Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing”*…
Antropologist Kristin Bell explores laughter as a far more complex phenomenon than simple delight, reflecting on its surprising power to disturb and disrupt…
… As an anthropologist specializing in health and medicine, laughter isn’t really in my professional wheelhouse—unless you subscribe to the view that laughter is the best medicine. My interest in the topic is more personal, not just because of my history as a former Giggling Gertie, but because it’s a behavior that is much less straightforward than it seems.
Ideally, laughter is something we share. According to anthropologist Munro Edmonson, laughter is sociable; it ideally invites a similar response. Indeed, it has contagious qualities: When we hear someone laugh, we often laugh, or at least smile, ourselves—an effect consistently shown through psychological research. This is how we ended up with canned laughter on sitcoms. Studios realized that the sound of laughter made their shows seem funnier to their audiences, while also giving them a degree of control over when people laughed…
… According to the anthropologist Munro Edmonson, the central feature of laughter is aspiration: We release a forceful puff of air as we laugh.
But laughter is also characterized by repetition. In fact, given the extraordinary variability in the sounds people make when they laugh, repetition is what makes laughter universally recognizable. This is why writers conventionalize laughter as “he-he-he,” “ha-ha-ha,” and “ho-ho-ho” (well, at least if you’re Santa Claus). Notably, this feature isn’t exclusive to English representations. Edmonson observed that laughter is represented in Russian as xe, xe, xe; in Tzotzil—a Mayan language spoken in Mexico—it’s ‘eh ‘eh ‘eh.
We don’t fully understand why humans make this sound when we laugh. When 19th-century biologist Charles Darwin set out to explore the biology of feelings in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he wrote, “why the sounds which man utters when he is pleased have the peculiar reiterated character of laughter we do not know.” However, the response seems to occur well before culture is embedded in our behaviors: Recognizable laughter is evident in babies from 4 months old.
Nor is laughter unique to humans. Great apes respond to being tickled in much the same way that humans do. Of course, because chimps, bonobos, et cetera have a different vocal apparatus than humans, it sounds more like a dog panting or a person having an asthma attack or energetic sex. However, these primate sounds have the same “peculiar, reiterated character” that Darwin highlighted in humans. This is why laughter is characterized by scientists as a cross-species phenomenon.
Yet, while laughter is evident in the play of other primates, it’s unclear whether they have a sense of humor. Recent research provides evidence of a capacity for teasing through nonverbal behavior. But, as the evolutionary psychologist Robert Provine noted, “there is no evidence that they respond to apparently humorous behavior, their own or that of others, with laughter.”
Giving meaning to laughter seems to be distinctively human.
While some laughter is deliberate, much of it is outside conscious control—an attribute that goes a long way toward explaining the widespread Euro-American ambivalence toward the act. According to the literary scholar Sebastian Coxon, a growing anxiety about mirth is evident in the European historical record from the late Middle Ages. For example, the 16th-century Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, better known for advising children to “replace farts with coughs,” also warned against “loud laughter and immoderate mirth.”
Notably, Erasmus singled out the “neighing sound that some people make when they laugh” for particular opprobrium—an impulse evident in the contemporary tendency to compare unrestrained laughter with the cries of animals: “howling” with laughter, “hooting” in delight, “snorting” with amusement, and so on. Indeed, while the term “guffaw” might not be borrowed from animal noises, it certainly sounds like it could be.
These characterizations reveal an attempt to draw laughter into the realm of taste and civility—categories that are strongly tied to gender and class strictures. For instance, in an 1860 etiquette guide titled The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society, readers are counseled to moderate their laughter during a dinner party so that it’s neither too loud nor too soft: “To laugh in a suppressed way, has the appearance of laughing at those around you, and a loud, boisterous laugh is always unlady-like.”
Social judgments abound not just in relation to how we laugh but what we laugh at—as an early 19th-century artwork attests. “Laughter,” etched by British artist and social commentator Thomas Rowlandson, depicts a man laughing at his cat adorned in a bonnet and cloak.
The caption reads: ‘Laughter is one of the most pleasing of the Passions and is with difficulty accounted for, as risibility is frequently excited from the most simple causes—as is the case with the Countryman and his Cat.’ The implication is that “unsophisticated” countrymen lack “class” and are therefore easily amused. (For the record, I am equally unsophisticated, because I will never not find cats pictured with human props funny.)
Still, despite the association between humor and taste, it’s often physical comedy that gets the most laughs. It’s not a coincidence that the first truly global hit comedy was The Gods Must Be Crazy, whose sublime “Tati-like slapstick routines” drew audiences from New York and Caracas to Tokyo and Lagos, despite being widely condemned by film reviewers as apartheid propaganda.
