Sociological Imagination

There is yet another article, this time in the Atlantic, asking the question “Does Facebook cause loneliness?” Like many articles on this topic, it ignores an enormous amount of data which –at a minimum- says, nope.

How much does the internet contribute to the economies of G20 countries?MUCH of the world may still (or again) be in recession, but the internet keeps growing—and so does its economic weight.

This week’s formal release of the OR Books publication put together under the auspices of Agit-Pop and the Yes Labs (“assembled” rather than edited by Andrew Boyd with Dave Mitchell) is indeed a cause for celebration. Bringing together more than seventy authors in a collection of two-page mini essays, Beautiful Trouble looks at interdependent theories, principles, tactics and case studies. Though largely written by a younger generation of agitators, including Waging Nonviolence’s own Bryan Farrell, Nathan Schneider and Eric Stoner, the book includes pieces by Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, Arun Gupta, Nadine Bloch, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and many others. Accompanied by a growing website of supplemental materials, the toolbox package seeks to put the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change makers. Written in an engaging style and format and chock-full of photos, cartoons, and visuals to incite and inspire, the book is sophisticated enough for antiwar and human rights veterans, while being easily accessible for newcomers.

I loved Kevin Kelly’s book, and especially loved the message I heard from it. What I heard was that tech wants us to become more humane, not less. What I heard, was that tech wants us to get to know ourselves, each other, and the world around us, even better than we ever imagined, for good.

This, to me, is about communication. It’s about changing up the conversations we have. It’s about spreading and sharing good ideas. It’s about intimate coffee house conversations on local-global as well as a global-global scales. It’s about exposing tacit knowledge. It’s about exposing love. It’s about spaces where we all feel like we have nothing to prove, but instead, realize we have something of extreme value to offer: ourselves.

ABSTRACT //

Most existing scholarship that measures the impact of the Internet on civic or political engagement focuses on political uses of new media. Drawing on two large panel studies, we find that youth engagement in nonpolitical online participatory cultures may serve as a gateway to participation in important aspects of civic and political life, including volunteering, community problem-solving, protest activities, and political voice. These relationships remain statistically significant for both datasets, even with controls for prior levels of civic and political participation and a full range of demographic variables. While politically driven online participation is clearly worthy of attention, these findings indicate that it should not be seen as the only relevant bridge from online activity to civic and political engagement.

Duff sent in a video showing candidates from the 2011 Miss USA contest answering the question, “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Their answers are a great example of the normalization of the idea that evolution is “one side” of a story, with religion being the other side, and that we should just choose between these two stories based on what we’re most comfortable with personally: