The Gender Gap Strikes Wikipedia

From technophiles to technophobes, the internet was abuzz this week about a Time Magazine report, claiming that women constitute a paltry 13% of wikipedia editors, while 87% are men.

So much for the Internet being a great equalizer? Bloggers, scholars, and journalists weigh in on the implications:

Feministing:

“It should go without saying that if women make up 51 percent of the population, 13 percent representation at Wikipedia is a DISGRACE!…It seems odd that women are drastically underrepresented at Wikipedia when women in graduate school outnumber men. This means that there is more to the story, possibly more issues — cough, sexism — which Wikipedia must investigate to figure out what gives when it comes to their lack of women contributors….Wikipedia is increasingly becoming the go-to source for everyday information, and women of all status — and men for that matter — should have a space there. Wikipedia should step up to ensure that.”

Humanities, Arts, Sciences and Technology Advances Collaboratory (HASTAC) blog

“So let me turn the question around. Why wouldn’t one expect different kinds of social media to reflect gender norms given that everything else in our society does? I think we are all over (way, way over) the silly 1990s utopic idea that new media, because it allows anonymous contribution, would be race- and gender-neutral. Not many human beings succeed, despite effort, to be gender neutral. Why should we magically become so online?”

Reaching Women Daily

“I have not used Wikipedia much, even though it is one of the top ten sites on the internet, but I looked at it to see what might cause women not to post contributions. Technical challenges aside (they say posting is not user friendly), I find the site to be quite dry and uninspiring….Women find satisfaction and purpose in relationship matters, things that are not well defined and structured, so perhaps they are less inclined to post factual information.”

The Advocate Studio

“Women may be more interested than men in making sure they are right or sitting back rather than speaking when they see the grey area in a particular subject. And maybe women get enough reprisal in other venues, so they may not volunteer to put themselves in such a public limelight solely for altruism or entertainment value.”

What say you, dear readers: A case for despair, or should we have seen this coming? Should wikipedia respond proactively and propose changes to its interface or its requirements for editors? Should we chalk it up to innate realities of gender difference? Or is there more here than meets the numbers?

Hey Baby, What’s Your Schemata?

A guy walks up to a girl in a bar and says: “Hey baby, what’s your schemata?”

I’m not a psychologist and I don’t play one on the internets, but I do find myself desperate for an empirical model to study the interaction between people and culture. Enter psychology. Psychologists have long used the theory of schema to understand the byzantine mental structures used by our brains to process information. And increasingly, social scientists are using schemata in their investigations of culture.

Settling on what we all mean by culture (which varies by discipline, by university, and by individual) can be tricky. But in my own quest to operationalize a definition for the unwieldy concept of culture, I came upon Culture and Cognition, an essay written by Princeton sociology professor Paul DiMaggio.

DiMaggio proposes using psychological schemata to investigate how it is that people “use” culture. This refreshing approach accounts for the complexity in culture; culture is not some unitary thing produced and consumed by individuals. Rather, culture is a complicated web of meanings involving institutions, organizations, media messages, and people, all negotiating the boundaries and meanings of culture in a motley of contexts. The threads that constitute these webs of meaning are what psychologists mean by “schemata.”

We can think of our own identity like a mosaic of schematas, woven together into a kind of unique abstraction that makes us, us.

While individuals might share similar designs in their mosaic, no two mosaics are the same. Each element of the design can be considered part of our schematic toolkit, serving as a sort of cognitive shortcut that helps us to identify socially desirable or undesirable things, experiences, or people. DiMaggio writes:

Individuals experience culture as disparate bites of information and as schematic structures that organize that information. Culture carried by institutions, networks, and social movements diffuses, activates, and selects among available schemata.

As a student of technology, I’m fascinated by the ubiquitous opportunities for schematic triggering that occur online. Social network sites such as Facebook provide users with organized interfaces to display personal information in a way that trigger other user’s schematas. Websites and blogs, generated around issues, topic-areas or themes, serve as additional sites for triggering cultural schematas or developing cultural schematas anew. Browsing The New York Times homepage, for example, my brain might be triggered by a set of keywords tied to my identity as a foodie, a feminist, an academic, a San Franciscan, or a runner.

We must be careful, of course, not to develop unitary definitions of schematic triggers in an attempt to avoid a singular definition of culture. So what would an experimental design look like for identifying and testing schematas? More on that to come now that my academic schemata has been triggered.