Indeed, screenwriters have long predicted that physical humor will become increasingly prominent in Hollywood comedies because it “transcends dialogue and even most cultural differences,” and movies must increasingly appeal to a global market to produce reliable returns. (As far as I can tell, the future of Hollywood films is basically Marvel movies and slapstick comedies.)…
… As McDonald observes, laughter disrupts the notion of a stable, coherent self—reflected in terms like “cracking up” and “bursting.” Moreover, unrestrained laughter doesn’t just signify a lack of personal control; it can be politically dangerous as well. The literary historian Joseph Butwin writes of “seditious laughter” as a weapon of the oppressed that can serve to destabilize hierarchies and power relations.
In the end, it’s clear that laughter is a deeply curious thing. It’s simultaneously the most social of human expressions and the one most disruptive of social edifices and rules. Shared, sanctioned laughter might bring us together, but unsanctioned laughter shows the cracks, revealing that we’re not quite who we think…
“The Strange Power of Laughter“
* Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
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As we muse on mirth (and lest we forget that sometimes laughter is simply a function of simple delight), we might recall that it was on this date in 1929 that Rube Goldberg‘s “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, A.K.,” cartoon series first published in Colliers Weekly.
“Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing”*…
Americans are now spending more time alone– mostly at home– than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. While the pandemic certainly enforced some of that isolation; the post-COVID world remains extraordinarily atomized.
In a bracing essay, Derek Thompson, explores the emergence of this wide-spread isolation, unpacking its drivers, enumerating its considerable (personal and civic) costs, musing on the possible impact of AI, and pondering what might lead to a return to sociability…
… “I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam [author of Bowling Alone] told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.
The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school…
On how we spend our time and what that yields: “The Anti-Social Century,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com (gift article).
See also: “You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention,” from @chrislhayes.bsky.social (also in @theatlantic.com, also a gift article)
* Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
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As we call a friend, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Alexander Graham Bell placed the first transcontinental phone call, from New York to San Francisco, where the Panama–Pacific International Exposition celebrations were underway and his assistant, his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson stood by. Bell repeated his famous first telephonic words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” to which Watson this time replied “It will take me five days to get there now!” Bell’s call officially initiated AT&T’s transcontinental service.
And, on ths date 45 years later, in 1959, The first non-stop transcontinental commercial jet trip was made by an American Airlines Boeing 707, from Los Angeles to New York. The sleek silver plane made the flight in airline official time of 4 hours and 3 minutes, half the usual scheduled time for the prop-driven DC- 7Cs then in regular use on that route.
“This is a cardboard universe”*…
As we rid ourselves of the detritus of the Holiday season, let us pause to consider its signature component: at the turn of the 21st century, corrugated cardboard accounted for just fifteen percent of the United States recycling stream; today, it’s nearly half. Shannon Mattern on the cardboard box…
… As historian Maria Rentetzi writes (“Cardboard Box: The Politics of Materiality,” in Boxes: A Field Guide), “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them.
Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. The Container Corporation of America was founded in 1926, and upon those claims it built an empire with surprising reach. The CCA made collapsible shipping boxes, and it transformed packaging into a science and an art. It advanced market research, shaped mid-century taste, and altered the chromatic universe through color standards. It employed some of the best graphic designers of the period, and as national borders shifted after the Second World War, it commissioned Herbert Bayer, author of the Universal typeface, to revise the World Geo-Graphic Atlas. Even then, the CCA was remaking that new world to meet its logistical needs, rehabbing mining towns and germinating forests, and orchestrating civic discourse about all of this.
How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process? Soon we’ll dive into the Paepcke archive, to find answers to those questions. But first I want to show you how a cardboard box is made…
In turn, inspiring and horrifying– the social history of the cardboard carton: “World in a Box,” @shannonmattern.bsky.social in @placesjournal.bsky.social.
For an earlier (R)D focused on Mattern’s work: “To clarify, ADD data.”
* Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl
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As we tape it tight, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that a federal official who might slowed the onset of the cardboard box was fired: Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, was fired by President William Howard Taft. Pinchot had opposed Taft’s newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, who favored commercial exploitation of federal reserve lands.
During President Theodore Roosevelt’s term, Pinchot had help enable policies for the conservation of natural resources. Roosevelt had designated millions of acres to protect as National Forests. That legacy was threatened, so Pinchot pressured Taft to remove Ballinger from office. In November of 1909, Collier’s Magazine had created a scandal when it accused Ballinger of shady dealings in coal lands in Alaska. When Pinchot criticized both Ballinger and Taft, the president reacted by firing him.
