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This past week for my collaborative learning course, we read three articles on activity theory, a theoretical perspective concerned with how actors work towards goals/objects from particular motives/passions, using certain tools to do so–based on the little triangular diagram that seems much beloved of activity theory, I would include “rules” within “tools,” which is of course very ethnomethodological of me.

That is to say, ethnomethodologists often argue that rules are never sufficient to account for people’s actions, no matter how frequently people claim that they did things “because of” rules. Rules are simply resources, another possible tool in the toolkit when people are accounting for action–and in fact, one often sees cases in which people justify a seeming violation of a rule by demonstrating how it was in fact following the “spirit” of the rule or something similar. I like to think of roles in a similar way, actually, although I would freely admit that some roles are harder to get out of or into than others, and of course accounts can fail in the sense that other participants do not accept them. But anyway. Activity theory.

One of the articles, Wolff-Michael Roth’s* “Activity Theory and Education: An Introduction” (2004), discusses the early absence of activity theory from the discipline of education (the course I’m taking is in educational psychology, if you’ll recall). He attributes its rise in visibility in part to articles published in English by Engestrom and notes that you can trace this ascent by looking at the increasing attendance at activity theory-related sessions as the American Educational Research Association national meetings.

As pretty much all academics know, there are trends within academia. Certain topics or theoretical perspectives get hot and everyone wants to get in on the action. Sometimes these trends are Madonna; sometimes they are Britney Spears. In the case of activity theory, the main barrier to its having been promoted earlier seems to have been a lack of English publications; this is certainly a problem for non-English-speaking researchers in engaging in dialogue with a larger audience, but one that I think is often not considered much. I’m guilty myself of crossing off potential references without a second thought if they’re not in English–I’m a graduate student; I have papers to write and articles to submit and classes to teach; I just don’t have time to learn German. This is, however, a good example of how what we know, or think is important, is often shaped by forces that are mostly invisible to us. Even if we know they’re there, we mostly don’t think about them.

Language barriers are an obvious example, but in fact academics’ perspectives are typically a lot narrower than that. We get trained in certain disciplines, with bodies of literature behind them–some of them are older and more entrenched than others, but graduate education is pretty focused anyway. Interdisciplinary research seems to be getting more and more buzz, and it seems obvious that it’s a good approach when you have a particular topic established. I remember a couple of years ago talking to a guy at a party who was interested in autism diagnoses. He wasn’t a sociologist, and had no idea about the work within conversation analysis (narrower and narrower) that had been done on the topic. He was really interested in it when I told him about it. I suspect he probably never read it, or maybe read it and got frustrated and decided to stick with more sensible perspectives.

By which I mean, more sensible to him. Academic training is all about learning a paradigm and working in it. Interdisciplinary research and perspectives seem like a great idea, kind of like ending world hunger, but then they turn out to be really complicated and confusing and people keep referencing pet theorists and very few people actually want to quit being a sociologist or a psychologist or whatever, and there’s a tendency, I think, to get frustrated with people for not having had the same training as you. It’s probably worse when you’re all sort of in the same division, like social science–physicists are clearly alien; you don’t expect them to know anything about Marx. But when people know about Marx, and then turn out not to know what YOU know about Marx, it’s confusing–especially when you start out thinking you know the same things, because duh, why wouldn’t you?**

For example, one of the other articles, a piece on online community, includes a bit on sociability:

The important design point here is that designers shift their focus from simply supporting usability to supporting what Preece (2000) described as ’sociability.’ Barab, MaKinster, Moore, Cunningham, and The ILF Design Team (2001) described sociability as ‘those social policies and technical structures that support the community’s shared purpose and social interactions among group members’ (p. 83)” (Barab et al. 2004)

I realize that what is being termed “sociability” here actually diverges rather sharply from Simmel’s definition of sociability as non-instrumental, but it comes as quite a shock, to a sociologist, to see the word “sociability” and not even a breath of him. This may just be an exaggeration of a problem common to a lot of social scientific terms, which is that we tend to use words like “self” and “motive” that already have vernacular connotations that may not actually mean what we want them to mean.***

I don’t mean, actually, to be negative about interdisciplinary research–I think it’s a good idea, just like a bunch of other people do. I do think that when attempting it, participants needs to really think about their own differences in perspective, and try not to ever assume that two people using the same word mean the same thing. There are language barriers amongst English speakers.