Counter-to-what-culture?

This morning I started reading the Jameson classic, Post-Modernism.  Five pages into the book –  one of ten on my academic summer reading list — I realized that among other things my list is far too ambitious for a mere three months already dotted with work, school, and an often sacrificed social life.

But speaking of social life (don’t worry, this will eventually relate to Jameson), I met a lovely new friend this weekend named Jonathan.  Jonathan braved an early morning bootcamp class along with J.R. and I, and after bonding through the grueling workout (one that left my hamstrings quite irritable), he invited us to lunch. Always looking for new acquaintances in the ever-transient district, J.R. and I gladly accepted his invitation.

We had first met during a fitness class and thus, our initial impressions of Jonathan and his impressions of us were, in some sense, unusual.  We all donned wicking sports shirts and spandex-like shorts, accompanied by sweat stains, sunscreen streaks, and hair styled by the overwhelming DC humidity.  So when we met up post- workout, with our “normal” clothes no longer selected for their utilitarian functionality, we more or less saw one another for the first time.

After a few moments of conversation Jonathan announced that he liked my “counter-culture” look.  More than anything, I imagine that this comment was in reference to my necklace, a black plastic medallion that (no joke) reads “Post-post-modern.”  This got me thinking about the whole cultural phenomenon I’m studying with hipsters.  Specifically, Jonathan’s comment reminded me of that nagging question that comes up whenever I consider whether hipsters are, in fact, a counter-culture or a subculture. After all, how can any subculture successfully represent themselves as an “alternative” to the masses when their signals are achieved through consumption, the same framework used by the Abercrombie-wearing Joe Schmos that hipsters seem to judge.

As we swapped jokes, stories, and most embarrassing moments over lunch, I had to wonder whether Jonathan still considered me to be “counter-culture.”  Moreover, I wondered what this label really means in terms of how we categorize or identify one another based on dress.

Jameson writes of postmodernism, in contrast to modernism, as a massive “dilation” of the cultural sphere or what Benjamin referred to as the “aesthetization” of reality.  Jameson argues that the post-modernist no longer experiences culture as a tradition, a feeling, or a memory, but rather sees culture as a “thing.”  Culture, in other words, becomes a product — a commodity used to express oneself  to the world.

Without meaning to single Jonathan out, I have to wonder: If he considers me to be counter-culture, what culture am I really “counter” toward?  If his initial impression was limited to my aesthetic presentation — the clothes and accessories I wore — than I could not be considered much different than most of my American counterparts.  How could I be counter-to-a-culture when, like most people, I use consumption as my tool to (for better or for worse) communicate my aspirational identity?  In other words, can we forget about the means when critiquing the method?

I’ve been told that the post-modernism lens is considered largely passe by academics.  Well, color me an academic luddite, because I think Jameson’s arguments very much apply to today’s cultural context.  If hipsters are a reference point to consider questions of identity representation, how do we explain the hipster culture, the hipster aesthetic, and the existence of hipsters?  Are they, as Jameson would likely contend, merely hyper-consumers who use retro objects to create meaning anew, ignorant of historical context?  Furthermore, are Americans so entrenched as consumers that we cannot see culture as anything other than the “consumption of sheer commodification as a process” (x)?

I may not know the answers to these questions by the time I finish Jameson’s book, but one thing is for certain.  Anyone studying culture today must consider consumption and identity to be interdepent elements, difficult to parse through any kind of analysis.  Whether it’s worth the time to unravel these threads for the purposes of my research remains to be seen.

The Network Structure of the Obama Administration, Illuminated

Last week, I accompanied Dr. Linda Garcia and her son, Steve — a business consultant who specializes in social network analysis — to present our research at the Harvard Political Networks Conference.

The conference was hosted by the Kennedy School of Government and brought together a wide-range of academics. This included political scientists, MBAs, and computer scientists studying how social ties affect the behavior of government officials and citizens. Using social network analysis as a methodology, these researchers examined how the strength and structure of social connections can influence outcomes of particular events, e.g., voter turnout during an election, aid following a natural disaster, or the approval of legislation in congress.

Our poster entitled, “Has Barack Obama Read Ron Burt?” analyzed the social network structure of the Obama Administration and whether, as Ron Burt argues, this structure allowed for the spread of good ideas. This topic (a brainchild of Linda and Steve) arose after all the media hullabaloo surrounding Obama’s cabinet nominees and the resulting speculation over whether these people would bring change to the established culture of Washington politics.

