August 12, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
The previous post here brought in four to five times the usual number of hits on this blog, and I can’t figure out why. Yes, it was linked by a couple of other sociology sites (Correntewire and Global Sociology), but they accounted for only 10% of the hits. Most were “direct traffic.” More mysteriously, most of the hits were from Minnesota.
And all of those were from the Minneapolis area.
It’s nice to be big in Hennepin County, if only for a day. But who are all these people, and why did they decide to descend on this blog for a video you can find all over the Internet?
A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
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Considering the Audience
August 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign) won best short film at Cannes. The director is Alonso Alvarez Barreda. It’s hard to talk about this video without spoiling it. Take the four and half minutes to watch it (six minutes if you sit through all the credits)
(A two-minute knock-off version is here.)
I think it has a lesson for teaching. It’s the same lesson I get from a story Nora Ephron tells about the teacher in her high school journalism class. The problem for the class was to come up with the lead (or as we say nowadays, the lede) for a story in the school newspaper.
Fortunately, as teachers we do not depend so utterly on the response of our audience. We’re not begging, and some teachers get away with ignoring the audience altogether. But a department facing a decline in majors may not be so different from a newspaper struggling to maintain its circulation.
I think I want the dude in the shades and pink necktie to go over my lesson plans.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign) won best short film at Cannes. The director is Alonso Alvarez Barreda. It’s hard to talk about this video without spoiling it. Take the four and half minutes to watch it (six minutes if you sit through all the credits)
(A two-minute knock-off version is here.)
I think it has a lesson for teaching. It’s the same lesson I get from a story Nora Ephron tells about the teacher in her high school journalism class. The problem for the class was to come up with the lead (or as we say nowadays, the lede) for a story in the school newspaper.
He dictated a set of facts that went something like, “The principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento, Thursday, for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, and two other people.”The challenge is not just to present the relevant facts, or in a sociology class the relevant data and ideas. The problem is to present them so that your audience immediately grasps their relevance. Both the ad man (or whatever he is) in the film and the journalism teacher come up with the brilliant lede by asking not, “How does this look to me?” but “How does this look to the audience?”
So we all sat down at our typewriters, and we all kind of inverted that and wrote, “Margaret Mead and X and Y will address the faculty in Sacramento . . ..” Something like that.
We were very proud of ourselves, and we gave it to Mr. Simms, and he just riffled through them and tore them into tiny bits and threw them in the trash, and he said, “The lead to this story is: There will be no school Thursday!”
Fortunately, as teachers we do not depend so utterly on the response of our audience. We’re not begging, and some teachers get away with ignoring the audience altogether. But a department facing a decline in majors may not be so different from a newspaper struggling to maintain its circulation.
I think I want the dude in the shades and pink necktie to go over my lesson plans.
Timely Furniture
August 8, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
Not sociological, but for 08-08-08 (at 08:08 a.m.), I thought this was too cool to pass up.
It's a sofa, designed by Emmanuel Laffon de Mazieres. Photos from other angles here.
Hat tip to Cecile, from whose blog I copied both the picture and the idea.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Not sociological, but for 08-08-08 (at 08:08 a.m.), I thought this was too cool to pass up.
It's a sofa, designed by Emmanuel Laffon de Mazieres. Photos from other angles here.
Hat tip to Cecile, from whose blog I copied both the picture and the idea.
Omission / Commission
August 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
I haven’t checked XKCD’s data, but it seems right. Think of all the regrets in your life. Which do you have more of
Psychologists probably have lots of explanations for this (is there a “psychology of regret” section in the APA?). The sociological explanation starts with norms. We all greatly overestimate the cost of breaking norms. “I couldn’t do that,” we think. But of course we could.
The power of the norm diminishes the farther we get from the actual situation. When Stanley Milgram asked his students to ask subway riders for their seats, he could not imagine that such a simple assignment would be so difficult. Milgram was speaking from the comfort of a seminar room miles from the city. When he actually went to the subway, he understood.
So when we think back on the norm not broken, the road (or kiss) not taken, we forget how it actually felt to be there.
The reality is that breaking these norms seldom results in anything more than temporary embarrassment, not the nagging regret that lingers for a lifetime.
Update (Aug. 7, 7:45 a.m.): The awesome Anomie has refined XKCD’s data by breaking it down by sex, comparing “kissed her” against “kissed him,”* and posting a more graphically sophisticated chart. For both sexes, regrets over inaction far outnumber regretted actions, but it looks as though the ratio is much higher for men.
*I assume, Katy Perry notwithstanding, that the “kissed her” regretters are male, and the “kissed him” regretters female.
Posted by Jay Livingston
I haven’t checked XKCD’s data, but it seems right. Think of all the regrets in your life. Which do you have more of
- things you didn’t do but wish you had
- things you did do and wish you hadn’t
Psychologists probably have lots of explanations for this (is there a “psychology of regret” section in the APA?). The sociological explanation starts with norms. We all greatly overestimate the cost of breaking norms. “I couldn’t do that,” we think. But of course we could.
The power of the norm diminishes the farther we get from the actual situation. When Stanley Milgram asked his students to ask subway riders for their seats, he could not imagine that such a simple assignment would be so difficult. Milgram was speaking from the comfort of a seminar room miles from the city. When he actually went to the subway, he understood.
So when we think back on the norm not broken, the road (or kiss) not taken, we forget how it actually felt to be there.
The reality is that breaking these norms seldom results in anything more than temporary embarrassment, not the nagging regret that lingers for a lifetime.
Update (Aug. 7, 7:45 a.m.): The awesome Anomie has refined XKCD’s data by breaking it down by sex, comparing “kissed her” against “kissed him,”* and posting a more graphically sophisticated chart. For both sexes, regrets over inaction far outnumber regretted actions, but it looks as though the ratio is much higher for men.
*I assume, Katy Perry notwithstanding, that the “kissed her” regretters are male, and the “kissed him” regretters female.
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