So our final project for this class was on identity as it relates to the internet. This topic has intrigued me for quite some time and I’ve had many conversations with friends about it as well. In the paper my group members and I investigated several different aspects, I distributed a survey asking people what they thought about their own usage of the internet and how it related to their identity.
What I found was that most people thought they did not display a different identity on the internet than in real life, which I think in general was true. It was interesting though that some females felt freer from social forces online, they thought they could be more sassy and flirtatious in a low-stakes way even with potential partners they knew in real life. This exemplified how many thought that the internet was a shield, though a permeable and imperfect one that could fail them if they put too much reliance on it.
The other piece of information that appealed to me the most was from respondents who had just graduated high school in the past 5 years. Those people almost unanimously said that they felt they had adopted different personalities online while in high school but that they had left them behind as they grew older. Well, not that they had left them behind but that they had converged over time.
This aspect of divergent and convergent personalities between the internet and real life is really what is most appealing to me about this subject. My friends and I have often spoken of how we feel we are the “bridge generation” between those who began accessing the internet sometime after adolescence and those who have had the internet as a ubiquitous tool and icon all their lives.
The internet became a social tool while we were in our teens. We were the first ones to begin discovering what it meant to explore your weaknesses in a truly alternate world at a time in life when you thought nearly everything about you was a vulnerability. This of course doesn’t mean that the internet was an absolutely safe place to delve into what identities we might want to grow into. It did give us a place where we could find spaces to examine and think about who we were and be totally removed from the real world yet still be able to jump right back into our normal lives if we needed to.
The people around my age were the ones who first began to realize this aspect of the internets potential and I think that our internet and real life selves as compared to those much older or younger than us is a very valuable relationship to investigate.
The data I collected with my surveys was very telling but I must admit they were rudimentary and slap-dash at best. I would enjoy the opportunity, if it came a long in the future, to do another version of these surveys, conduct interviews and do further research on this topic. I feel that this is probably the most important piece of sociological work to be done in the present day as it governs such a huge section of our social interactions and yet it really is not very well understood.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Between Straight and Gay is totally...
“Between Straight and Gay” has taken its place in my mind as my favorite ethnographic study. Though this was mainly in its style. The novel-esque direction that Tillman-Healy takes is really quite engaging and allows one to really get the feel of the community she is interacting with in a way that purely academic ethnography cannot. I also appreciated that she realized that it is impossible to do an objective study of this kind, it is as in all experiments: you cannot make an observation of something without disturbing it on some level or another.
However, I believe that what she thought she was studying was not at all what was really going on. Her premise of “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work and what is contained within them” should have been modified to “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work when the straight man is in the minority rather than the majority”.
Tillman-Healy’s book subject needs so many more qualifiers before it can be applied to anything else in the world that it pretty much becomes useless as anything beyond a meta guide to doing an ethnographic study. “relationships between a group of gay men and a straight couple from the midwest in Florida in the mid 1990s” doesn’t really help anyone out in general application.
Personally I think that she should have tried to study pre-existing friendships between straight and gay men where there was more of a balance between the sexualities. I have two friends who are roommates, one straight and one is gay. I have spoken to the straight one, Deck, about the book and he seems interested in how it would apply to his friendship with Ryan. I don’t think it would apply very much at all however. When I hang out with them we've pretty much got the spectrum covered, and in this interaction and others I've never known anyone who felt they were 'invading' a gay community if they just happened to be the only straight one there. Maybe they felt like a foreigner, but never in a negative way thats been expressed to me.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I guess my main point is that to me Tillman-Healy’s book seems to be more about how to write a Ph.D. in ethnography and sociology than to actually examine her relationships with the men involved in a meaningful way.
However, I believe that what she thought she was studying was not at all what was really going on. Her premise of “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work and what is contained within them” should have been modified to “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work when the straight man is in the minority rather than the majority”.
Tillman-Healy’s book subject needs so many more qualifiers before it can be applied to anything else in the world that it pretty much becomes useless as anything beyond a meta guide to doing an ethnographic study. “relationships between a group of gay men and a straight couple from the midwest in Florida in the mid 1990s” doesn’t really help anyone out in general application.