For us, the short answer to that question was yes; the structure of the Obama Administration is in fact conducive to the spread of new ideas.

We arrived at this conclusion following a fascinating research process (fascinating for me, at least). And all the more surprising to me — a former Communication major who had a long-distance relationship with math — this analysis was gleaned through a series of mathematical algorithms, also known as social network analysis.

How does social network analysis work? Essentially, it begins with the selection of key events in order to bound your network. We knew that there were many people who could be considered ‘”linked” to the Obama Administration, so we narrowed our list down to civilian-appointed, Senate confirmed nominees. Then, we defined the events that we thought might connect these people together, events like education, past work experience, awards, social clubs, hometown and current department. Once we had gathered this data, we logged it in excel matrices by event. Any time that two people were found to be connected, e.g. they had worked for the same company or attended the same university, they were considered to have a relationship and thus we added a “1″ to the intersecting cell in the matrix. Any time two people did not share a relationship within a particular event, they received a “0″. Here’s a quick glimpse of this method in all its nerdy detail:

Using these spreadsheets, Steve and his co-worker, Ben were able to feed the data into a system that combined each matrix, totaled each actor’s sum, and presented a number that would fall within the spectrum of 0-9. This allowed us to mathematically calculate the strength of a particular relationship between any two people, which eventually evolved into this visual representation:

Pretty cool, huh? And we had some rather interesting findings, beyond just this pretty looking graph. Our most interesting one: Obama and two other members of his administration serve as cut points in the network, meaning they act as the glue that binds disparate groups of people together, people who might not otherwise be connected. This kind of structure reduces the connections between different parts of the network and naturally minimizes the spread of redundant information. People who serve as cut points are thus positioned to receive new information from different part of the networks more efficiently.

Mathematical equations and matrices can help calculate the strength of social ties. Who knew? Well, apparently everyone at the conference. But for me, the academic newbie, this discovery was all too enthralling, and I can’t wait to start using social network analysis to investigate other cultural phenomena. Perhaps I will start with that illusive contemporary subculture that has served as fodder for many of my blog posts.

Hipsters as a Community of Practice

I’d like to think I’m on to something with this hipster stuff.

Over the last few weeks, Andrew Sullivan, a blogger for The Atlantic Monthly, has posted extensively on hipster culture, proffering reflections on christian hipsters and black hipsters, also known as “blipsters.”

Personally, I think it’s counterproductive to organize hipsters into various sub-categories based on race and religion given that hipsters organize themselves around the same shared goal: to appear alternative to the masses. In fact, once could argue that the posts promoted by Sullivan serve as further evidence of how ubiquitous the hipster culture has become.

With globalization and the inevitable expansion of companies offering the same choices to a larger net of consumers, hipsters see their movement as a rebellion against homogenization. The use of irony and self-awareness in their consumer choices thus serve as a sort of “wink-and-nod” to the world, showing that while hipsters may participate in capitalism and consumerism, they are wise and disapproving of its ills. Yet, in working to create a cohesive subculture, based on self-aware consumption, hipsters must collaborate as a group in order to establish shared cultural taste and the means by which to represent themselves to the world. With unintended irony, hipsters must themselves become conformists against conformity.

For a shared representation to be possible among such diverse, global participants, an infrastructure must exist to guide and bound what constitutes a hipster. This kind of boundary work is fundamental to a subculture like hipsters who are, more than anything, a kind of consumer tribe. As a subculture defined through what I call “alt” consumption, hipsters must constantly monitor trends in the mainstream to maintain divergence, and they often innovate when one of their cultural artifacts or status symbols becomes adopted by the mainstream.

As I wrote in my last post, simply browsing through definitions of “hipster” on urbandicitonary.com, one can see how quicky artifacts of hipsters can become mainstreamed. The keffiyeh scarf is one example of this trend. Originally a symbol of Palestinian Nationalism (and some argue the anti-war movement), it was a popular fashion accessory among hipsters a couple of years ago, until it started being sold at places like Wet Seal and Forever 21, at which point it was quickly abandoned by hipsters.

As the keffiyeh scarf example shows, in order to maintain the boundaries of their subculture, hipsters must become a community of practice.