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*It is not often that I encounter another academic with an apparently English name as non-normative as mine.

***I was told once that Japanese academics, as part of their academic training, have to learn new sets of kanji (Chinese characters) for the technical terminology of their discipline. I wonder if their social sciences follow this convention as well, or if they, too, use words pinched from laypeople.

I know it’s because a lot of the early literature focuses on them, which makes sense because they were actually a new and vibrant online community when the early research was being done, but at this point I don’t think they’re terribly relevant unless you’re trying to explain the difference between hard core internet geezers and everyone else, which hardly anyone ever is.

So anyway, I got back from ASA and I’m tired because my internal clock thinks it’s midnight and the margaritas from happy hour at Compadres to celebrate my triumphant return have worn off.**

I met a lot of cool people doing interesting work, and I thought that our presentation on third places in virtual worlds went quite well, especially when you consider that it took place at 8:30 in the morning on the first full day of the conference. A more substantive post may or may not follow in the next few days; please recall that I now have 10 days to pack all my shit and move back to Wisconsin. And there’s a poster presentation at PARC in there somewhere, too.

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*Year chosen because that’s the year I started playing MUDs, but I was sort of late. And they didn’t really take off at my junior high, although I did inspire a few fellow orc slayers.

**After the conference, I felt it was best to gradually reduce the alcohol consumption rather than abruptly cutting it off.

ETA: NOTE TO POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS AND MY PARENTS: No, I was not participating! Read the footnotes, geeze. It just HAPPENED TO BE amateur night.

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I have mentioned before that African American women love my hair. Just yesterday I was walking down the Infinite Corridor and was informed by a young black woman (she looked about junior high age): “Man, that makes you HOT.” Something along those lines, anyway. I remember thinking that I don’t understand how the kids talk these days, although it seemed generally positive.

At any rate, I have identified another group with a special appreciation for my hair: exotic dancers.*

Proportionally, exotic dancers seem to love my hair even more than African American women. I see a lot of the latter in any given day and only a small number of them say anything about my hair. Of course, I recognize that dancers are working for tips. They also got to see my hair under a black light, a condition in which it is particularly striking.** Unfortunately, I suspect I will never be able to conduct a truly controlled study to determine, for good and all, who likes my hair BEST. But I will say, over half the professional dancers I encountered last week were very enthusiastic about it.

The amateurs, not so much. An interesting difference between professional dancers and the women who participate in amateur night is that the former see a group of women and make a beeline for them, whereas the latter LITERALLY cannot be paid to come close.

Another thing that dancers like (in addition to my hair, the nominal topic of this post in case you lost track) is $2 bills. Another member of my party knew this and came prepared. I realize that $2 bills are worth twice as much as $1 bills, so they’ve got that going for them, but dancers seem to love them far out of proportion to their doubled economic value. One woman told us that they are lucky, which I of course found subculturally fascinating.*** Another woman told us that she gives them to her daughter, a fact that I suspect she would never have disclosed to a group of men–that’s not what they’re buying.

At one point, I was in the bathroom and heard two women discussing how “there’s nothing like a strip club to make you feel bad about your body, god, I need to do some crunches!”

Huh, I thought. You’d think amateur night would be more of a consolation than that.

I mean, no, I do not think I am as hot as the PROFESSIONAL dancers,**** especially not the one who was double-jointed and could cross her ankles behind her head. But this is kind of like acknowledging that I could not take an Army Ranger in a fight. They’re PROFESSIONALS and they’ve dedicated way more time to their pursuit of choice (being smoking hot, killing people with spoons) than I am willing to put in, so it’s not like there’s any SHAME in it.

Anyway, I have my hair. Even the dancers are impressed.