Personally I think that she should have tried to study pre-existing friendships between straight and gay men where there was more of a balance between the sexualities. I have two friends who are roommates, one straight and one is gay. I have spoken to the straight one, Deck, about the book and he seems interested in how it would apply to his friendship with Ryan. I don’t think it would apply very much at all however. When I hang out with them we've pretty much got the spectrum covered, and in this interaction and others I've never known anyone who felt they were 'invading' a gay community if they just happened to be the only straight one there. Maybe they felt like a foreigner, but never in a negative way thats been expressed to me.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I guess my main point is that to me Tillman-Healy’s book seems to be more about how to write a Ph.D. in ethnography and sociology than to actually examine her relationships with the men involved in a meaningful way.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Politics Part 2
On a related topic to the politicians and performance: when I was reading the article “Deference and Maternalism” by Rollins instead of looking just at the case study that was being examined in the piece I thought of how politicians and the electorate fill out both those roles.
The relationships of deference between politicians and their electorates tend to be an attempt at a kind of symmetrical deference. By portraying themselves as the ‘common man’(or woman) politicians are trying to associate themselves with the identities of the people that they wish to garner the support of. This kind of ceremonial activity is usually very different from the way they would act towards the ‘common man’ if they were not politicians. This kind of forced change from asymmetrical deference to an attempted projection of symmetrical deference is very intriguing to me. Many Americans want a president who is like them, as many people said during the 2000 election they would vote for George W. Bush because he was someone “Who they could sit down and drink a beer with.” Aside from the irony of him being a recovering alcoholic, this statement calls into question the idea that rulers should be superiors to the average person.
One of the reasons that I believe Barack Obama was so successful in his campaign for president in this cycle was his fusion of symmetrical and asymmetrical deference. He portrayed himself both as someone who could associate with the average person, but also as someone who is smart and capable, someone who we owe deference to. His sincerity in the moments of symmetrical deference and recognition of general cynicism in the asymmetrical deference situations propelled him forward as both an elite and someone who understand common problems.
The relationships of deference between politicians and their electorates tend to be an attempt at a kind of symmetrical deference. By portraying themselves as the ‘common man’(or woman) politicians are trying to associate themselves with the identities of the people that they wish to garner the support of. This kind of ceremonial activity is usually very different from the way they would act towards the ‘common man’ if they were not politicians. This kind of forced change from asymmetrical deference to an attempted projection of symmetrical deference is very intriguing to me. Many Americans want a president who is like them, as many people said during the 2000 election they would vote for George W. Bush because he was someone “Who they could sit down and drink a beer with.” Aside from the irony of him being a recovering alcoholic, this statement calls into question the idea that rulers should be superiors to the average person.
One of the reasons that I believe Barack Obama was so successful in his campaign for president in this cycle was his fusion of symmetrical and asymmetrical deference. He portrayed himself both as someone who could associate with the average person, but also as someone who is smart and capable, someone who we owe deference to. His sincerity in the moments of symmetrical deference and recognition of general cynicism in the asymmetrical deference situations propelled him forward as both an elite and someone who understand common problems.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Poltics Part 1/Performance and Truth
Politics is performance. We all know this, we all accept it. Despite the knowledge of the performance we still wish to see something else there. We want politicians to show us that they’re not just executing a song and dance in order to impress the public, we wish to see them actually being one of us. We want to see our identities reflected within them.
But is this really possible? Can we see politicians in a true light where they are revealing the groups that they themselves actually identify with rather than who they try to become associated with in order to achieve their certain goals?
It is interesting that if we look at this problem without the cynical light of Goffman telling us that everything is performance then we can never know what the true identity of politicians is. This gives us a cynical view of politicians and politics as merely means to an end without any true identities within themselves. However, if we instead take all (or most) of Goffman to be true then we can instead look at politicians as no more or less performance-oriented than the rest of us. I personally would like to look at politics in the latter view, because in my opinion it makes the whole process more palatable. Additionally I see nothing wrong with viewing all human interaction as performance.
As physical beings our primary(or only, depending on what you believe) way of expressing ourselves is through action. All of our thoughts and our identities that lie within ourselves are just that, within ourselves. There will always be something lost in the translation from mind to mouth and that translation is where our performance lies.
I take Goffman’s idea of performance and look at it as a way of viewing truth. If we are to say that all human interaction is performance then our truths are relative. If we are to say that some human interaction is not performance then there must be some absolute truth that lies behind the interaction that is making it something other than a performance. I don’t even know what we would call a non-performance interaction, perhaps a “true expression” or some such thing. I think what can be said about performance and interaction is that there are absolute truths. However those absolute truths can exist only within us. When we express them through speech, writing, or action we are applying truths to a situation, and in that application we must modify the truths to the scenario.