In their article, “Globalization, Developing Countries, and the Evolution of International Standard Setting Communities of Practice”, Garcia and Burns (2005) describe communities of practice as akin to standards-setting bodies, which “establish rules, norms, meaning and identity over time based on ongoing interactions and negotiations that accompany participation in a shared enterprise” (1). While their article investigates how standards-setting bodies function in the technology sector, the arguments apply to any community in which members participate and negotiate toward some shared goal. Like a firm, made up of various organizations and actors, hipsters are a subculture with a global presence and a shared ethos – to appear alternative, progressive, edgy and outside the mainstream. Hipsters may not always agree on how these themes come to be represented through cultural products and taste. But with all members interested in being associated with the general ethos of the movement, they participate in negotiating the overall identity of the group alongside the commercial actors who supply the resources they need to maintain their identity.

This network of commercial actors includes indie bands, “alt-cultural” magazines like Vice, Paper, and Nylon, blogs like LOOKBOOK, Street Peeper, email subscription lists like Flavorpill, clothing stores like American Apparel, and events like the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival that acts as a physical place to bring many of these actors together. Naturally, this network also includes consumers, the people buying the products created and promoted by these organizations, and these consumers negotiate the boundaries of the community with their dollars. Together, all of these actors serve to support one another toward a shared goal: maintaining a subculture that is always one step ahead of the mainstream.

Vice is a major actor in the hipster movement, credited with helping to invent the hipster aesthetic. As a magazine that currently boasts over 900,000 readers in twenty-two countries, Vice was originally founded as the Voice of Montreal by Suroosh Avi, Shame Smith and Gavin McInnes. Vice features articles covering the independent arts, pop culture, and more recently political topics such as the war in Iraq, written with an air of sarcasm and irreverence (“Vice Magazine”, Wikipedia).

A popular and controversial part of the site is the Dos and Don’ts page, where photos of everyday people, captured on the streets, are uploaded and labeled according to whether they succeed or fail at “looking cool.” To me, this serves as a perfect example of how members of a community negotiate and set the boundaries of their culture to create a standard. Commenting on these photos is a common practice among readers, showing that users are as much participants in the process of establishing norms and rules as they are spectators. This kind of participation helps define “who’s in and who’s out” within the community, creating a set of standards that readers can use to guide their consumption choices.

All this to say that if I had to place myself into any category it would likely be as a hipster. I share the same criticisms of capitalism and see alternative consumption as a comfortable means by which to represent myself to the world. While people may turn their nose up at hipsters, a subculture defined exclusively through consumption, we should see hipsters as a natural fact amidst a global community consumed by consumption. We all, to an extent, represent ourselves to the world through the products we consume. As individuals among many other individuals, we use representational objects to bypass complexity and create heuristics for identifying like-minded people.

Thus, I find websites like http://www.latfh.com/ kind of icky. What explains this fervent dislike of hipsters? is it merely because hipsters have found a representational aesthetic that is more salient than any other?

More (in defense?) of hipsters…coming soon!

The (Irrational) Green Brain

If you didn’t catch it yesterday, The Times ran a fascinating article called, “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?”

Following on the coattails of behavioral economists like Dan Ariely, researchers at CRED, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, are using the behavioral science model to study people’s choices, behaviors and attitudes in relationship to the environment. Their hope is to have better insights around changing human behavior to encourage short-term compromises for long-term environmental benefits. Read the full article here.

Palin and Ross: Sinking the state of Alaska

Just when Sarah Palin was beginning to feel like a bad memory, this piece popped up in The New York Times. Among other unfortunate events, Palin has managed to spend $1 billion worth of Alaska state savings without proposing any new legislation (arguably a good thing)  since her bid for Vice President. In between appearances to maintain her national image, which includes jet-settting to  anti-choice fundraisers in places like Indiana, she has managed to appoint Wayne Anthony Ross, a board member of the NRA, to be Alaska’s next attorney general. Ross’ stellar public moments nearly trump Palin’s, with public references to  gays and lesbians as “degenerates” and proud claims to he and his wife’s matching liscense plates that read: “WAR” and “MRS WAR.”   Alaska: working to make California the second most embarassing state in the union.

Overheard in Austin: Speaking, Silence and the Third Person Effect

View this paper as a PDF.

