Is Anna Nicole Smith Still Dead?

February 21, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

Britney Spears is on the front page of tabloids like the New York Post again today, though in some papers she’s competing with Anna Nicole Smith. Aren’t you tired of these stories? Do you think the Anna Nicolecoverage is way out of line with what it deserves?

You’re not alone. A poll by The Pew Research Center for People and the Press finds that the People think the Press has overdone the Anna Nicole Smith story. In the survey taken a week ago, 61% said the story had been given too much coverage. Interestingly, 8% thought Anna Nicole merited even more press. Still, more than one person in ten said it was the story they’d followed most closely (18% among younger — 18-49 — women).

Nevertheless, here we are a week later, and Anna Nicole is still on the front page, and she's one of the first stories on the 11 o’clock news. Presumably, the people in the news business know what they're doing. So if people had really had enough of the Smith story, wouldn’t they pass up the newsstand and turn off the TV? Maybe this is one of those cases where there’s a discrepancy between what we say and what we do.

I wish we had something besides survey data to find out what news stories people are interested in. Surely Google, MSN, and Yahoo keep track of which stories people are clicking on. Do they make the data available?

In the meantime, news programmers will continue to feature Anna Nicole (and Britney) , news watchers will continue to tell pollsters “enough already,” and newscasters will continue to make comments, usually off-camera, like this one by CNN reporter Jack Cafferty.



Cafferty’s question, “Is Anna Nicole Smith Still Dead” is an allusion to a news anecdote of a half-century ago. In 1952, actor John Garfield died of a heart attack, which might have been news enough since he was a handsome Hollywood star, he was only 39, and he’d been blacklisted after refusing to name names when called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But Garfield’s death was especially newsworthy because he had suffered the heart attack while making love, and the woman he was making love to was not the woman he was married to. The press squeezed the story to the last drop of ink, playing out every possible angle.

The anecdote, at least the way I heard it, goes that on a slow news day weeks afterward, editors were sitting around a table, trying to decide on the day's headlines. Nothing in the news seemed to have the attention-grabbing juice needed for the front page.

So someone suggested, “John Garfield Still Dead.”

(A personal note: Garfield's son David went to the same college I did. We weren't buddies, but we knew one another by name. In Googling around for this post, I discovered that David, like his father, became an actor, and like his father he died of a heart attack. He was 52.)

Mixi Messages and Wa

February 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I spent a few months in Japan many, many years ago, the Japanese often told me that Americans were “frank.” At first, I took this as a compliment. Only later did it dawn on me that what they were really saying was that Americans tended to shoot off their mouths, saying whatever they thought, without much regard for how it would affect others. Americans seemed more interested in expressing their own individual opinions and quite willing, in the process, to trash the overall harmony within the group, what the Japanese call “wa.”

Sportswriter Robert Whiting’s 1989 book You Gotta Have Wa is about Wa in Japanese baseball. (The title is an allusion to the song “You Gotta Have Heart,” from the baseball-themed musical Damn Yankees.) Whiting describes the difficulties that arose when American baseball players who couldn’t quite stay in the majors wound up in Japan. Like good Americans, they would see their main task as playing well, getting hits, etc. But they would ignore or even resent a task that most Japanese would take for granted — becoming and being a member of the team, especially in the sense of subordinating their own preferences and accomplishments to the overall Wa of the group.

I myself unwittingly committed these cultural gaffes, one of them so egregious that it’s a wonder I wasn’t immediately ostracized if not executed.

I remembered this distant past again with some embarrassment when I read in Wired Online about MySpace moving into Japan, where the popular site is Mixi. Rupert Murdoch, whose NewsCorp owns MySpace (and a lot of other media), has never been shy about expanding his empire, and since November MySpace has run a Japanese site.

The differences between the MySpace and Mixi reflect the broader cultural difference between individualism and Wa. The name says it all: MySpace “is about me, me, me, and look at me and look at me and look at me,” says an American media executive in Japan. “In Mixi, it's not all about me. It's all about us.” In fact, American parents are surprised and often dismayed by how much personal information teenagers will put up on their MySpace pages for any stranger to see, and by the way kids will use the Internet for nastiness and character assassination.

But Mixi messages tend to be more supportive. It also is based more on groups than individuals. To join, you need an introduction from someone who is already a member, and communication remains centered among clusters of friends or people who share interests. It’s more a way to maintain relations among a group than a way of meeting new people or expressing yourself.

I checked the home pages for the two sites today. MySpace is very in-your-face. Someone in a photo on the cover of Nylon (screaming bold yellow typeface) seems to be screaming and sticking her tongue right into the camera. Just above, “Meet Sal” shows a very confrontational Sal, and then there's Jonathon in battle gear, and over on the right of the screen “cool new people” being cool by acting wild and crazy.



The Mixi login page shows a girl sitting in a field of grass, quietly reading a book, as her friend walks up to her. Both girls are dressed conventionally, and we see them from a distance. The words, not in garish yellow but almost blending in to the blue summer sky, say, “community entertainment.”