In short it appears to me that we can have absolute truths within ourselves but not between ourselves and others, much as we might like to believe we do.
But is this really possible? Can we see politicians in a true light where they are revealing the groups that they themselves actually identify with rather than who they try to become associated with in order to achieve their certain goals?
It is interesting that if we look at this problem without the cynical light of Goffman telling us that everything is performance then we can never know what the true identity of politicians is. This gives us a cynical view of politicians and politics as merely means to an end without any true identities within themselves. However, if we instead take all (or most) of Goffman to be true then we can instead look at politicians as no more or less performance-oriented than the rest of us. I personally would like to look at politics in the latter view, because in my opinion it makes the whole process more palatable. Additionally I see nothing wrong with viewing all human interaction as performance.
As physical beings our primary(or only, depending on what you believe) way of expressing ourselves is through action. All of our thoughts and our identities that lie within ourselves are just that, within ourselves. There will always be something lost in the translation from mind to mouth and that translation is where our performance lies.
I take Goffman’s idea of performance and look at it as a way of viewing truth. If we are to say that all human interaction is performance then our truths are relative. If we are to say that some human interaction is not performance then there must be some absolute truth that lies behind the interaction that is making it something other than a performance. I don’t even know what we would call a non-performance interaction, perhaps a “true expression” or some such thing. I think what can be said about performance and interaction is that there are absolute truths. However those absolute truths can exist only within us. When we express them through speech, writing, or action we are applying truths to a situation, and in that application we must modify the truths to the scenario.
In short it appears to me that we can have absolute truths within ourselves but not between ourselves and others, much as we might like to believe we do.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
I <3 how math is everything
Can we look at identity and its complexity in terms of fractals? Not in the sense that they are infinitely repeating as they get smaller and smaller, but it seems that there is no way to nail down a true identity, something that is isolated and defined by itself. The exception to this could be some biological components to identity, ie: gender and race. However these can still be broken down into the circumstances from which they emerged and the socialization that caused one to look upon themselves as boy vs. girl, asian vs. African, etcetera.
Maybe fractals aren’t the best way to look at this. Perhaps its better to visualize identity as something that is more like the way our neurons are connected in our brain. Each one is connected to many others, and though they don’t all touch and interact directly the ripple from one touches all others. In this same way identities can be seen to be not exactly overlapping, but interconnected and reactive to all the other identities that are present within the overarching Self.
Do we use identity as a crutch? Especially in sociology and anthropology identity is used as a reasoning and sometimes justification, for how people act. Isn’t identity just another result of actions of other people in our society and them shaping how they view us and view ourselves? Self-identity surely comes from the synthesis of many outside influences but the identity categorization that places us into groups of generalized others has been used many times to create broad statements about ends, but without talking about origins or means.
Maybe fractals aren’t the best way to look at this. Perhaps its better to visualize identity as something that is more like the way our neurons are connected in our brain. Each one is connected to many others, and though they don’t all touch and interact directly the ripple from one touches all others. In this same way identities can be seen to be not exactly overlapping, but interconnected and reactive to all the other identities that are present within the overarching Self.
Do we use identity as a crutch? Especially in sociology and anthropology identity is used as a reasoning and sometimes justification, for how people act. Isn’t identity just another result of actions of other people in our society and them shaping how they view us and view ourselves? Self-identity surely comes from the synthesis of many outside influences but the identity categorization that places us into groups of generalized others has been used many times to create broad statements about ends, but without talking about origins or means.
Baracking the Vote
These past few weeks have had me make certain decisions about the way I interact with others in the world, how I make my performance and present my Me. For the first time in my life our country is involved in an election that I actually have a strong investment in the outcome either way (at least at the outset, we had no idea how terrible George Bush could be at the beginning). This has energized my political impetus to a large extent and initially pushed me towards being interested in working for the Barack Obama campaign, because he was such a compelling personality and I think is one of the most effective role takers in politics today.
Role-taking and performance in fact seems to be the heart of what politics is, making the entire political work one large sociology case study. In his campaign Obama successfully showed that he could take on the role of average Americans and inspire trust in them because he knew what it was like to be them.
But to get back to my point, after becoming energized about the campaign I had to decide what role I wanted to play. I realized that the identity that I wished to possess most in this period was not one of a participant in the campaign process, but as a participant in the voting process. I have never been so excited or proud to be a voter and I wanted to be able to tell that story about myself, now and in the future, more than being a participant in the campaign. Thusly I have done everything I can to become and informed voter and make my decision according the data that is available.
This is an interesting step for me along the continuum of my political identity. With each major stage in my life I have associated myself with a different political ideology. When I was in high school I was extremely politically active and somewhat radical in my ideology, looking to anarchism or socialism (I saw them as two sides of the same coin) as a solution to our broken democracy. After high school I became disillusioned by the process following the reaction to September 11th and the invasion or Iraq, which caused the onset of political apathy. This identity of apathy was actually wrapped up in a reaction to the identity that many Americans seemed to be holding onto at that point, which was mainly focus on Us vs. Them, for our God against your God, and there’s no middle ground. This kind of belief and identity role scared me to such an extent that I tried to excise the idea of being an American from my mind. I felt that that part of my identity had been hijacked by others, that what I had thought was a significant symbol in my symbolic interaction with others (especially foreigners) had become a very mutable and inconsistent symbol.
In the last few weeks of the election and after casting my vote today I feel exhilaration in my identity. I am a voter, I am an American, I did my constitutional part to bring change to this country and to make the American identity something that I wish to associate with myself. I can only hope that the rest of the electorate also wishes for America herself to act according to her Me instead of her I.
Role-taking and performance in fact seems to be the heart of what politics is, making the entire political work one large sociology case study. In his campaign Obama successfully showed that he could take on the role of average Americans and inspire trust in them because he knew what it was like to be them.
But to get back to my point, after becoming energized about the campaign I had to decide what role I wanted to play. I realized that the identity that I wished to possess most in this period was not one of a participant in the campaign process, but as a participant in the voting process. I have never been so excited or proud to be a voter and I wanted to be able to tell that story about myself, now and in the future, more than being a participant in the campaign. Thusly I have done everything I can to become and informed voter and make my decision according the data that is available.
This is an interesting step for me along the continuum of my political identity. With each major stage in my life I have associated myself with a different political ideology. When I was in high school I was extremely politically active and somewhat radical in my ideology, looking to anarchism or socialism (I saw them as two sides of the same coin) as a solution to our broken democracy. After high school I became disillusioned by the process following the reaction to September 11th and the invasion or Iraq, which caused the onset of political apathy. This identity of apathy was actually wrapped up in a reaction to the identity that many Americans seemed to be holding onto at that point, which was mainly focus on Us vs. Them, for our God against your God, and there’s no middle ground. This kind of belief and identity role scared me to such an extent that I tried to excise the idea of being an American from my mind. I felt that that part of my identity had been hijacked by others, that what I had thought was a significant symbol in my symbolic interaction with others (especially foreigners) had become a very mutable and inconsistent symbol.
In the last few weeks of the election and after casting my vote today I feel exhilaration in my identity. I am a voter, I am an American, I did my constitutional part to bring change to this country and to make the American identity something that I wish to associate with myself. I can only hope that the rest of the electorate also wishes for America herself to act according to her Me instead of her I.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Looking back at a month of Symbolic Interactionism
Having just finished our first textbook immediately before our first exam I continue to vacillate between thinking that symbolic interactionism is unusual and difficult understand and that is the most common-sensical theory that seems as if barely is worth the academic effort that is dedicated to it. I think that the truth of the theory lies within the middle ground of those two statements. With Mead and the pragmatists attempt to bring sociology to the masses I think that they have half-succeeded, on the one hand the ideas are very simplistic and flow into one another in a logical way, on the other hand neglecting to view them in context of the greater structure of society I feel is a grave error.
Symbolic interactionism has the advantage of really trying to get at the whys and wherefores of social interactions in a very down to earth and organic style. A huge disadvantage to this is that we lose the look at the greater social impetuses that affect people. I would prefer myself to look at both the individual interactions of people through the SI lense but also to put that lense within the frame of larger social forces that exist.
In the last chapter of our book Symbolic Interactionism the author goes through six case studies to illustrate the usefulness of the theory. One in particular I feel could do with the more expanded look that I am interested in. The study looked at tattooing as a grass-roots kind of social movement. It looked at how in the current generation there is a much higher percentage of people with at least one tattoo and the reasons for that. The study was discussed as examining how people found more justification within their pre-existing social contexts for tattooing(such as marking significant moments, in life, skills, or character traits of the tattooed). While these are all valid reasons for getting tattooed the origins of the social environment that made such justifications possible were not touched upon. To understand why this generation has so many tattoos among us, especially folks who might be otherwise considered to have relatively conservative lifestyles one must look at the greater emphasis on individualism in our society in the latter half of the twentieth century and the propagation of fractured subcultures that came along with it.