Recently I spent four days in Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival.  This is an annual event in which approximately 1,850 bands – mostly independent and unsigned to a record label – were invited to perform in local venues throughout the downtown area of this college town (Root, 1). The music festival followed on the coattails of two other well-known festivals, the South by Southwest Interactive Conference and the South by Southwest Film Festival, and was the most well attended event of the three.  Last year over 13,000 people descended into the bars and parks of Austin for the music festival, and early estimates of this year’s crowd projected a record number of participants (Root, 1).

In the pages that follow, I will describe my observations about the expression of public opinion by local residents of Austin. It is important to highlight that these observations were of public opinions and not of attitudes, the difference being that public opinion is generally correlated to actions while attitude more often relates to feelings. As Vincent Price writes of this distinction, “Opinions have usually been considered observable, verbal responses to an issue or question, whereas attitude is a covert, psychological predisposition or tendency” (46).  Considering that all of my research resulted from verbal conversations with various individuals, the sentiments expressed by them will hereby be referred to as opinions.

My observations took place in two public spaces: a local bar and a local restaurant, where I functioned as an observer and as a participant observer, respectively. For the purposes of this paper, I will analyze two of the interactions I had in these spaces and will discuss how the spiral of silence, pluralistic ignorance, the third person effect, and cross-cutting networks affected the dynamics and perceptions of participants.

My first encounter occurred when I was engaged in some mid-day reading on the patio of Moonshine, a bar situated on a quiet side street adjacent to the central downtown area.  Sitting in a rocking chair that was roughly twenty feet away from the font door, I was able to eavesdrop on a conversation between two thirty-something patrons, Matt and Sarah, who were standing on the front steps. Sarah initiated the dialogue by asking Matt if her friend (presumably an employee of the bar) was still on shift.  Matt informed Sarah that her friend had already left for the day, and then introduced himself, casually mentioning that he had seen Sarah around the bar. Soon they were swapping stories about the music festival – which bands they had seen play, which parties they had attended – and eventually the conversation evolved into a discussion of the benefits and the drawbacks of this kind of tourism for their hometown. They both agreed that the festival was good for business (Sarah photographed many of the bands for regional publications and Matt managed the Moonshine Bar and Restaurant), but also noted that the resulting traffic, congestion and late-night partying in public spaces disrupted their daily routines.

Matt expressed his environmental concerns with the festival, complaining about the “tons of waste” produced by vendors and concert goers, but not without smirking at the irony of how so many “lefty hipsters” who probably thought of themselves as “concerned environmentalists” could indulge in so much conspicuous consumption. Sarah agreed with this sentiment. Matt did most of the talking after this point. Soon he had steered the conversation into the territory of national politics, discussing his support of Ron Paul during the 2008 presidential election, the details of Paul’s “constitutional libertarian” political philosophy, and his own thoughts on the causes and effects of global warming.

Throughout the entirety of their conversation, Matt and Sarah confined themselves to an isolated portion of the patio; I was the only other patron within earshot, and I pretended to be lost in my reading (though I was busily scribbling notes and observations in the margins of my notebook) so as to effectively eavesdrop on their conversation. This might explain the liberty Matt took to express what he considered to be controversial opinions:

“If I say I don’t believe in global warming, people think I voted for Bush.  But really, the term global warming is masking what’s really going on.  The United States is engaged in industrial farming and the creation of genetically modified organisms around the world.  They’re fucking with the food supply; with the ecosystem and the very things that we eat and the way we’ve eaten for centuries! And that’s what they don’t want you to know.  The planet isn’t transforming just because we’re releasing more CO2 into the air.  It’s so much more than that.”

At this point in the conversation, Matt began to lament about the polarizing effects of politics on the average citizen, admitting that he felt embarrassed during the 2008 election to campaign for Ron Paul because he was a Republican candidate. “I mean, my friends thought I was crazy.  So I just stopped talking about it.  They were like ‘You don’t support Obama?! What’s wrong with you?!”  Sarah nodded and added, “Yeah, totally,” to which Matt took as an invitation to continue with his frustrated political reflections:

“And all the pundits weren’t even talking about Ron Paul, unless they were balking at him for calling for an end to the Federal Reserve. I mean, I’m a constitutional libertarian; I believe that our government should abide by what’s outlined in the constitution, and I was so inspired when Ron Paul was talking about the backwardness of the Federal Reserve System.  It has to go. But you even mention those things, and that maybe you’ll vote for a Republican candidate, and people look at you like you have a third head.”

