What Social Scientists Do, volume 43, number 17

The following ad is for a post-doc and so none of us is eligible (though projects that need post docs always need research assistants so a little googling could go a long way for soon-to-graduate types), but it gives you another angle on the kinds of things people are doing with sociology (and other social science) degrees in connection with new media.

And note that we are offering a sociology of mass communication this spring!

See the Movie; Assess the Commentator

In today's Times, David Brooks says "The Social Network" is not good sociology, but it is good psychology.  What do you think?

 

Opinion

The Facebook Searchers

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: October 7, 2010

 

“The Social Network” is spot on with its parsing of who wins and loses in our information economy and hypercompetitive meritocracy.

"In 1952, two-thirds of Harvard applicants were admitted. The average verbal SAT score for incoming freshmen was 583. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in.

 

"Harvard’s president at the time, James Bryant Conant, decided to change that. Harvard could no longer be about birth and WASP breeding, he realized. It had to promote intelligence and merit. Within eight years, the average freshman had a verbal score of 678 and a math score of 695. New sorts of people were going to Harvard — more intellectual and less blue blood. But Conant didn’t want his school to be home to unidimensional brainiacs. He hoped to retain the emphasis on character.  

"In “The Social Network,” the director David Fincher and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin imagine that these two Harvards still exist side by side. On top, there is the old WASP Harvard of Mayflower families, regatta blazers and Anglo-Saxon cheekbones. Underneath, there is the largely Jewish and Asian Harvard of brilliant but geeky young strivers.

"This social structure will be familiar to moviegoers. From “Animal House” through “Revenge of the Nerds,” it has provided the basic plotline for most collegiate movies. But as sociology, of course, it’s completely fanciful."  [Read More]
 

The Quantified Self: Meetup tomorrow, Wednesday, October 6, 2010 6:00 PM!

 Some of you sociology/anthropology types might find this "meetup" group dedicated to "the quantified self" interesting.  What they mean by QS is any form of "self-tracking."  It is, at once, the data collection of the future and, in its way, an intriguing manifestation of the protestant ethic.

--Dan

	Meetup Reminder The Bay Area Quantified Self Meetup Group
Your group has a Meetup tomorrow! You still need to RSVP.

What QS Show&Tell #16 (Autodesk Gallery in SF) When Wednesday, October 6, 2010 6:00 PM Who 159 Yes Where Autodesk Gallery One Market Street, 2nd Floor San Francisco CA 94105	159 Self-Quantifiers RSVPed Yes, including… see all
Meetup Description Please join us for yet another interesting, fun night of self-tracking presentations, sharing ideas, and showing tools. This time we will be at the breathtaking Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco, with innovations ranging from 3-D printed gadgets to augmented reality displays for us to responsibly play with. It's an amazing setting - thanks to Carlos Olguin at Autodesk for hosting us! Our theme for the presentations will be location, transportation, consumption, and energy. If you are self-tracking in any way, please come and share your methods and results during the opening workshop, or volunteer to give a talk. We will also be experimenting with a sticky-note board where people with similar interests can find each other - thanks to David Fetherstonhaugh from IDEO for this suggestion! 6 -7:30 pm SOCIAL HOUR AND WORKSHOP: If you have a self-tracking project, gadget, app, or idea you'd like to share or demo, but you don't want to get up and talk about it, the workshop hour is for you. You don't need to have a prepared talk, or permission to show something. Just come and bring what you have. We will have tables and power strips where you can plug in a laptop if you like, but paper is good too. Think: "science fair." With healthy snacks and wine to get the conversation flowing. Just to be clear, we save the talks for personal accounts of self-tracking and self-experimentation, rather than sales/investor pitches. But of course we are also interested in tools! If you are making something useful for self-trackers – software, hardware, web services, or data standards – please demo it in this workshop portion of the Show&Tell. 7:30 pm – 9 pm QS SHOW&TELL TALKS For this meetup, we're excited to have a theme of location, transportation, consumption, and energy. We have some exciting speakers planned, to be announced soon! If you'd like to talk about your project, please let us know in advance so we can discuss your topic and how much time you'll need. Bonus points if your talk includes the use of AutoCAD or other Autodesk software! QS SPONSORS: OUR THANKS TO AUTODESK AND HEALTHTAP An incredible space is generously being provided by Autodesk. Thanks too to HealthTap, our first annual sponsor, for supporting the Quantified Self movement expansion across the country and around the world. Three cheers to them for making our gathering possible! QS SPONSORSHIP - WHAT IT IS We use the sponsor money to pay for professional video recording and healthy refreshments, as well as to fund projects that help the larger QS community. If you or your company are interested in sponsoring Quantified Self, please let us know. See you there!
This Meetup Group is sponsored by Autodesk · CureTogether · HealthTap

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UCB Colloquium: Mobilizing Inclusion -- TODAY at 2 p.m.

MONDAY September 13th

BLUMER ROOM – 402 BARROWS HALL

2:00-3:30pm

The Berkeley Sociology Colloquium Series FALL 2010 Presents:

 Mobilizing Inclusion: Getting Out the Vote among Low-Propensity Voters

 

Lisa García Bedolla

Graduate School of Education

University of California, Berkeley

 &

 Melissa Michelson

Department of Political Science

Menlo College

Political participation studies have consistently found that socioeconomic status (SES) -- education, occupation, and income -- is the best predictor of voter turnout. Yet, over the past decade hundreds of field experiments have shown that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts, usually a short conversation on a voter's doorstep, changes individual behavior. Given the voter's resources do not change as a result of that conversation, how can we explain why GOTV works? Using a foundation of over 300 field experiments fielded across six electoral cycles, we put forward a cognitive explanation for the power of GOTV. We argue that brief conversation, because it takes the form of a narrative social interaction, changes the voter's cognitive schema. In addition, through their voting practice, these marginalized voters are not only changing their own self-perceptions, but they are also redefining and expanding the American electorate -- what we call "governmentality from below." It is at this intersection between the individual and the social context that the transformative potential of GOTV may be realized.

What's Out There: Grad School in Internet Journalism

The details of this probably make it inappropriate for current students, but it gives you an idea of some alternative paths through grad school that you might not ordinarily hear about.

-- Dan

Jobs with a Sociology Major

The following is not a job for which a BA in sociology would qualify you, but I thought it'd be useful to pass it along to supplement your mental database of sociology related jobs. The field of online content creation is a growing one, and will, I suspect, play a larger and larger role in higher education over time (for better or worse, one can add).

The New Demography of American Motherhood

A recent report, "The New Demography of American Motherhood," by Gretchen Livingston and D’Vera Cohn of the Pew Research Center "examines the changing demographic characteristics of U.S. mothers by comparing women who gave birth in 2008 with those who gave birth in 1990. It is based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Census Bureau. It also presents results of a nationwide Pew Research Center survey that asked a range of questions about parenthood."

"Among the key findings of this report:

• "Age: Mothers of newborns are older now than their counterparts were two decades ago. In 1990, teens had a higher share of all births (13%) than did women ages 35 and older (9%). In 2008, the reverse was true -- 10% of births were to teens, compared with 14% to women ages 35 and older. Each race and ethnic group had a higher share of mothers of newborns in 2008 who are ages 35 and older, and a lower share who are teens, than in 1990.
• "Marital Status: A record four-in-ten births (41%) were to unmarried women in 2008, including most births to women in their early 20s. In 1990, 28% of births were to unmarried women. The unmarried-mother share of births has increased most sharply for whites and Hispanics, although the highest share is for black women.
• "Race and Ethnicity: White women made up 53% of mothers of newborns in 2008, down from 65% in 1990. The share of births to Hispanic women has grown dramatically, to one-in-four.
• "Education: Most mothers of newborns (54%) had at least some college education in 2006, an increase from 41% in 1990. Among mothers of newborns who were ages 35 and older, 71% had at least some college education.
• "Explaining the Trends: All the trends cited above reflect a complex mix of demographic and behavioral factors. For example, the higher share of college-educated mothers stems both from their rising birth rates and from women's increasing educational attainment. The rise in births to unmarried women reflects both their rising birth rates and the shrinking share of adults who are married.
• "Attitudes about Parenthood: When asked why they decided to have their first (or only) child, the overwhelming majority of parents (87%) answer, 'The joy of having children.' But nearly half (47%) also say, 'There wasn't a reason; it just happened.'"

Read Online Report or download PDF of full report.

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