It will be interesting to see what happens with MySpace in Japan. Will the medium itself shape the content? Will it speed the development of a more individualistic and less group-oriented culture among Japanese youth, a change which has been slowly evolving in any case? Or will the culture reshape the site and make it more typically Japanese?

Necessities

February 15, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

In debates about poverty in the US, conservatives will usually point out that many people with incomes below the poverty line have a standard of living equal to that of middle class people of earlier times or other places. Here’s a typical version, by Robert Rector, written in 1990 and posted on the conservative Heritage foundation Website. After noting that the poor own homes (38%) and cars (62%), Rector concludes,

“Poor” Americans today are better housed, better fed, and own more property than did the average U.S. citizen throughout much of the 20th Century. In 1988, the per capita expenditures of the lowest income fifth of the U.S. population exceeded the per capita expenditures of the median American household in 1955, after adjusting for inflation.

(The quotation marks are enough to clue you in that Rector doesn’t think that a family living on $15,000 a year is really poor. They’re merely “poor.”)

By a similar logic, the “poor” today are better off than J. P. Morgan because Morgan didn’t have a washing machine. And they’re better off than Louis XIV because the Sun King didn’t have indoor plumbing.

Bill O’Reilly put the “not really poor” argument more succinctly, “Even the poor have color television sets and pretty much everything they need.”

O’Reilly at least comes closer to the real issue. Being poor is not simply a matter of what you have. It’s what you have compared with what you need.

But what do you need? In the 1600s, nobody needed a flush toilet because nobody had one. And for a similar reason, nobody in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s needed a washing machine.

Needs are determined by what people have. If nearly everybody in a society has a car, that society becomes a place where a car is a necessity. And if you can’t afford to buy what people think are the necessities, you are poor.

Here are the results of Pew Research poll published late last year. The poll asked people whether they thought an item was "a necessity" or "a luxury you could do without."
(You don’t have to be a social constructionist to see that what people need is not much different from what they think they need.)

(Click on the graph to see it in a larger version)

Have you got what it takes?

Note that ten years ago, a microwave was a luxury for two-thirds of the population. Now it's a necessity for two-thirds. I’m in the minority on that one, and I'm missing two of the other top five items as well.

Operationalizing Investment

February 13, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

How do you turn a vague concept like “decline in the moral authority of the family” into a variable you can actually use in research? This week, I told my students that operationalizing concepts is the key to thinking like a sociologist. Of course, at the beginning of the semester when I introduced the idea of social facts, I told them that thinking in terms of social facts was the essence of thinking like a sociologist. (Moral authority happened to be the subject that came up; it's not the subject of this post.)

I also tell students that no matter how you operationalize it, someone is going to complain that you've left something out. And they're right. Most of these conversions from abstract to measurable are imperfect. But you go to research with the variables you have, not the variables somebody else would like you to have.

I've been thinking about this problem in connection with parental “investment” in children. Back in November, one of the candidates we interviewed for a position this year, Kristen Schultz Lee, taught a sample class based on her research, which was about “parental investment in children’s education” and whether it was greater for boys than girls. I thought that was an interesting idea. I don’t usually think of what my parents did for me as an “investment,” i.e., something with an eventual payoff for the investor.

Kristen operationalized “investment” (at least in her talk to my class) as merely how far the child went in school. It works, but I wondered if there might not be more to this idea of investment. After all, she did her interviewing in Japan, where, supposedly, the stereotype “kyoiku mama” (education mama) stays up late with her son, helping him with homework and going over drills in preparation for the all-important college entrance exams. (Click on that link and you’ll get several other negative female stereotypes in Japanese.)

Now an article in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review looks at something similar. It compares adoptive and biological parents’ investment in children’s education, but the researchers (Laura Hamilton, Simon Cheng, and Brian Powell) define investment more broadly: “the economic, cultural, social, and interactional resources that parents provide for their children.”

• Economic: the things that money buys (books, computers, private school).
• Cultural: not just music lessons, but even the time parents spend with kids, reading or just playing.
• Interactional: what non-sociologists call “talking” with the child.
• Social Capital: Talking with other school parents, going to PTA meetings, etc.

(I guess I’m not much of a sociologist after all. In all those hours I spent squeezing Play-doh with my kid, I never thought of it as providing him with Cultural Capital. And when I went out for coffee with other parents after drop-off, I thought I was just putting off going to work. Now I realize I was building up my kid’s Social Capital.)

The importance of this research lies in its implications for biology-based theories about human behavior. These theories, under names like “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology,” have become increasingly influential in social science. In this case, they would probably predict that adoptive parents would be less invested in their children.

But this study found nothing of the sort: “two-adoptive-parent families invest at similar levels as two-biological-parent families but still at significantly higher levels in most resources than other types of families.”

Interestingly enough, Kristen Schultz Lee had included similar variables in her research (homework helping, cram schools) though she didn’t mention them in my class. Somewhat in keeping with the kyoiku-mama stereotype, extracurricular activities were somewhat gender-related (girls do cultural classes, boys do academic classes). But I don't think the overall differences in education were as large as I might have expected.

(Hi, Kristen. As I write this, Oswego County has had twelve feet of snow in the last ten days or so. In Montclair, there’s not a snowflake to be seen.)