“If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?”*…
For years, people have bemoaned the sorry state of innovation. Compared with the great inventions of the industrial era, the inventions of our own time seem pathetic. In a short essay reprised from 2012, the estimable Nicholas Carr offers a different take: We’re as innovative as ever, but the focus of innovation has shifted…
… The original inspiration for such grousing… came from Robert J. Gordon, a Northwestern University economist. His influential 2000 paper “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” included a damning comparison of the flood of inventions of a century ago with the seeming trickle we see today. Consider the products invented in just the ten years between 1876 and 1886: the internal combustion engine, the electric lightbulb, the electric transformer, the steam turbine, the electric railroad, the automobile, the telephone, the movie camera, the phonograph, the linotype machine, the film roll for cameras, the dictaphone, the cash register, vaccines, reinforced concrete, the flush toilet. The typewriter had arrived a few years earlier, and the punch-card tabulator, the computer’s precursor, would appear a few years later. And then, in short order, came the airplane, the radio, air conditioning, the vacuum tube, jet aircraft, the television, the refrigerator, and a raft of other home appliances, as well as revolutionary advances in manufacturing processes. (And let’s not forget The Bomb.)
The conditions of life changed utterly between 1890 and 1950, observed Gordon. Between 1950 and today? Not so much.
So why is innovation less impressive today?… maybe it’s crappy education. Or a lack of corporate investment in research. Or short-sighted venture capitalists. Or monopolistic business practices. Or overaggressive lawyers. Or imagination-challenged entrepreneurs. Or maybe it’s a catastrophic loss of mojo. None of these explanations makes much sense. The aperture of science grows ever wider, after all, even as the commercial and reputational rewards for innovation grow ever larger and the ability to share ideas grows ever stronger. Any barrier to innovation should be swept away by such forces.
Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we’ve done that for entirely rational reasons. We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation we desire — and deserve.
My idea is that there’s a hierarchy of innovation that runs in parallel with Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow argued that human needs progress through five stages, with each new stage requiring the fulfillment of lower-level, or more basic, needs. So first we have to meet our most primitive Physiological needs, and that frees us to focus on our needs for Safety, and once our needs for Safety are met, we can attend to our needs for Belongingness, and then on to our needs for personal Esteem, and finally, at the peak of Maslow’s pyramid, to our needs for Self-Actualization.
If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy as an inflexible structure, with clear boundaries between its levels, it falls apart. Our needs are messy, and the boundaries between them are porous. A caveman probably pursued esteem and self-actualization, to some degree, just as we today spend time and effort fulfilling our physical needs. But if you look at the hierarchy as a map of human focus, then it makes sense — and seems to be borne out by history.
In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.
If technological progress is shaped by human needs, as it surely is, then general shifts in needs would also bring shifts in the nature of innovation. The tools we invent would move through the hierarchy of needs, from tools that help safeguard our bodies or coordinate social groups on up to tools that allow us to modify our moods or express our individuality — from tools of survival to tools of the self. Here’s my crack at what the hierarchy of innovation looks like:
Innovation’s focus moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think bow-and-arrow), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think assembly line), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).
As with Maslow’s hierarchy, you shouldn’t look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the top level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We’re already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn’t seem particularly pressing. We’ve become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal states or projecting those states outward to an audience. An entrepreneur today has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he or she creates a popular social-networking app than a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. Innovation, to put a dark spin on it, arcs toward decadence…
One might wonder why Carr doesn’t focus more (and more affirmatively) on information technologies– the emergence of personal computing in all of its form factors, the knitting together of the web and the advent of turbocharged connectivity, and on its back, the emergence of social media– all of which have been hugely impactful, perhaps especially in the 12 years since this essay was written: a “TikTok/YouTube/influencer election,” a social media fueled mental health concern, the proliferation of meme investing and online gambling, etc., etc… But then, one might conclude that they simply underline his point.
Why our innovations seem so small: “The Arc of Innovation Bends toward Decadence.”
Pair with Ted Gioia‘s painfully apposite “The State of the Culture, 2024.”
* Robert J. Gordon
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As we ponder progress, we might recall that it was on this date that an acute observer of this phenomenon, The Simpsons, made its debut as a full-length show. Originally a part of The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons got their own Christmas special, which aired on FOX on this day in 1989. “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (AKA “The Simpsons Christmas Special”– the first of an annual tradition) was created by Matt Groening and written by Mimi Pond (who only wrote the one episode). It was viewed by 13.4 million viewers, was nominated for two Emmy Awards, and hasn’t left the airwaves since.
“Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing”*…
As the press continues to treat this year’s all–too–consequential election as a horse race, your correspondent is re-visiting a topic touched a few weeks ago: the prevalence of polling data in election coverage. Rick Perlstein weighs in with a (fascinating) history of presidential election polling, then turns to it implications…
… That polls do not predict Presidential election outcomes any better now than they did a century ago is but one conclusion of this remarkable history. A second conclusion lurks more in the background—but I think it is the most important one to absorb.
For most of this century, the work was the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, even among pollsters. In 1948, George Gallup called presidential polling (as distinguished from issue polling, which has its own problems) “this Frankenstein.” In 1980, Elmo Roper admitted that “our polling techniques have gotten more and more sophisticated, yet we seem to be missing more and more elections.” All along, conventional journalists made a remarkably consistent case that they were empty calories that actively crowded out genuine civic engagement: “Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy,” as a 1949 critic put it, “Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”
Critics rooted for polls to fail. Eric Sevareid, in 1964, recorded his “secret glee and relief when the polls go wrong,” which might restore “the mystery and suspense of human behavior eliminated by clinical dissection.” If they were always right, as James Reston picked up the plaint in 1970, “Who would vote?” Edward R. Murrow argued in 1952 that polling “contributed something to the dehumanization of society,” and was delighted, that year, when “the people surprised the pollsters … It restored to the individual, I suspect, some sense of his own sovereignty” over the “petty tyranny of those who assert that they can tell us what we think.”
Still and all, the practice grew like Topsy. There was an “extraordinary expansion” in polls for the 1980 election, including the first partnerships between polling and media organizations. The increase was accompanied by a measurable failure of quality, which gave birth to a new critique: news organizations “making their own news and flacking it as if it were an event over which they had no control.”
And so, after the 1980 debacle, high-minded observers began wondering whether presidential polls had “outlived their usefulness,” whether the priesthood would end up “defrocked.” In 1992, the popular columnist Mike Royko went further, proposing sabotage: Maybe if people just lied, pollsters would have to give up. In 2000, Alison Mitchell of The New York Times proposed a polling moratorium in the four weeks leading up to elections, noting the “numbing length … to which polling is consuming both politics and journalism.”
Instead, polling proliferated: a “relentless barrage,” the American Journalism Review complained, the media obsessing over each statistically insignificant blip. Then, something truly disturbing started happening: People stopped complaining.
A last gasp was 2008, when Arianna Huffington revived Royko’s call for sabotage, until, two years later, she acquired the aggregator Polling.com and renamed it HuffPost Pollster. “Polling, whether we like it or not,” the former skeptic proclaimed, “is a big part of how we communicate about politics.”
And so it is.
Even as the resources devoted to every other kind of journalism atrophied, poll-based political culture has overwhelmed us, crowding out all other ways of thinking about public life. Joshua Cohen tells the story of the time Silver, looking for a way to earn eyeballs between elections, considered making a model to predict congressional votes. But voters, he snidely remarked, “don’t care about bills being passed.”
Pollsters might not be able to tell us what we think about politics. But increasingly, they tell us how to think about politics—like them. Following polls has become our vision of what political participation is. Our therapy—headlines like the one on AlterNet last week, “Data Scientist Who Correctly Predicted 2020 Election Now Betting on ‘Landslide’ Harris Win.” Our political masochism: “Holy cow, did you hear about that Times poll.” “Don’t worry, I heard it’s an outlier …”
The Washington Post’s polling director once said, “There’s something addictive about polls and poll numbers.” He’s right. When we refer to “political junkies,” polls are pretty much the junk.
For some reason, I’ve been able to pretty much swear off the stuff, beyond mild indulgence. Maybe it’s my dime-store Buddhism. I try to stay in the present—and when it comes to the future, try to stick with things I can do. Maybe, I hereby offer myself as a role model?
As a “political expert,” friends, relatives, and even strangers are always asking me, “Who’s going to win?” I say I really have no idea. People are always a little shocked: Prediction has become what people think political expertise is for.
Afterward, the novelty of the response gets shrugged off, and we can talk. Beyond polling’s baby talk. About our common life together, about what we want to happen, and how we might make it so. But no predictions about whether this sort of thing might ever prevail. No predictions at all…
Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?
Eminently worth reading in full. Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives? “The Polling Imperilment,” from @rickperlstein in @TheProspect.
Pair with: “The Problems with Polls.”
For more on why today’s polls are so flawed, see “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
Apposite: from the estimable James Fallows: “Election Countdown, 38 Days to Go: What Is Wrong With Our Leading Paper?“
* J. B. Priestley
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As we pray for more consequential coverage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that the (then-venerable) Literary Digest mailed out return postcard to 2,000,000 Americans, asking them to return the card with an indication for whether they would be voting in the upcoming presidential election for incumbent, Franklin D. Roosevelt or challenger Alf Landon. They published the results of their anxiously-anticipated poll in their October 31 issue: a massive victory for Landon. In the event, of course, Roosevelt defeated Landon in an unprecedented landslide.
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