Our Summer 2008 issue is out the door and should be in your hands soon. You can read the Summer 2008 Discoveries here!
(We’ve also made the Discoveries from our Winter 2008 issue and our Spring 2008 issue available as well.)
Article: The Blogosophere as a Public Arena, Social Problems, February 2008.
Summary: In an age of mass media and giant corporate news agencies, many optimistically look to the internet as a new venue for non-elites to make their voices heard and push issues into the public discourse.
Ray Maratea analyzes the role blogs play in the competition for public attention and finds that blogs do, in fact, offer many advantages. Thanks to the speed at which blogs can be updated and the ability of blog posts to quickly spread through the internet via hyperlinking, blogs can be an effective means of drawing public attention to issues.
However, in other respects blogs aren’t as revolutionary as they may seem. For example, the blogosophere is very hierarchical, with a small number of blogs drawing most of the traffic. Additionally, blogs tend to use the same criteria as traditional media when deciding what is deserving of attention, such as drama and novelty.
Article: Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers, Public Choice, January 2008.
Summary: On the one hand, the internet provides people with access to an extraordinarily diverse range of information and opinions. On the other hand, the internet can also bring like-minded people together into isolated, homogeneous communities devoid of dissent and diversity. Which side wins out?
Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo and Matthew Kane look at political blogs and examine how frequently conservative bloggers link to liberal bloggers and vice versa. They followed 40 of the top political blogs (20 conservative, 20 liberal) for three week-long periods over the course of ten months. They have several interesting findings:
In short, they found some support for both faces of the internet, and also found some interesting differences between conservative and liberal bloggers.
If this is interesting to you, this article is part of a special issue on blogs and politics.
Article: Losing my religion: the social sources of religious decline in early adulthood. Social Forces, June 2007.
Summary: During early adulthood, it’s pretty common for Americans to become less religious. Many blame the college experience: viewing Universities as a hotbed of liberal, secular ideas. However, Uecker, Regnerus and Vaaler find this stereotype doesn’t hold — it’s not the students who go to college that experience the greatest decline in religiosity:
Contrary to expectations, emerging adults that avoid college exhibit the most extensive patterns of religious decline, undermining conventional wisdom about the secularizing effect of higher education.
The authors admit that this may not have always been the case: changes in both the student population as well as college campuses may be responsible for today’s situation:
America’s institutions of higher learning - even secular state universities - instead have an (over)abundant supply of religious and para-church organizations to meet the demands of students, and they often teach tolerance and respect for religion in the classroom.
Article: Celebrity Status. Sociological Theory, December 2007.
Summary: The authors* argue that debates within sociology over class and status,which are usually grounded in the classic debate between Marxian and Weberian views of class, miss out on a distinguishing feature of status in contemporary mass society: celebrity. As they put it:
Compared with other types of status, however, celebrity is status on speed. It confers honor in days, not generations; it decays over time, rather than accumulating; and it demands a constant supply of new recruits, rather than erecting barriers to entry.
*Charles Kurzman, Chelise Anderson, Clinton Key, Youn Ok Lee, Mairead Moloney, Alexis Silver, and Maria W. Van Ryn.
Article: It’s the Message, Not the Messenger: The Declining Significance of Black-White Contact in a “Colorblind” Society. Sociological Inquiry, August 2007.
Summary: Eileen O’Brien and Kathleen Odell Korgen each had two separate projects: O’Brien studied a group of white antiracist activists and Korgen studied black-white friendship pairs. When they brought their data together, they found they made for an interesting comparison. Contrary to the expectations of contact theory, whites with close black friends did not have strong anti-racist views and those whites participating in antiracism activism did not necessarily have many close black friends. They attribute this finding to colorblind attitudes. “Colorblindness” encourages Americans to treat all people purely as individuals and not as members of racial or ethnic groups. As a result, their respondents didn’t re-evaluate their view of a racial group after positive individual contact: they simply exempted that individual from what they thought about the racial group.
UPDATE: This Discovery was published in our Winter 2008 issue.
Article: The Income Digital Divide: Trends and Predictions for Levels of Internet Use. Social Forces, February 2007.
Summary: Steven P. Martin and John P. Robinson examine the pace of Internet adoption. They find that while the number of people with internet access is increasing each year, the rate of increase is slowing. Importantly, they find the rate of internet adoption is slowing more dramatically for low-income citizens than their more affluent colleagues:
These differential rates of diffusion, combined with an overall slowing of the diffusion of Internet use since 2001, suggest that it may be 2009 before a majority of lowest income Americans use the Internet.
They also note that this trend doesn’t hold in many other countries. For example, the United Kingdom has similar levels of income inequality as the United States, yet has decreasing levels of inequality with respect to Internet access by income.
UPDATE: This Discovery was published in our Winter 2008 issue.