Group items tagged

exploring the effects of new media on society and culture

The knowledge is all around people and a lot of advanced technology is so ubiquitous that it makes connection, organising, sharing and learning easier than ever before

new culture and environment

they mediate relationships. Media changes, relationships change and the culture changes.

media helped the people there in a big way

Media is therefore not just tools and communication

Think about how we watch TV. We watch TV for the content, but the content drives relationships. We watch TV while at dinner, we congregate in groups to watch sport. These are the conversations that create our culture

a brief history of the phrase

it's a way for people to raise their personality and not be indistinguishable. More people want to be important today - more people want to be the new American Ido

We all need identity and recognition and the media keeps bombarding us with messages of the kind of people we should become. The search for the authentic self leads us towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment and disagreement on several things - values, views, approaches. We're more disengaged and more fragmented. The new media revolution is creating the cultural background for this kind of a change.

micro-learning

400 feet in diameter

Britain’s prehistoric henges

garbage dump

uman bones

but now a mass grave as well.”

all of them victims of violence

960 to 1020—the period in which the Anglo-Saxon monarchy peaked in power

riginally from Germany, Anglo-Saxons had invaded England almost six centuries earlier, after the Roman Empire had fallen into disarray.

“execution cemeteries”

n average, more fish and shellfish than did Anglo-Saxons.

Assume that there were salamanders living in some grasslands. Suppose, Lamarck argued, that these salamanders had a hard time walking because their short legs couldn't trample the tall grasses or reach the ground. Suppose that these salamanders began to slither on their bellies to move from place to place. Because they didn't use their legs, the leg muscles wasted away from disuse and the legs thus became small.

passed this acquired trait

legless salamanders evolved

no legs.

by inheriting the acquired characteristic of

Darwin's Background

o have extraordinary talents.

genius, did not at first appear

Darwin disliked school

d observing birds and collecting insects to study.

sent to medical school in Scotland

"intolerably dull

interested in attending natural history lectures.

university at Cambridge, England, in 1827.

Darwin be chosen for the position of naturalist on the ship the HMS Beagle.

to collect specimens, make observations, and keep careful records of anything he observed that he thought significant.

Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell,

In the Andes he observed fossil shells of marine organisms in rock beds at about 4,300 m.

One reason that Darwin was so eager to study life on land was that he suffered from terrible seasickness and couldn't wait to get off the Beagle.

thousands

trekked hundreds of miles through unmapped region.

catalog his specimens and write his notes.

praised by the scientific community.

experts for study.

bird specialist

Darwin's bird collections from the Galapagos Islands, located about 1,000 km west of South America.

13 similar

Other experts

believe that species change over time.

evidence f

In 1837 Darwin began his first notebook on evolution. For several years Darwin filled his notebooks with facts that could be used to support the theory of evolution.

fossils of similar relative ages are more closely related than those of widely different relative ages.

He ran his own breeding experiments and also did experiments on seed dispersal.

"similar patterns of adult mortality,"

a demographic advantage for early modern humans,

it must have been the result of increased fertility and/or reduced immature mortality."

socio-cultural

two levels

New Media« are media based technically on digitalisation, miniaturisation, data compression, networking and convergence.

current media development

(PCs with multimedia capability, Internet, mobile radio

different levels of Internet use

cultural content

groups and humanity as a whole

Changes in readership and reading behaviour

dramatic changes in reading strategies

reading motivation

example

social sciences

almost general expansion of the concept of culture

a renewed interest in the culture of the individual

between cultural and media development

This makes cross-border movements, interculturalism and hybridisation more important for cultural theory; media development, transnational cultural relationships, intercultural exchange and migration become even more important topics for research.

recent debates

finally the increase in the importance for the understanding of culture of new (or what are perceived as new) cultural communities, groups and contexts.

the current status of the concept of culture in science and politics is not a fashionable phenomenon, but rather »evidence of a significant social development«, a »development from the domination of things to a domination of knowledge«

In dealing with the interactions between the change in concepts of culture and recent media development, the mutually impacting trends of individualisation and cultural globalisation become issues leading to further depths. Both issues are extremely important for the current debate on media development.

individualisation« or »personalisation

media services with a customised nature

economic globalisation

cultural globalisation

show on the one hand that the development of the New Media has aroused (often vague-seeming) fears and hopes, while euphoria over technology and pessimism over culture are relatively evenly divided between the political and social trends. Conversely, there is also the tendency in these debates to pursue older scientific arguments and view the development of the New Media in the context of specific media-historical, social-theoretical or philosophical considerations.

The current crisis in traditional concepts of culture is apparently closely connected with the recent development in the media, as the New Media change the cultural significance of physical proximity and separation

real power of the sociological imagination is found in how you and I learn to distinguish between the personal and social levels in our own lives

C. Wright Mills (1916-1962

neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both"

50 percent of all college students in the country never graduate, we call that a larger social issue.

Does sociology provide personal and larger social insight

Be aware of the three-strike issue

Know which factors you can control

larger social factors that have historically contributed to these patterns

brief spike in divorce after World War II

It was the highest rate of marriages, highest rate of births (The Baby Boom began in 1946

Divorces continue to be high during economic prosperity

ecline during economic hardships.

abundance of single women

urban

enslaved to those force

They still impact you, and you can follow Mill’s ideas and manage as best you can within your power concerning consequences of these forces

This is the

Colorism can occur within one’s own community, or across racial and ethnic groups

any other “racial” group.