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*My information from a friend of mine who worked for several years in the profession, as well as what I gleaned from that Lerum 2001 article I read for the social psych prelim, suggests that dancers do not like being referred to as “strippers.” I have to agree that the term eclipses a truly impressive degree of athletic skill, not to mention various other professional competencies that most people probably don’t think of when they hear “stripper.”

****But I am totally as hot as the amateurs. The main difference between us, I would venture, is that I recognize the fact that I lack the necessary social skills for success in exotic dancing. Nudity? No problem. Making nice to strangers? Not so much. Also, I saw one of the amateurs almost fall off the pole while hanging upside down. I try to avoid any job that entails the risk of cracking my skull open, naked or clothed.

(I’m back-dating because it IS a Valentine’s Day post, and I have other ideas for today anyway.)

So somebody lost Facebook a LOT of money this Valentine’s Day.

The Facebook gift shop has apparently been manifest in some form for awhile, but it was only within the past week that it was added to users’ home pages, on the right sidebar–in fact, is has now disappeared again from that location, but if you go to a person’s profile page and scroll down, you’ll find a “gift box” just above their “wall,” with the option of giving them a gift.

The “gift,” in case you don’t already know, is a brightly colored graphic, less than an inch square on my resolution anyway, designed by Susan Kare, who did the original Mac icons. They’re cute. They cost $1 each.*

They are, of course, totally noncorporeal. Some people might wonder why anyone would pay $1 for some pixels, but the issue here is the nature of gifts, which have never really been about what they are. Or they are other than they seem. Whatever.

Gifts aren’t about necessity, which is why, for instance, bath products are so popular.** Gifts are not about permanence, either–a real flower is much more transient than a digital one. Gifts are generally about reciprocity; it’s embarrassing to get a Christmas gift from someone for whom you have no reciprocal present. And gifts are about giving and getting–giving and getting as social actions, which means that in general, they’re enhanced by an audience.

The major point of flowers on Valentine’s Day is not the flowers themselves. It’s the knowledge that someone loves you and gave you flowers–a knowledge that is even better shared, that is, when all your co-workers can SEE that someone loves you and gave you flowers. What better place to put a gift than Facebook, where the audience is not limited to the recipient’s dorm or office? Where the audience, in fact, is everyone on the site whom the recipient has designated as an Other of some degree of some signifance? And where the newsfeed makes it fairly likely that they’ll see the fact of the gift?

The smartest thing that Facebook did with these gifts was give everyone one free token. One gift to give at no cost–but only one. Unlike MySpace, Facebook does not order friends. You don’t have a Top Eight (and MySpace’s top friends lists are statically ordered, so that even within the Top Eight or Twelve or whatever, you can only ever have ONE Best Friend).

But if you have one gift, and you give it, you’re making a pretty major statement about the recipient you singled out. Unless you give it to a boyfriend/girlfriend-type Significant Other, chances are there are going to be people who thought they were just as important.

The obvious strategy here would be to give NO gifts, but the lure of the free is likely to draw people into giving one that has no cost–and then they’re much more likely to buy more gifts in order to maintain the peace by not overly favoring a single relationship.

Valentine’s Day is obviously a prime occasion for all this gift-giving, and in fact the Facebook giftshop provided seven V-Day only gifts. However, for AT LEAST five hours on Valentine’s Day, the giftshop was inoperable, clearly overloaded by too much traffic.

Most people were probably giving gifts pretty impulsively. If the giftshop wasn’t there when the mood struck them, they probably didn’t keep reloading to see if it was up and running again.** Those five hours of downtime, I suspect, cost Facebook a HUGE potential profit, although they may have coincidentally driven up the social value of those limited edition gifts.

I’m not sure why they took the giftshop link off the home page after V-Day, either. It didn’t take up a lot of room–depending on how many system messages you have in that column, there’s very little in it. Maintaining a link above individual profile’s walls is a good idea, and maybe that’s how people prefer to give a gift anyway, rather than going to the gift shop and having to mentally scroll through one’s friends list to think of whose name to enter.

I’m interested to see what holidays they do this for. Will Easter rate? God, I love Easter crap.