Feeling reticent to publicly express support for an underdog Republican candidate in a left-leaning city like Austin was a clear illustration of the spiral of silence effect argued by political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.  Believing that his view was far outside the mainstream, Matt opted to stay silent among his peer group in order to avoid feelings of embarrassment and social isolation. His pattern of behavior fits with another aspect of Neumann’s theory: when a person perceives their view to be a minority one, they are likely to either 1) become ambivalent in their opinions, or 2) remain hardened, yet silent, in their opinions. This second point very much reflects Matt’s behavior. And what is more, while a person who perceives their opinion to be unpopular may avoid publicly expressing it, they may simultaneously seek out those who display an appreciation for their beliefs.  Neumann writes of this phenomenon:
“After a lengthy struggle, a minority faction may be reduced to a hard core of persons who are not prepared to conform, to change their opinions, or even to be silent in the face of public opinion.  Some members of this group may get accustomed to isolation, and many of them manage to support their opinions by selecting out persons and media which confirm their views” (Noelle-Neumann, 49).

For whatever reason, Matt assumed that Sarah’s opinions would be in line with his, and as they found themselves safely at a distance from co-workers, peers and outside observers, Matt was able to express an opinion that was typically viewed as socially risky.

Further distilling Noelle-Neumann’s theory, Elihu Katz writes of speaking and silence in terms of pluralistic ignorance. This is a phrase used to capture the phenomenon that occurs when a person believes he or she is the only person (or one of a small minority of people) to hold a particular opinion on a given issue, and that “most people” possess diametrically opposed beliefs indicative of mainstream values. Even on the rare occasions that these “groups of individuals” may constitute a majority of opinion, it is their perception that they are unsupported. Thus, as Katz writes, the unsupported “lose confidence and withdraw from public debate, thus speeding the demise of their position through the self-fulfilling spiral of silence.  They may not change their minds, but they stop recruitment of others and abandon the fight” (Katz, 89).

This theory seems directly applicable to many of Matt’s lamentations around his inability to have a voice in the 2008 election. He discussed the transition that transpired between his enthusiastic public displays of support and efforts to mobilize interest in the candidacy of Ron Paul at the beginning of the election cycle, to muted and passive concern, as the result of negative peer pressure. Because everyone else was supporting Barack Obama for president (or so he perceived), Matt felt marginalized and alienated from his friends and coworkers.

Large portions of the conversation between Matt and Sarah also support another aspect of Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence theory, that impressions about current majority opinions can often affect projections about future public sentiment. Noelle-Neumann argues that as people convince themselves that they hold a minority opinion, the more likely they are to doubt that the mainstream will ever adopt their views. The spiral of silence has a powerful grip: outsiders believe they will always exist outside of and in contrast to the mainstream majority. “There is a positive correlation between the present and the future assessment: if the opinion is considered to be the prevailing one, it is likely to be considered the future one also” (Noelle-Neumann, 45). An hour after the initial exchange of names and introductions, Matt and Sarah left the bar together. The last thing I heard from Matt before they both disappeared out of earshot was the question – a rhetorical question asked as much to himself as it was offered to Sarah – “Is there any place for people like us?’

The next day I engaged a local couple in conversation as we sat next to each other on the outdoor patio of a downtown hamburger joint.  After a few minutes of small talk, the boyfriend, Jonah, mentioned his admiration for the bike culture in San Francisco (my hometown), at which point I asked both of them if there was much of a bike culture in Austin. Jonah answered:“Well, I have a bike, but I don’t ride it as much as I should. We definitely have a growing bike culture here, but it’s not where it should be. Drivers aren’t used to bikers yet, and there are such aggressive drivers. They’re building a light rail soon, which should be really good for everyone who commutes.”  At this point, I asked when building started and where funding was coming from.  Anne responded:  “They started work on it but construction won’t be done for a really long time.  I mean, it passed …last election, and they just started building. “

Jonah interjected:

“Yeah, and it totally should have passed [as a ballot measure] in 2000.  We could have gotten more federal funds for it then.  But people didn’t understand the importance of light rail.  It failed forty-nine to fifty, which is like, crazy.  Fifty percent of the people in Austin thought that light rail wasn’t a good idea?  I have to think it was the result of this huge advertising campaign funded by car companies. I’m sure that affected people who were on the fence. The whole cost argument, you know. But everyone I know supported light rail, so I really don’t understand who those fifty percent were and where they hang out.”

