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First days are difficult. Smith College has a pretty lengthy trial period, and students like to ‘shop.’ I can understand the benefits of that, but it also makes for wasted time. Do you just pass out the syllabus and reconviene on the next day? Do you teach full on? Because of this dilemma, I’ve been opting to start class off with some sort of framing story or activity, as a way to get students thinking about the course, thinking about society differently. I have used horoscopes and Mark Twain to talk about chance and opinion, I have used the story of Finn twins to talk about structure and agency, and of Damon Mootoo being lost in Queens to introduce the mash-up grid system of Queens. These have had varied degrees of success.

This semester I’m thinking of a few new things. I’m thinking that I’ll break students into groups of two to make a select who will win the Academy Award for Best Actress, a group of three to pick Best Actor, five to pick Best Director, and then ten for Best Film in order to explain Simmel’s dyad and triad piece (and then talk about roles, power, membership, mediation, participation, representation, etc.). I’m thinking about doing some Twittering for the Media and Technology class, and playing an FDR Fireside Chat and Obama’s YouTube weekly address. Goffman once wrote about a person making a ‘call’ with a toy phone that he found in a trashcan on the street (1981: 86, n. 6), engaging in a fake conversation playing off the (at the time) absurd idea of conducting work on the street. Now, technology allows for the opposite to occur.

For my culture class I was thinking about using fake culture, ‘Stupid Undergrounds’ (Mann 1995), Dog Island, Mos Def’s song Hip Hop, and von Trier’s Dogville to talk about the hyperreflexive turn of culture. I might use an early clip from the Crawford/Gable film The Possessed, wherein a common farm girl comes face-to-face with how the other half lives, by looking episodically into the windows of a slow-moving train. At the caboose, a man offers her a drink and asks: “Have a drink? Aw, don’t go away… Looking in? Wrong way. Get in and look out.” (Slavoj Zizek’s brilliant The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema uses it.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke8OIawaAE4]

Haruki Murakami’s fiction is filled with dark sewers and tunnels, revelations and horrors. His nonfiction text, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, is an amazing mosaic of urban life under strain. The sarin gas attack, in a fashion, is what Hitchcock called a ‘MacGuffin‘ (hat tip to Rich Lloyd on using Hitch as an explanitory device in his ethnographic work). The attack is the plot device through which the stories of urbanites lives collide. Which reminds me, I’ve been mesmerized by The Works, which offers up lush visual representations of data. Only some of it has been directly applicable to our urban sociology course in the fashion that Underground has.

Taking a break from camping this weekend, I got to check out the Calvino-worthy performance of Swoon‘s ‘Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea‘ at the DIA Beacon last night. I’ve been committed to a lot of unconventional city readings this summer (on top of the aforementioned The Ghost Map and Underground, also Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950).

Swoon is at the top of the graffitti world (not just ‘female graffitti artists), and has done a similar project down the Mississippi. This trip is a more modest storytelling exbidition down the Hudson river. The hour-long performance is a series of monologues loosely tied together by pantomime and music (by Dark Dark Dark). These experiments on ‘loose communal life,’ are decidedly reflexive about it. 60-odd performers participate on seven ramshackle ships (The ‘Seven Sisters’–ahem):

The boats use recycled motors, one from a 1968 Mercedes, another from a Volkswagen Rabbit (itself recycled from “Miss Rockaway”). One uses a gasifier, which burns organic waste materials.

Of the seven shipbound monologists who provide their overlapping and conflicting tales of the origins of the flotilla, one, ‘David,’ is a sociologist who stumbled onto the ‘docks that were disconnected from the waters edge.’ He talks about the crew as a form of civilization, and how the waters will soon be the world’s last open space. Expectedly the crews all playfully boo him for his scholarly analysis. But obviously, this was where my mind was wandering anyway. It reminded me of the alterative cart/homes for the homeless proposed by Duneier and Neil Smith, and the roaming Tent Cities of the American South and Northwest.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnOOo6tRs8]

I know that I’m not the first person to gush about Mad Men, but I was given the first season on dvd for my birthday and the first episode impresses from alpha to omega. Not only is there great display of 50s gender politics, but the cultural production zeitgeist is in full swing as well. One of the best ad stories of the time–if not of all time–is glanced upon: the transformation of the ‘Nazi Car to Love Bug,’ or how a Jewish ad executive, William Bernbach, helped to re-industrialize Germany. (I used Thomas Frank’s book, The Conquest of Cool, in my culture class. It details this well, and with less smoking.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HchanK0N3Mg&eurl]

@ 30 seconds. Thanks, Kristina!

Upon reading about you in the Times, I realize that this is, perhaps, the best way to get in touch with you: my low traffic, sociology-based blog. I appreciate your personalized, Internet-based, targeting of dissatisfied Comcast customers and would like to use this venue to complain about the 80% increase in charges your company imposes on customers in the Pioneer Valley. Comcast holds a monopoly here, but not for long. I teach about media and technology too. Be nice to me.

Julia Child is revered on campus already. There is ‘Julia Child Day,’ upon which the students get her recipies cooked for them in their houses. But now there is news that she was a spy… which might be cool? Here’s the write-up in the WSJ.

You can’t get a better example, or at least ‘more classic example,’ of video sociology than William H. Whyte’s ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.’

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GfOhFZkY8]

Understanding media and technology through the lens of politics is always fascinating, but in class we talked about the Lincoln/Douglas (seven hours! a break for dinner! liquor on sale!) and Nixon/Kennedy Debates and it was very fun. (Read this, which goes into a little detail about how people on the radio thought that Nixon had won, but people who watched it on television got to see Tricky Dick drown in flopsweat.)

Anyway,  Krugman had an interesting op-ed, which gets at the money and media. About Hillary’ town hall meeting, broadcast on the Hallmark Channel in comparison to the will i am Obama video:

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

(Hillary was, in fact, cut off mid-sentence for the regularly scheduled programming, A Season of Miracles.)

Sociologist Duncan Watts has done a series of experiments to offer a long overdue challenge Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Jonathan Berry and Ed Keller’s The Influentials. The long-held romantic notion that some charismatic cultural alphas spread ideas, and the men in grey flannel just need to get their products in their hands–the ‘Law of the Few’–is back in play. A nice article discusses this in more detail, a long section, towards the end of the piece:

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song’s merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had “social influence”: Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that’s what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another’s opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here’s the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs–and the bottom ones–were completely different. For example, the song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song’s success seemed to be due to merit. “In general, the ‘best’ songs never do very badly, and the ‘worst’ songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible,” he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.