dive too much into the small world theory, let’s review some key SNA concepts.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE this. It tells me you have a purpose to your blog post. You have an audience in mind and you understand the goal here is to communicate beyond the academy to inform a broader public. This is what public sociology is all about! Excellent!
nvestigate the networks in the modern society
I think this is the main methodology for digital sociology. We just don't know it yet.
research questions including:
Your challenge will be to make these type of questions more specific and relevant to digital sociology.
people’s behavior and emotions are affected by the people that they know, the people that those people know, and so on – in other words, by the social network which an individual is integrated in
This is the essence of sociology. And is the fundamental challenge to the logic of individualism and neoliberalism.
errelation of individual and society
Isn't all sociology really about networks? Why don't we see them?
What it means to be poor, with many additions in the replies. It is a shame that people are made to feel shame for accepting help or asking for help. If your charity group is giving kids something for Christmas, that's great. But don't put them on the local news.
Hunter S. Thompson saw the Hell's Angels of the 1960s as an example of a problem that was going to get much worse -- people left behind, who therefore have nothing to do but demonstrate their growing resentment for society.
The Shouting Class -- people who criticize things as a way of life.
How could political leaders betray what were supposed to be national values? How could brutal practices be embraced by ordinary Americans?
Or, as she put it, “Why did no one stop people from doing bad things?”
The answer you’re supposed to give to children – one I heard myself as a child – is “That’s just the way things were.” You’re supposed to say “Lots of good people owned slaves” or “It was legal then”. You’re supposed to pretend that historic injustices have either been resolved or that they were never that bad, that they didn’t linger and structure the politics of the present.
You’re supposed to normalize cruelty, and in doing so exonerate those who practiced it.
A lot of people will do whatever they can get away with. There aren't always enough people brave enough to bluntly say something is wrong.
But for me, hope is not a feeling. It is not an emotion. Hope is action. Hope is found in motion.
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Hope begins the moment that somebody stands up and says, “Let’s roll.”
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It is clear to me though that hopelessness and despair often lead to an inability to act. When that happens, we must rely on others to act. Anyone that was gone through trauma and faced extended periods of indecisiveness can understand this. This is why a sense of community is so important, and that we share in our action by relying on others to back us up.
Thoughtful blog by Grete Howland, about being raised as an evangelical Christian -- and then discovering that it isn't for her.
For those raised in more liberal, free-thinking denominations, such as certain Episcopal congregations or the Unitarian-Universalist church, the religious molding might not be such a bad thing. In those cases, you might have been taught that everyone is unconditionally welcome in the love of God, that all belief systems are worthy of respect, that decolonization is mandatory practice, to have a community service mindset, and the basic lesson of self-reliance. These are examples of habits and traditions one might want to continue practicing, regardless of personal faith or continued church involvement.
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I had been taught (1) to put my faith in God regarding everything--finances, relationships, and so on--and (2) that the way to deal with stress and pain was to pray for their causes to be gone. I was not supposed to change my thinking; God was supposed to change my circumstances.
I grew up in rural, Christian, white America. ... The problem isn’t that I don’t understand these people. The problem is they don’t understand themselves, the reasons for their anger/frustrations, and don’t seem to care to know why.
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Since facts and reality don’t matter, nothing you say to them will alter their beliefs. “President Obama was born in Kenya, is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood who hates white Americans and is going to take away their guns.” I feel ridiculous even writing this, it is so absurd, but it is gospel across large swaths of rural America. Are rural, Christian, white Americans scared? You’re damn right they are. Are their fears rational and justified? Hell no. The problem isn’t understanding their fears. The problem is how to assuage fears based on lies in closed-off fundamentalist belief systems that don’t have the necessary tools for properly evaluating the fears.
What CAN change their minds?
the results remain compelling nonetheless
At least, they’ve become unavoidable in class discussions even tangentially related to social psychology. In intro sociology, they lead to some interesting thoughts about lab vs. field experiments.
SocArXiv - an upcoming open archive of papers in the social sciences modeled on arxiv.org.
critical rationalism.
what is critical rationalism?