Speaking of which, today being the day after V-Day, I have a strong instinct to search CVS for discounted V-Day stuffies. Oh, pink fluffy imaginary animals, how I love you.

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*Actually, at least for the moment, when you buy one for a dollar you get the option of buying 4 additional gift credits for $2, so that you end up paying $3 for 5 gifts. But I don’t know if that’s a special promotion or what.

***I am a special obsessive case.

Just so you know, I wrote this entry yesterday and then managed to hit a random combination of keys that closed the tab in FireFox. It was extremely traumatic. Demoralized, I gave up and went to the gym, but now I am trying again, because I feel bad about not updating, especially when my top entry is so very, very geeky. Anyway, this is why I have backdated it.

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Marriage loses its edge

I actually heard about these data a little while ago, but then yesterday I saw this headline on Yahoo News. The numbers are a little complicated, from what I can make out–for instance, when they say that marriage is no longer the living arrangement for a majority of households, they mean that married couple households (55.2 million of them) now make up only 49.8% of households total.

“Households” as a category seems to include “nonfamily households,” which the article asserts are primarily unmarried cohabiting couples (some of them same-sex), although I don’t know how the Census handles, say, roommates. It seems like if you share an address you’re a household, even if you write your name on all your condiments and meticulously split the electric bill. But how should I know how the Census handles roommates? Do I look like a demographer?*

Anyway, confusingly, it appears that unmarried adults living alone, also not categorized as families, are something different from “nonfamily households,” and it’s really not clear if they are counted in the total number of households of which “traditional households with married couples at their core” now constitute 49.8%. There “over 30 million” such singles, anyway, and 36.7 million nonfamily households that are mostly people living in various types of sin, unless they are just roommates,** and another 19 million single-parent households (14 million of them headed by single women). It doesn’t say how many of the “nonfamily” households involve children, although:

Douglas Besharov, a sociologist with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said it is difficult for the traditional family to emerge unscathed after three and a half decades of divorce rates reaching 50 percent and five decades out-of-wedlock births.

“Change is in the air,” Besharov said in a recent interview with the State Department journal called US Society and Values. “The only question is whether it is catastrophic or just evolutionary.”

He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were likely to dominated America’s social landscape for years to come.

“Overall, what I see is a situation in which people — especially children — will be much more isolated, because not only will their parents both be working, but they’ll have fewer siblings, fewer cousins, fewer aunts and uncles,” the scholar argued. “So over time, we’re moving towards a much more individualistic society.”

So apparently out-of-wedlock cousins don’t count. Maybe decent children are just ashamed to spend time with them.*** Anyway, it’s hard to imagine families getting much more isolated than the suburbs have already made them. If anything, out-of-wedlock births should be promoting a connection with grandparents, or so I imagine would argue the woman from Pocahontas, Missouri who told my mother she really hoped her 17-year-old daughter would get pregnant in her senior year of high school and thus never leave.****

It is true that overall families have gotten smaller over the years, particularly in the middle and upper classes, and that does lead eventually to a reduction in the size of kin networks overall, but I don’t think divorce is the primary cause here. I’d be more inclined to look at the cost of college, maybe women’s age at first childbirth–I don’t know; do I look like a demographer?*

Of course, you’d certainly never know that marriage was in a decline by going through my mail. As a resident of the Midwest who is not (in the long term) poor, I am freaking surrounded by people getting hitched all the goddamn time. I try not to spiral into despair, with little help from Yahoo News, who follow their decline of marriage news link immediately with this one:

Buck the trend: Find your match

Actually, this raises what I think is an interesting question: are personals users more marriage-minded overall than the general population? Do they perceive greater time pressure and/or disadvantage in the market? Are they, like, super picky? Or are they just really tired of paying more than twice as great a percentage of their income towards rent, but like me, reluctant to put up with a roommate without fringe benefits?

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*My hair would indicate a resounding “NO.”

****True story.

Yesterday CNN ran an obit for Tetsuro Tamba. The headline was “‘You Only Live Twice’ actor dead,” which makes sense given that their audience is likely to be most familiar with the 1967 James Bond movie, but I was surprised to discover near the end of the piece that he had also starred in the 1973 film adaptation of Japan Sinks.

As a connoisseur of the post-apocalypse, I read Japan Sinks in translation in college (I had to get it on interlibrary loan). The basic premise of the novel is that Japan is going to be completely dragged under the ocean by tectonic activity; while there is some earth science fiction going on there, the real story is a speculative fiction description of the frantic attempts of the government to secure a future for Japanese culture. While other governments are happy to take custody of art treasures, they are less enthusiastic about refugees. The influence of the immediate post-WWII/atomic bomb era is obvious in the general sense of the rest of the world’s indifference/hostility to Japan;* the story does not really close on an optimistic note.

It’s not EXACTLY the (post)apocalypse, unless you consider Japan to be the entire world, but then again, this was not then and is not now an unimaginable attitude among the citizenry. Consider The Day After Tomorrow, as well, which was basically the story of a North American apocalypse with similar social issues, although less drawn out. (And really was just a USA POST-apocalypse, since I assume the entire population of Canada was just supposed to be dead.)

Interestingly, when I searched the IMDB for information about the movie, I also uncovered this year’s remake–of which I had been aware although I hadn’t realized it had been released yet–and I discovered that while the 1973 version was titled Nippon Chinbotsu, the 2006 remake is Nihon Chinbotsu.

The implications of this shift are unclear. In the present day, the use of the pronunciation “Nippon” makes you sound a little right wing. I don’t know if there were similar implications in 1973. I also don’t know how you would indicate this difference if you were writing in Japanese, which uses a two kanji character compound for “Japan” and as far as I know it’s the same regardless of your political leanings. I tried and failed to find an indication of how the book was originally titled/pronounced.

In fact, I think “Nippon” is probably more appropriate to the tone of the story, which as I recall had a fairly strong “wareware Nihonjin” (”We Japanese”) kind of feel to it, what with the tragedy of diaspora and all.*** The user review I saw on the IMDB remake page complained that it had largely ignored the sociological story in favor of big budget disaster effects–so closer to The Day After Tomorrow, although I assume without the dire wolves loose in the big city. It would be interesting to see the 1973 and 2006 versions together, although I don’t know when the latter will be available in English.

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*Although as I recall, this focused mostly on the white Western world and less on the rest of Asia, which has more immediate and arguably justified reasons to be hostile toward Japan.

**Do not discount the possibility that I am talking out my ass here.

Right before I took the social psych prelim last month, I read a really interesting article in the June issue of Social Psychology Quarterly by Ellen Granberg about weight loss maintenance, incorporating Identity Control Theory, possible selves, and the narrative of self.* I don’t remember if I actually got to cite it on the prelim, but it was one of the few things that I actually enjoyed reading in my frantic whirlwind of studying.

Of course weight loss maintenance is something that holds particular significance for me, but I also thought that she synthesized the theories really well–basically, the idea is that losing weight is a process of identity change for most people who embark on the project, but that cultural narratives about what weight loss means do a lot to undermine the maintenance of the new, lower weight. Because we’re taught that losing weight will completely remake our lives, it’s very difficult to feel like we’ve “succeeded” when we do manage to lose weight and subsequently do not become perfect princess rock stars.

Possible selves are pretty self-explanatory; they can serve as motivators when we imagine ourselves actually inhabiting them, either positively (if I lose weight I will be a happy skinny person) or negatively (if I don’t lose weight I will be a miserable slug-like creature). Identity Control Theory argues that people seek out self-verifying feedback, and if they don’t get it, they may adjust either their behavior or their self-concept, with the latter usually being a last resort if the former doesn’t work. Granberg suggests that self-concept change may be a more frequently used strategy, however, in situations where one is adopting a new identity.

She argues that the people who are most successful at keeping weight off are those who either start out with domain-specific expectations about their skinnier possible self (”My cholesterol will go down”; “I will be able to ride my bike faster and longer”), or who are at least able to change/narrow their skinnier-self-concept if they start out thinking that they will experience a total extreme make-over of self by losing weight. People who can’t give up that construction of the skinnier self are more likely to become discouraged by the continued lack of confirmatory feedback and may end up reverting to old bad habits and regaining weight–because keeping weight off is a project, too, and one that doesn’t produce dramatic results like losing it did. If you feel like you’re working hard to maintain a self that’s really a disappointment–because you lost weight but you’re still not a perfect princess rock star–it’s not surprising that you might gradually become less dedicated to the work necessary to maintain weight loss.

This is definitely something that I find myself thinking about sometimes, although when I started working on losing weight, I think I was fairly realistic about what I wanted to attain; I just didn’t want to feel actively bad about my body anymore. But it’s hard to totally escape that mainstream cultural narrative of the fat ugly duckling becoming the thin beautiful swan, the plot of every other teen movie ever, even when you’re aware of it. It’s hard not to catch yourself thinking, when things get really shitty, I thought everything was supposed to be better now.

Like most psychological processes, I guess it’s just a matter of degree. No one is issue-free, and it probably doesn’t help that nobody’s body seems to fit the clothing designer ideal. My problem used to be my chest being too big for things; now it’s my shoulders, which are apparently freakishly broad in relation to the rest of me, and my butt, which isn’t there. But overall I feel pretty good about my body, and I still feel invested in maintaining the ground I’ve gained in the past year and a half.

Besides, while I know that weight loss will not fix everything that has ever gone wrong in my life, I’m pretty sure that these shoes will:

Um. Amazon is having a blow-out shoe sale.** Spend $80 or more and get free shipping (even for stuff that normally isn’t eligible, I think) and $20 off (that only works once, in case you were wondering).

WeightWatchers and other weight loss programs frequently suggest buying shoes as a reward for losing weight because, in addition to presenting an obviously superior alternative to, say, celebratory eating, your shoe size is much more resistant to change than your pants size. This is true, but I still lost about a half shoe-size last year, too. And yet, thanks to my incredibly well-muscled calves, buying any boots that go up much higher than those remains an ordeal. It’s always something.

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*Full citation: Granberg, Ellen. “‘Is That All There Is?’ Possible Selves, Self-Change, and Weight Loss.” Social Psychology Quarterly 69.2 (June 2006): 109-126.

**That link goes to the women’s section, because there doesn’t seem to be a link for the top level, and I suspect that most people who will be interested in this sale will be primarily interested in women’s shoes. But men’s and children’s are on sale, too.

Goffman, in his famous discussion of the presentation of self via dramaturgical interaction (1959), talks a lot about performance teams–groups of people who have a common interest in maintaining a particular definition of the situation, and depend upon each other to do so. That is to say, one person can fuck up the performance for everyone by behaving incongruously or whatever (and they can do it because you’re on the same team, and because you’re on the same team, it’s not so simple to get rid of them).

It occurs to me that many blogs, and particularly anonymous ones, are perceived as inappropriate, dangerous, wrong, etc. because of the danger they pose to this kind of reality maintenance. The blogs that get famous are usually the ones for which someone gets, or could get, fired, disowned, or divorced–they talk about behind the scenes information that is often at odds with the facade people want to construct. Anonymous blogs are worse because they erode the proposed realities of a large number of structurally similar teams–in many cases you can’t prove that the renegade lawyer or receptionist or housewife or whatever is NOT writing about your particular company/household, and so all companies/households that could be the structural home of the anonymous blogger suffer a blow to the credibility of the realities that they put forth as unproblematic, necessary, and obvious.

Goffman specifically mentions “renegades,” like doctors who talk about other doctors’ fee-splitting and performance of unnecessary procedures. Obviously there are costs to being a renegade, and anyone who’s ever been fired/divorced/disowned for a blog knows it, but the consequences of an anonymous blog are less certain, while at the same time you can potentially reach a much larger audience with your own personal version of reality.

So: it’s no wonder that a lot of people don’t like blogs. They fuck with carefully maintained realities, and that’s not just threatening, it’s immoral, regardless of whether or not it violates a non-disclosure agreement (cf. Pollner 1974).