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.”
I should spend more time in the supermarket check-out line.
Lisa at Sociological Images has a nice post about a magazine cover I’d missed.
Lisa focuses on the social-control angle, or as she calls it “policing.” For most of us, the pressure to follow norms comes from friends, family, and others we interact with. For celebs, it comes from the media.
More interesting, at least to me, was the implication that violating a norm must be harmful, not just to the general society but to the norm violator. Life&Style phrases it as a question – “Is it harming the 3-year old?” Like other such questions (“Is Martha cheating on George?”) the actual answer, on the story inside, is less important than the implied answer contained question on the cover. The real answer, after all, is probably either “no” or “we don’t know.”
But with just the question, “Is it harmful?” of course it is. It’s our old friend, Lindesmith’s evil-causes-evil assumption: If something is wrong, it must have negative consequences. It’s wrong to give a girl a “boy’s haircut.” Nothing good will come of this, and probably something bad will.
But the other thing in the photo that struck me was how much Shiloh, especially in her girl haircut, looks like her grandfather.*
Maybe the real danger isn’t that she’ll grow up confused about gender roles, but that she’ll be a right-wing nutter.
*In the pictures above, Voight is a 30-year-old man; Shiloh is a 3-year-old girl. I chose it because it shows Voight in his best-known role. There must be other pictures of Voight where the resemblance is even clearer, but this is the best picture I could find for current purposes in a quick search.
When a sociology professor joked on her Facebook page about wanting to kill her students, her university put her, temporarily for now, on its no-teach list. A comment on my previous post agreed: even a joking reference to wanting to kill someone should be taken literally, and all such instances should be examined and investigated.
I wondered how big a job that might be, so I Googled a few phrases to see if there were perhaps one or two other potential killers out there. Here are the results.
(Click on the chart for a larger view.)
I also tried these using Bing, which returned huge numbers – more than 50 million for each of these.
Some of the hits were serious, taken from statements by real killers. And some of them were from novels or songs (though if jokes reflect a person’s inner reality, so do fiction and lyrics). But many of them were the kind of “killing” that most of us have heard in everyday discourse.
A Yankee fan said of manager Joe Girardi,
I gotta admit there was a time last year when we weren’t hitting I just wanted to kill him.
(How many umpires have actually been killed?)
Hockey elicits murder scenarios that are even more specific :
When the Sharks were playing Calgary in the ‘04 WCF, I wanted nothing more than to choke the life out of Nieminen because he was running around, kicking ass all over the place with that stupid perma-grin on his face (I once read that his nickname is “the joker”). I just wanted to kill him!
Also, to nobody’s surprise, the teacher-student homicidal urge runs both ways.
I agree with Mr. _____ being the worst! I had him for 2 years and I just wanted to kill him. I even shouted at him because he was making me retake an exam I didn't want too. [Posted on a Facebook page]
Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of potential killers are out there. And if Prof. Gadsden’s Facebook entries are cause for concern, someone should be checking up on these potential killers as well. They are lurking at sports, school, work (bosses, customers – be very afraid), even friends:
I took my friend to see [District 9] the other day . . he was bitching about it so much I just wanted to kill him >:| [Note to investigators: ignore the smiley face.]
But most of the death threats, as you probably guessed, were all in the family. Husbands, it seems, are especially at risk.
I made a BEAUTIFUL Chateau Briand and my husband put KETCHUP on it. I just wanted to kill him!
Ketchup on Chateaubriand?? Not guilty, your honor.
(What I find most interesting in these quotes is that the word “just” functions much the same as the smiley face to indicate that the words are not to be taken literally.)
“I’m gonna kill you,” the woman next door used to scream at her kids loud enough for anyone in the neighborhood to hear.
“Ah, but she never does,” sighed my mother.
This was a long time ago in an upper-middle class suburb. The neighbors who heard the yelling knew what she meant and what she didn’t mean. Nobody called the cops or the child protection agencies.
That was then.
had a good day today, DIDN'T want to kill even one student :-). Now Friday was a different story.
The professor, Gloria Gadsden, who posted this on her Facebook page has been suspended. She was joking – note the smiley face – but administrators at her university (East Stroudsburg) found a similar remark on her Facebook page a month earlier:
Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete* hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day . . .
Here’s the school’s justification for suspending her:
“Given the climate of security concerns in academia, the university has an obligation to take all threats seriously and act accordingly,” Marilyn Wells, East Stroudsburg’s interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, said in a written statement. “The university’s knowledge of the online statements comes with a responsibility to act in a manner that ensures the safety of our students, employees and our campus community.”