There is also the matter of the system that we—the liberal elite—are quietly creating in which all abuse claims are trusted at face value and any questioning of them is subsequently shamed. I understand that a big part of our culture, our rape culture, is founded on ignoring or disbelieving victims and the societal imperative among the sensitive and educated is to correct that. But without scrutiny even where it’s uncomfortable, we are putting justice at grave risk. So are abuse victims, thereby, at grave risk. Weide’s exercise strikes me as morally sound, at heart.
As sociologists, we study and teach about women’s devalued place in society. But the stigma against the romance genre is so strong that even our background as scholars in the sociology of gender wasn’t enough to inoculate us against the stigma. If anyone was going to know better, it should have been us.
Greyson and Lois establish the pervasive and deeply ingrained pejorative attitude toward the popular romance novel. Admit their own assumptions about the genre mirrored that of our culture.
Those with the highest degree of functional literacy aren’t necessarily those with the highest social status.
In precise contrast with school. In some ways, literacy is such a basic part of schooling that it’s nearly impossible to imagine other core skills (from numeracy to empathy) giving pupils and students any kind of social status outside of literacy.
“Language in the Inner City,”
Labov’s key text on the sociolinguistics of African American Vernacular English, with special attention to verbal eloquence (such as ritual insults, similar to Hip Hop taunts) regardless of literacy levels.
insert reflective pause to acknowledge the power of weak tie networks here
And references to Granovetter, with his famous 1973 article. This [article on sports media and Twitter](http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/20143219270.html sounds contextually relevant.
As any debate club veteran knows, if you can’t make your opponent’s point for them, you don’t truly grasp the issue. We can bemoan political gridlock and a divisive media all we want. But we won’t truly progress as individuals until we make an honest effort to understand those that are not like us. And you won’t convince anyone to feel the way you do if you don’t respect their position and opinions.
The two-party system, formal debate, and typical advice for essay writing all emphasize picking A or B, and then defending it to the death. We should place more emphasis on the identification of alternatives and the collection of objective facts.
In psychology, the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect
We tend to assume that most people think and feel similarly to us. We then categorize those who don't as "other" and somehow inferior. This tendency is intensified when we gather with people who are in fact like-minded. And that happens in social media, where we tend to follow those with similar views.
Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not.
I agree. But on the other hand, "mocking a caricature of the Other Side" is a description of satire, which seems to be a valuable way to spread ideas.
Stupid models are extremely useful. They are usefulbecause humans are boundedly rational and because language is imprecise. It is often only by formalizing a complex system that we can make progress in understanding it. Formal models should be a necessary component of the behavioral scientist’s toolkit. Models are stupid, and we need more of them.
Formal models are explicit in the assumptions they make about how the parts of a system work and interact, and moreover are explicit in the aspects of reality they omit.
Microeconomic models based on rational choice theory are useful for developing intuition, and may even approximate reality in a fewspecial cases, but the history of behavioral economics shows that standard economic theory has also provided a smorgasbord of null hypotheses to be struck down by empirical observation.
Where differences between conditions are indicated, avoid the mistake of running statistical analyses as if you were sampling from a larger population.
You already have a generating model for your data – it’s your model. Statistical analyses on model data often involve modeling your model with a stupider model. Don’t do this. Instead, run enough simulations to obtain limiting distributions.
A model’s strength stemsfromits precision.
I have come across too many modeling papers in which the model – that is, the parts, all their components, the relationships between them, and mechanisms for change – is not clearly expressed. This is most common with computational models (such as agent-based models), which can be quite complicated, but also exists in cases of purely mathematical models.
However, I want to be careful not to elevate modelers above those scientists who employ other methods.
This is important for at least two reasons, the first and foremost of which is that science absolutely requires empirical data. Those data are often painstaking to collect, requiring clever, meticulous, and occasionally tedious labor. There is a certain kind of laziness inherent in the professional modeler, who builds entire worlds from his or her desk using only pen, paper, and computer. Relatedly, many scientists are truly fantastic communicators, and present extremely clear theories that advance scientific understanding without a formal model in sight. Charles Darwin, to give an extreme example, laid almost all the foundations of modern evolutionary biology without writing down a single equation.
Table 1.Twelve functions served by false models. Adapted with permissionfrom Wimsatt
Twelve good uses for dumb models, William Wimsatt (1987).