Jonah’s belief that paid advertising campaigns swayed Austin residents’ voting habits is a clear display of the third person effect. This phenomenon is about believing that the perceived effect of a communication cannot affect you, or someone whom you might know, but it might affect someone else, a sort of hypothetical third person. Phillip Davison describes the third person effect in the following way: “individuals who are members of an audience that is exposed to persuasive communication…will expect the communication to have a greater effect on others than on themselves” (Davison, 3).

When a person is engaged with an issue that is of particular concern to them, they are more likely to have an underlying base of tacit knowledge that can function as a sort of lens. As someone concerned with women’s rights, for example, I might believe that I am better informed than others because I am particularly sensitive and attentive to feminist issues. A person in this scenario is more likely to feel that a third person effect is working against their efforts or opinions.  As Davison writes: “In a sense…we are all experts on those subjects that matter to us, in that we have information not available to other people. This information may not be of a factual or technical nature; it may be our own experiences, likes, and dislikes.  Other people, we reason, do not know what we know.  Therefore, they are more likely to be influenced by the media” (9).
While the participants discussed above were able to articulate their opinion on a wide range of issues, a similar pattern emerged across these conversations: that of retroactive criticism. Hans Speier writes of this trend, “As a rule, public opinion realized the mistakes that have been committed in foreign policy only when they review it in retrospect the history of a generation” (Bismarck as quoted in Speier, 385). While the conversations I witnessed as both an observer and as a participant observer reflected concerns around local and national issues rather than foreign policy, the idea is still the same.  In both these cases, individuals expressed their opinions publicly because they felt there had been some injustice or bad decision made in the past.  In their conversation around issues of the day, they frequently expressed frustration and lamentation around these past mistakes, which stemmed from the behavior of their fellow citizens, of the media elites, or of politicians.

Contextualizing the nature of these interactions is of the utmost importance. Austin is known to be a politically homogenous space.  It attracts a breed of unconventional individuals who are generally left leaning in their politics.  In this way, local residents have carved out a community unique to the rest of Texas, which is generally more conservative and politically right leaning, yet they have created a place that lacks diversity of opinion in the process.  In all of the conversations I engaged with or overhead during the four-day music festival, no cross-pressures – which provide a diversity of social cues and political attitudes – could be detected. SXSW may have exacerbated this phenomenon, as the attendees were a paradoxically homogenous mass of counterculture individuals commonly referred to as hipsters.  Hipsters are a subculture known for adopting certain conventions in dress, self-presentation and lifestyle. Walking down the streets of Austin last week, one could observe an endless sea of individuals adorning tattoo sleeves, Mohawks, skinny jeans, and “fixie bikes.” This crowd was almost exclusively white and likely from upper socio-economic levels to be able to afford all the expenses associated with attending SXSW: airfare, hotel, food, and all access passes which cost a minimum of $695.  The event took place during the week, which meant that participants needed to have flexible work schedules. No doubt that this sort of context would only serve to further reinforce the normative opinions, lifestyles, and behaviors of the large majority of white, left-leaning residents of Austin.

Diana C. Mutz writes of the effects of this kind of homogeneity or lack thereof in terms of political participation. In her research she found that individuals engaged in cross-cutting networks – through which differing opinions are expressed – are more likely to feel politically ambivalent and may be more delayed in their political actions, such as voting, in order to avoid confrontations that might compromise their social relationships. On the flipside, individuals who are not privy to cross-cutting networks are more likely to be politically active and to express strong opinions.  Mutz writes of this trend: “High levels of political participation go hand in hand with homogenous networks” (850).

In closing, what I witnessed in Austin – public opinions affected by the spiral of silence, pluralistic ignorance, the third person effect, and an absence of cross-cutting networks – had much to do with the homogenous environment created by the mingling of residents and typical concertgoers at SXSW. In this kind of environment, there are high social rewards for demonstrating conformity in opinions, lifestyles, and appearances, and negative repercussions including social isolation and stigmatization for sharing ideas, holding beliefs, or trumpeting values that run counter to the carefully constructed “alternative” lifestyle of the mainstream hipster. My recent trip to Austin for the South by Southwest Music Festival proved to be more than a mini-vacation from which I would collect memories of live music performances as my souvenirs; it also provided me with an opportunity to embed myself in a foreign and fascinating culture as a social critic, a budding ethnographer, and an aspiring sociologist. As a student of sociology, I came to view Austin, generally, and the SXSW Music Festival, specifically, as environments that foster group-think, socio-political homogeneity, and extreme speaking and silence vis-à-vis individual beliefs about one’s minority or majority status.