That “climate” includes several multiple killings on campuses in the past few years, especially the very recent one by a professor. The East Stroudsburg administrators probably feared that if Prof. Gadsden had shot a student or hired someone to do the hit, the university would be liable and be accused of not connecting Prof. Gadsden’s Facebook dots.
The “university’s knowledge of online statements” is the part that seem problematic. The Internet is changing our definitions of public and private in ways that are still not clear. The provost’s statement seems to treat all online statements alike. But most of us make distinctions. What is a Facebook post anyway? A diary entry that you show to a few friends? Or to hundreds of of Facebook friends? A public statement like a blog post that anyone can read, the more the better?
Several comments on blogs about this story blame Prof. Gadsden for not knowing how to change her Facebook settings. These comments assume that statements made under one privacy setting should not be treated the same as those made under another setting. We also make a distinction among online sites. Another comment (at the Althouse blog as I recall), said that if Prof. Gadsden had posted her question about a hitman on Craig’s List rather than Facebook, there might have been more cause for concern.
Even the status of one-to-one electronic communication isn’t clear – e-mail, IM, text messages, pictures sent from one cell phone to another. Yes, people could violate others’ expectations of privacy with pre-electronic communication as well. You could repeat something told to you in confidence, someone might show your letters to others. But the Internet multiplies the number of people who can violate this privacy and the number of people who they can reach. It also greatly multiplies the number of people who can misunderstand a facetious comment and misattribute all kinds of intent.
As I said in the previous post, the Internet is bringing changes that we are still trying to get a handle on. Nobody pays much attention to William Ogburn, and you don't hear the phrase “cultural lag” much these days. But maybe it’s time to reconsider.
* Many comments on the blogs had fun with this mistake (“better a discrete hitman than a continuous hitman”) and noted with some glee that Prof. Gadsden is a sociologist – as though the Facebook postings of other academics are exemplary in their grammar, spelling, and diction.
Things change. Watch the video (go ahead, it’s only five seconds long).
(Please ignore the offensive and irrelevant “blonde” in the title. “Secretary” would be better on all counts. )
Maybe you laughed out loud. And if your kids were in the room, maybe they asked you what was funny. Show them the video. Did they laugh? Did they get the joke? (The text that accompanies the video says that people under 40 won’t get it.)
I may use this in my class as a lead-in to the origins of sociology. Tönnies and Gemeinschaft, Durkheim and solidarity, Weber and rationalization. I always fear that students will see these thinkers as merely idle intellectuals coming up with fancy ideas and vocabulary for no other reason than to make life difficult for undergraduates a century later. I want students to see them as real people who were facing big changes, changes that they thought were important, puzzling, and even troubling.
My strategy of late has been to ask students what they think of as the most important events of the past 25-30 years. I also ask them the same question about inventions.
The list of events was slow in coming and a bit quirky:
The Iraq wars
9/11
Election of Obama
Death of Michael Jackson (I don’t judge; I just write ’em on the board).
Haiti earthquake
Katrina
Tsunami of 2004 (there was a disaster chain of association)
Fall of the Berlin Wall
Formation of the European Union (from an older student, born in Europe)
They had an easier time with inventions:
Computers
The Internet
Cell Phones
iPods
Facebook
Fiberoptics
In fact, their list, although shorter, was strikingly similar to a list generated a year ago by a panel of judges at the Wharton school. (Drek too, here, has recently played this game.)
Then comes the hard part. Why are these important? In what ways have they changed, or will they change, our lives? Will we look back in 25 years and say, “Yes, the death of Michael Jackson – that changed everything,”? (When I asked this in class, the student who had contributed it agreed to take it off the list.) But even with 9/11, the question isn’t an easy one. We know we’re in a “post-9/11 world,” but how is it different from the pre-9/11 world?
The inventions were less baffling. Students thought it made a difference that you could be friends with someone thousands of miles away, someone you’d never met face to face. Or that you could form a group based on narrow interests with people you never could have met otherwise, people all over the world. But they had a hard time saying just how those changes would be important in their lives or how these things would change society.
My point was that with many of these things, we are in the same position as the early sociological thinkers. They were responding to events, chiefly the French Revolution and its legacy, and technological change, the Industrial Revolution. Their task was to come up with a way of talking about these changes, making sense of them, and figuring out their impact on how people lived their lives and thought about themselves and others.
I think the exercise was useful. Maybe some of the students saw it as just bullshitting about stuff we had no conclusions or information about. But my hope is that it gave students some appreciation of the thinkers we were going to be looking at and of the important changes that began around 1800. Some students have only the dimmest knowledge of the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution (stuff that happened a long time ago in high school). I hope that the analogy with 9/11 and the Internet help.
Maybe the real danger isn’t that she’ll grow up confused about gender roles, but that she’ll be a right-wing nutter.