To paraphrase Gunawardena (2014), a model is a logical engine for turning assumptions into conclusions.
By making our assumptions explicit, we can clearly assess their implied conclusions. These conclusions will inevitably be flawed, because the assumptions are ultimately incorrect or at least incomplete. By examining how they differ from reality, we can refine our models, and thereby refine our theories and so gradually we might become less wrong.
the stupidity of a model is often its strength. By focusing on some key aspects of a real-world system(i.e., those aspectsinstantiated in the model), we can investigate how such a system would work if, in principle, we really couldignore everything we are ignoring. This only sounds absurd until one recognizes that, in our theorizing about the nature of reality –both as scientists and as quotidianhumans hopelessly entangled in myriad webs of connection and conflict –weignore thingsall the time.
The generalized linear model, the work horse ofthe social sciences, models data as being randomly drawn from a distribution whose mean varies according to some parameter. The linear model is so obviously wrong yet so useful that the mathematical anthropologist Richard McElreathhas dubbed it “the geocentric model of applied statistics,”in reference to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system that erroneously placed the earth rather than the sun at the center but nevertheless produced accurate predictions of planetary motion as they appeared in the night sky(McElreath 2015).
A model that approximates some aspect of reality can be very useful, even if the model itself is flat-out wrong.
But on the other hand, we can't accept approximation of reality as hard proof that a model is correct.
Unfortunately, my own experience working with complex systems and working among complexity scientistssuggests that we are hardly immune to such stupidity. Consider the case of Marilyn Vos Savantand the Monty Hall problem.
Many people, including some with training in advanced mathematics, contradicted her smugly. But a simple computer program that models the situation can demonstrate her point.
2/3 times, your first pick will be wrong. Every time that happens, the door Monty didn't open is the winner. So switching wins 2/3 times.
Mitch Resnick, in his book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, details his experiences teaching gifted high school students about the dynamics of complex systems using artificial life models (Resnick 1994). He showed them how organized behavior could emerge when individualsresponded only to local stimuli using simple rules, without the need for a central coordinating authority. Resnick reports that even after weeks spent demonstrating the principles of emergence,using computer simulations that the students programmed themselves, many students still refused to believe that what they were seeing could really work without central leadership.
Alice Maz on communication failures due to different cultures of conversation and values.
Most people value feelings, shared perspectives, and social status. They see correction as an attempt to knock them down a peg. Nerds value facts, logic, and the sharing of information. A genuine nerd shares information with no intention of knocking anyone down, and prefers being corrected to remaining misinformed.
Introduction to Sociology 2e
The fact that professionals prefer anecdotes from people like us over concerted efforts to understand a demographic as a whole is shameful. More importantly, it’s downright dangerous. It shapes what the tech industry builds and invests in, what gets promoted by journalists, and what gets legitimized by institutions of power. This is precisely why and how the tech industry is complicit in the increasing structural inequality that is plaguing our society.
Danah Boyd points out that people in the tech industry are far too quick to think of themselves as "typical", and ignore millions of Americans and billions of people who have little in common with them.
The Book of Human Emotions, Tiffany Watt Smith
Emotions are not just biological, but cultural. Different societies have unique concepts for combinations of feelings in particular circumstances.
If you know a word for an emotion, you can more easily recognize it, control it -- and perhaps feel it more intensely.
Emotions and how they are valued also varies across time as well as space. Sadness was valued in Renaissance Europe: they felt it made you closer to God. Today we value happiness, and we may value it too much. Emodiversity is the idea that feeling a wide range of emotions is good for you mentally and physically.
Was ist mit "Änderungen" an wisssenschaftlichen Texten gemeint? Wie muss ich mir das vorstellen? Geht es nur um das Wiederveröffenltichen von Textteilen z.B. in Lehrbüchern oder tatsächlich um das Remixen von Sätzen?
If we want to understand how social structures, let alone put ourselves in a position to take control of them (that is, to “reassemble” them) we must dispose of the assumption that the local is explained by the global, and start tracing the process by which the local GENERATES global structures
local/global
Traditional sociologists start with a macro-scale entity or force–”society” or “culture”–that they then use to explain myriad local interactions.
Bruno Latour reassembling the knowledge
