surprised if more tiny or smaller residences attract social media hits in the coming years. If under 100 or 200 square feet is too small, could more housing options at 200-500 feet prove attractive in real life and on smartphones?
This has been possible with Photoshop and similar tools for years but Magic Eraser from Google makes it even easier: we can get rid of strangers in our photos. Should we?
My most Andy Rooney opinion, at least since the latest flare-up of the sleepover debate (I’m pro), is that we should not erase strangers from our family pictures. My original nuclear family’s albums, which my mother maintained in those classic 1980s scrapbooks with self-adhesive pages, annotating each image in her distinctive handwriting, are absolutely, positively chock-full of randos. When I was in elementary school, I loved to look at these pictures, hauling out two albums at a time and paging through them at our kitchen table. It was a time when I was becoming acutely aware of the difference between our family and others—not in a bad way, but in an interested one. We lived in a small town, and our family vacations gave us information about how things were elsewhere. I wasn’t going to pass up analyzing those clues.
The people we are around are also parts of our lives, even if we do not know them. To take pictures in public often means that others are present. We may not interact with them but we do not live in a world where we have our own bubbles and no one else is around.
There may be occasional times where removing strangers makes sense. Perhaps we want to focus on particular people or a particular scene. But, doing this at a larger scale always puts us at the center and makes it appear as other people do not exist.
Is this a continuation of the emphasis on the individual self? Social media, which is linked to the images we take, see, and use today, also encourages emphasizing ourselves. In images and a world where there is no one portrayed around us, we are at the center.
A future world where our pictures only feature us makes me think of Black Mirror or an extended global pandemic where streets and public places are empty. It would be a loss of our collective memories and the ways that we rely on nameless others every day.
Los Angeles-based car YouTuber effspot stumbled across something we’ve heard about but haven’t been able to dig up solid evidence of: dealerships are hiding a ton of new inventory in secret locations. Now you might think these dealers are putting their overstock vehicles in some secure location like a warehouse or locked lot, and some definitely are, but effspot found hundreds of Jeeps, Dodges, Rams, and Chryslers stashed in a public parking garage, all apparently put there by just one dealership.
This is a potentially interesting find. How common is this?
Dealerships have been running this scheme for months and months, but it’s starting to fall apart despite some media outlets trying to claim there may be no return to normal for the car market. Instead, both the new and used markets are going in only one direction: down. Just how quickly and by how much remains to be seen, but don’t believe car dealerships have hardly any vehicles and need to overcharge you big time for the privilege of new car ownership.
So we go from one parking garage is “dealerships have been running this scheme for months and months”? Roughly 51 seconds into the YouTube video, the maker says “these dealerships, or at least this particular dealership” has engaged in these practices. Later, at 5:52, he asks whether this is happening around the country.
This does not necessarily mean the larger argument is not true. But, the evidence presented here shows one parking garage and cars from one dealer. How broad is this practice? We do not know from this video and story.
This might just be the daily story of the Internet and social media. Interesting things are posted. Information is shared. People describe their experiences. But, it is difficult to know how this matches larger patterns or not. An individual reader might be able to make connections across stories. Or, people online could connect the dots for others. For example, others could make videos on YouTube detailing their finds of auto inventory in different locations. Sometimes these connections are made, often they are not. The next day comes and there is more information to process and relatively little that helps fit all the pieces together.
The connection is not just the Internet and social media and the way they connect us to more people and narratives. This is a change in statistics: we think we can see larger patterns and we can access more information.
Whether what we see on social media is a real pattern might not matter. (A reminder: relatively few people are active on Twitter.) We see more online and we can see what people are highlighting. This might appear as a pattern.
Not too long ago, we were more limited in our ability to compare our actions to others. The mass media existed but in more packaged forms (television, radio, music, films, newspapers, etc.) rather than the user-driven content of social media. The comparisons to that mass media still mattered – I remember sociologist Juliet Schor’s argument in The Overspent American of how increased TV watching was related to increased consumption – but people’s ties to their family and friends in geographic proximity were likely stronger. Or, in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone world, people spent a lot more time in local organizations and groups rather than in the broad realms of the Internet and social media.
Now, we can easily see how our choices or circumstances compare to others. Even odd situations we find ourselves in quickly be matched across a vast set of platforms for similarities and differences. Whether our tastes are mainstream or unusual, we can see how they stack up. If I am on college campus X on one side of the country, I can easily see what is happening on college campuses around the world.
Even as the Internet and social media is not fully representative of people and society, it does offer a sample regarding what other people are doing. We may care less about what the people directly near us are doing and we can quickly see what broader groups are doing. We can live our everyday lives with a statistical approach: look at the big N sample and adjust accordingly.
Legally Sociable 