This criticism by no means negates the importance of SI for me but it does limit its usefulness, as I feel much sociology is limited in its usefulness. I have found throughout my own life that it seems much easier for anthropologists to unlock the nature of societies that have collapsed or faded away by looking at as complex and complete picture as possible, the Mayan collapse is a good example of this with agricultural, social, and military forces all contributing to the trends that ended the Classical Mayan period.
Symbolic interactionism provides a wonderful perspective to examine why humans do what we do based on the core of our society, the interactions between people, but the limitations that it places upon itself maim it in a most unfortunate way. Symbolic interactions have their roots in our biology as firmly as any other social behaviors do, and this piece should not be neglected as it is what distinguishes our biology from chimpanzees. They are our closest relatives and yet they face a insurmountable (at least as far as biologists can tell right now) barrier between their sophisticated but rather static social interactions and the human ability to use language to create social objects and symbols that allow for abstract thought and a society that is larger than a family clan.
Chimpanzees have a good sense of what their ‘I’ is and also a rudimentary sense of the ‘Me’ and it would appear that they are also able to role-take to a certain degree. However the extent to which they role take seems to be the most limiting factor in their social and evolutionary progression towards sentience. Chimpanzees can teach each other how to use simple tools but there is no concerted effort to make sure everyone in a clan learns a useful new skill as soon as it is discovered, there is no thought of “Well this spear use makes my life easier because I know it, I bet it would also make her life easier if I taught her how.”
Symbolic interactionism has the advantage of really trying to get at the whys and wherefores of social interactions in a very down to earth and organic style. A huge disadvantage to this is that we lose the look at the greater social impetuses that affect people. I would prefer myself to look at both the individual interactions of people through the SI lense but also to put that lense within the frame of larger social forces that exist.
In the last chapter of our book Symbolic Interactionism the author goes through six case studies to illustrate the usefulness of the theory. One in particular I feel could do with the more expanded look that I am interested in. The study looked at tattooing as a grass-roots kind of social movement. It looked at how in the current generation there is a much higher percentage of people with at least one tattoo and the reasons for that. The study was discussed as examining how people found more justification within their pre-existing social contexts for tattooing(such as marking significant moments, in life, skills, or character traits of the tattooed). While these are all valid reasons for getting tattooed the origins of the social environment that made such justifications possible were not touched upon. To understand why this generation has so many tattoos among us, especially folks who might be otherwise considered to have relatively conservative lifestyles one must look at the greater emphasis on individualism in our society in the latter half of the twentieth century and the propagation of fractured subcultures that came along with it.
This criticism by no means negates the importance of SI for me but it does limit its usefulness, as I feel much sociology is limited in its usefulness. I have found throughout my own life that it seems much easier for anthropologists to unlock the nature of societies that have collapsed or faded away by looking at as complex and complete picture as possible, the Mayan collapse is a good example of this with agricultural, social, and military forces all contributing to the trends that ended the Classical Mayan period.
Symbolic interactionism provides a wonderful perspective to examine why humans do what we do based on the core of our society, the interactions between people, but the limitations that it places upon itself maim it in a most unfortunate way. Symbolic interactions have their roots in our biology as firmly as any other social behaviors do, and this piece should not be neglected as it is what distinguishes our biology from chimpanzees. They are our closest relatives and yet they face a insurmountable (at least as far as biologists can tell right now) barrier between their sophisticated but rather static social interactions and the human ability to use language to create social objects and symbols that allow for abstract thought and a society that is larger than a family clan.
Chimpanzees have a good sense of what their ‘I’ is and also a rudimentary sense of the ‘Me’ and it would appear that they are also able to role-take to a certain degree. However the extent to which they role take seems to be the most limiting factor in their social and evolutionary progression towards sentience. Chimpanzees can teach each other how to use simple tools but there is no concerted effort to make sure everyone in a clan learns a useful new skill as soon as it is discovered, there is no thought of “Well this spear use makes my life easier because I know it, I bet it would also make her life easier if I taught her how.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