Our more systematic historical research shows that the importance of skin color on life chances dates back at least to the nineteenth century.

it may emerge as an indirect effect of the person’s ability to take advantage of the higher social status that has accrued over many generations to light-skinned African-Americans

skin tone within a given race or ethnicity is associated with socioeconomic outcomes.

Being dark-skinned has psychological as well as economic, educational, and temporal costs.

“colorism” may be a direct response to the behavior of or, more likely, the appearance of a person standing before the potential employer, judge, or teacher.

people who suffer from discrimination may not protest it because they are unaware of their unfair treatment, because they perceive no alternatives, or because they see no means of effective protest. 

Light-skinned blacks tend to come from families with relatively high status on these dimensions, so skin tone affects educational attainment indirectly.

light- and medium-skinned blacks received shorter sentences for all crimes than the darkest category of blacks.  In every case except property crimes [i.e. for drug, personal, and miscellaneous crimes], the darkest group of blacks received higher sentences, on average, than whites

sentences are 2 percent shorter for light-skinned blacks compared with whites, 4 percent longer for medium-skinned blacks, and 2 percent longer for dark-skinned blacks. Those differences seem small, but 4 percent of a 2,560 day sentence (the average length for whites) is over three months of prison time.

light-skinned African Americans are relatively advantaged in the social and economic arenas,

they have a similar advantage as voters and political actors, and that dark-skinned blacks perceive more discrimination.

Light-skinned blacks may be slightly more likely to perceive discrimination against other members of their race, and they are a little more likely to participate politically.

So why isn’t colorism an issue around which blacks organize politically?

Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from

a variety of relevant values and material interests

light-skinned blacks as roughly analogous to middle-class Americans – certainly not at the top of the distribution, but enjoying enough benefits from the unfair structure that they would be hesitant to disrupt it too much.

he implication is that dark-skinned blacks ought to perceive that they are doubly maltreated, that skin color hierarchy is just as unfair as the racial hierarchy within which it nests, and that protest is warranted. 

the task is to understand their values on their own terms.

Applying this logic to the case of skin color discrimination yields several hypotheses.  Perhaps dark-skinned blacks are aware of their doubly unfair treatment, but choose to ignore it because they too care more about some other political value, such as racial solidarity or individual autonomy.

Similarly, light-skinned African Americans may recognize,

that “for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together,” but they too care more about racial solidarity than about either taking advantage of or fighting this internal division. 

in short, one form of unfairness may be worth accepting or ignoring publicly for the sake of fighting another, or simply pursuing some unrelated goal.

The deeply religious, in short, vote their values, not their interests.

At the turn of the twentieth century, both black and white media frequently used “mulatto” (and sometimes “quadroon” and “octoroon”) – sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably, but to a surprising degree simply as a common and unremarkable descriptor.

those descriptors were never used or were terms of opprobrium or shock.

one can explain the lack of collective attention to the unfairness of skin tone discrimination by pointing to the dissemination of and allegiance to other, apparently stronger values.

Racial nationalists have traditionally been hostile to black feminists or black Marxists who seek to draw attention to unfair practices within the black community

they are similarly hostile to any discussion of skin color differentiation because it appears to be a strategy of “divide and conquer.

Archeology: The study and interpretation of ancient humans, their history and culture, through examination of the artifacts and remains they left behind

Cultural Anthropology:(also: sociocultural anthropology, social anthropology, or ethnology) studies the different cultures of humans and how those cultures are shaped or shape the world around them

Biological Anthropology

using genetics, evolution, human ancestry, primates, and the ability to adapt.

Linguistic Anthropology: examines human languages

pplied anthropology is simply the practice of applying anthropological theory and or methods from any of the fields of Anthropology to solve human problems

Culture is:

Learned

Patterned

•Shared

•Adaptive

Symbolic

At its most basic level, the difference between Culture and culture is in the way they are defined. C

lture with a capital C refers to the ability of the human species to absorb and imitate patterned and symbolic ideas that ultimately further their survival

Familial culture

Every family is different, and every family has its own culture

icro or Subculture

distinct groups within a larger group that share some sort of common trait, activity or language that ties them together and or differentiates them from the larger group

clique

Mexican-Americans

micro-culture would be the Japanese hip hop

Cultural universals

Claude Levi-Strauss

gender roles, the incest taboo, religious and healing ritual, mythology, marriage, language, art, dance, music, cooking, games, jokes, sports, birth and death

tual ceremonies

f cultural relativism deny the existence or reduce the importance of cultural universals

Language and cognition

Society

Myth, Ritual, and aesthetics

Technology

This problem of right and wrong in terms of crossing cultural lines is a big one.

intrinsic cultural distinctions that are meaningful to the members of a given society, often considered to be an 'insider’s' perspective.

reate bias o

Enculturation

This process is the way in which we obtain and transmit culture.

In the !Kung Bushman tribe they look down upon people who think highly of themselves and who are arrogant. To avoid these characteristics, each child was raised to put down and mock others when they do things such as hunting and other activities.

Cultural Transmission

Symbols and Culture

Symbols are the basis of culture. A symbol is an object, word, or action that stands for something else with no natural relationship that is culturally defined

Ethnocentrism

Cultural Relativism

Ethnography

Deconstructing Race and Racism

Race was created long ago as a tool to separate humans

Deconstructing the social concept of race has been a major interest of Cultural Anthropology at least since Franz Boas's work on race and immigration in the early 1900's.

Race is not biological but it's supposed to be a way to classify biological differences by grouping people according to different characteristics that they have

There is no biological part of race. It is strictly a concept created by humans to try to better understand differences between us

Technology