Works Cited

Breed, Warren and Kstanes, Thomas. “Pluralistic Ignorance in the Process of Opinion
Formation.” The Public Opinion Quarterly Autumn 1961: 382-392
Davidson, Phillips W. “The Third-Person Effect in Communication.” The Public Opinion
Quarterly Spring 1983: 1-5.
Katz, Elihu. “Publicity and Pluralistic Ignorance: Notes on the ‘Spiral of Silence.” Mass
CommunicationYearbook 1983: pages 89-99.
Mutz, Diana C. “The Consequences of Cross-Cutting Networks for Political
Participation.” American Journal of Political Science Oct. 2002: 838-855
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabth. “The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion.” Journal
of Communication Spring 1975: 45-51
Price, Vincent. Communication Concepts 4: Public Opinion. London: Sage Publications,
1992.
Speier, Hans. “Historical Development of Public Opinion.” The American Journal of
Sociology January 1950: 376-388.
The Houston Chronicle. March 15, 2009. The Associated Press. March 23, 2009
[http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/business/6312141.html].

Research for Women’s Leadership Initiative Competition

(from left) Me, Dr. Jeanine Turner, and Gillian Brooks

Yesterday my partner, Gillian Brooks, and I presented our research on female leader’s use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) at the Georgetown Women’s Leadership Initiative Competition.  After winning our session (which was completely unexpected), we delivered an address to the roughly 200 female executives and leaders present (including Michelle Rhee!) in the National Press Club ballroom.

Among our other findings, we learned that women leaders are more likely to use CMC to communicate in the workplace, but they are largely perceived as less effective than men through this medium. Follow this link to view a PowerPoint highlighting our research findings.

We owe much of our success to the guidance and insight of our wonderful faculty advisor, Dr.  Jeanine Turner.  Next step… publish our findings!

The economic crisis: Were structural holes our achilles heel?

Socio-economists offer us a great deal of insight on the ways in which social relations shape the economic actions of people (both firms and individuals). Uzzi, Lin and Burt all consider how social ties can affect an individual actor or a firm’s access to information, opportunities and, in turn capital.

This is quite a departure from the theoretical assertions of traditional economists, who assume that actors are autonomous individuals pursuing their own best interest in an economic vacuum, without accounting for the fact that social ties (including elements like trust) between actors influences their marketplace behavior.

So what do these concept of embeddedness and network position add to our theoretical toolkit and how do they help explain the current economic crisis?

Uzzi approaches this concept from the level of the firm, describing the two types of networks that can emerge: those at arms length and those in organizational networks. He warns that interfirm networks that exist at arms length, “may be composed of loose collections of firms…and tend to be impersonal, diffuse, and shifting in membership” (679).

From an organizational perspective, I would argue that the current housing crisis could have resulted from this kind of network structure, in which many firms were connected together by arms length relationships. Uzzi explains how third-party referrals and previous personal relations can “set expectations for trust between newly introduced actors and equip the new economic exchange between newly introduced actors” and through an interative process, arms-length ties can be transformed into embedded ties (679). According to Uzzi, this can lead involved actors to engage in a process independent of the initial economic goal.

This might explain how so many financial firms and banks, from Iceland to New York, were brought together through cooperative exchanges and investment in the U.S. housing market. Perhaps third-party referrals and structural holes (Burt) led these organizations to trust their information sources more than they should have.

This would also explain the behavior of millions of home-buyers in the market, who were encouraged to “buy, buy, buy” (even if they couldn’t afford to) through loosely structured social ties. I imagine that just the exercise of asking one of these home-buyers to trace the original source responsible for recommendations to buy would demonstrate the relative strength (and in this case the weakness) of weak ties. Was it a financial lender, a media pundit, your next-door neighbor (or all of the above) who led you to believe that buying a house was a good investment?

While structural holes can give financial players more efficient access to new information, leading to greater levels of trust among actors, if the information being spread across networks is poor, this kind of network structure can be deadly.

So were strucutural holes our achilles heel? I believe that most socio-economists would answer that it was. Perhaps the housing crisis and the resulting global economic meltdown shows us that when proper regulation is absent, a network connected by weak ties and/or structural holes can lead to sometimes dangerous consequences.