Monthly Archives: July 2010

Summer readings, cultural revolutions, destructive designs

My interest in the topic of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was jump-started by Tsinghua sociologist Guo Yuhua. In the summer of 2008, in the aftermath of a month-long fieldwork conducted in Beijing and Shanghai, I came back to Paris to attend the conference La Chine et l’internationalisation de la sociologie. There, Guo Yuhua delivered a presentation about political rituals in rural China, emphasizing the role of “movements” as being instrumental in creating a certain form of emerging governance in remote provinces. By movements, Chinese authorities traditionally mean loosely-designed public campaigns promoting ever-changing (and often contradictory) policies: movements to “save the country through physical fitness”, movements to “chase away sparrows”, movements to “voice dissent”, movements to “repress dissent”, movements to “kill and bury stray dogs”, and so on. Something like western democracies national plans, but less clear as to scope, budget and timing, and more bottom-up and arbitrary in their application: “is one hour of exercise per day sufficient to stay healthy?”; “on what exactly should I voice my dissent?”; “how many dogs do we have to kill, overall?” All these questions are not answered by Chinese  policymakers. Rather, the answer is supposed to emerge consensually, after a period of collective negotiation sometimes leading to tensions, struggle and social criticism.

The idea that popped in more than one head that day, while listening to Guo Yuhua, was that maybe the long series of disruptive political events that we conventionally call the “Cultural Revolution” should not be regarded as a coherent political masterplan, but as the random combination of some of those campaigns – starting with the “Destruction of the Four Olds” in 1966, peaking with the “Down to the Countryside movement” in the early 1970s, and fading away after the “Criticize Lin Piao, Criticize Confucius” movement in the mid-1970s.

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Antonio Casilli décortique trois "mythes d'Internet" (Sciences Humaines, n° 229 – août/septembre 2011)

“Qu’est le numérique, si ce n’est la poursuite de la vie par d’autres moyens ?” : c’est la question qui se pose sur le n. 229 du magazine Sciences Humaines le journaliste Xavier de la Vega, coordonnateur du très nourri dossier “Nos vies numériques”. L’article d’ouverture, signé par le sociologue Antonio Casilli, auteur de Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité ? (Ed. du Seuil), s’attaque à trois mythes d’Internet : celui des effets désocialisants du Web, celui du “dualisme” virtuel/vie réelle et celui, omniprésent, des digital natives. Parmi les autres invités de marque de ce numéro spécial: Daniel Miller sur les défis des réseaux pour l’anthropologie, Fabien Granjon et Céline Bagault évaluent les effets révolutionnaires du Web, Martine Fournier se plonge dans le sexe en ligne, Maxime Coulombe et Justine Canonne abordent les jeux vidéo et les mondes immersifs, Henry Jenkins porte son regard sur fan et hackers et Jean-François Dortier conclut le dossier en nous conduisant au coeur de Wikipedia.

Les digital natives ne peuvent être pensés en dehors de leurs familles. Les étudier à l’aune de la stratification sociale, comme le fait Eszter Hargittai, fait ressortir un tableau plus fragmenté : les membres de la soi-disant « génération Internet » ne sont pas tous des virtuoses du clavier (3). Des comparaisons entre enfants de familles aisées et de classes populaires révèlent une divergence parfois radicale en termes de compétences informatiques. Dans le droit fil de Pierre Bourdieu, Laura Robinson emploie la notion d’« habitus informationnel » pour montrer comment les attitudes vis-à-vis des Tic sont assimilées par les jeunes utilisateurs. Si les enfants des classes moyennes se montrent plus intéressés par l’expérimentation, la recherche et le jeu en ligne, ceux dont les familles sont plus proches du seuil de pauvreté développeraient un « goût de nécessité » qui se manifeste par une attitude plus orientée vers la réalisation de tâches utilitaires, aux résultats immédiats : envoyer un message ou vérifier une information – souvent sous la supervision d’un enseignant ou d’un adulte (4). Quant à l’utilisation d’Internet dans les différentes classes d’âge, le panorama n’en est pas moins complexe : alors que les adolescents profitent des vidéos, jeux et sites de socialisation pour se distraire, les pratiques numériques des personnes âgées, centrées sur la messagerie électronique, la presse en ligne et l’e-commerce, relèvent d’une tyrannie de la nécessité (5).


Ainsi, le fait de diviser les utilisateurs entre « natifs » et « immigrants » du Net est non seulement la marque d’un certain « jeunisme » ambiant, mais surtout le signal « du déplacement politique des scènes de l’exclusion sociale (6)  ». Si les personnes âgées ne se servent pas d’Internet, cela n’est pas dû à un manque de prédisposition naturelle, mais plutôt au fait que les avantages culturels et sociaux de ce moyen de communication semblent plutôt réservés aux plus jeunes qui s’en servent pour renforcer leur capital culturel et ainsi améliorer leur image auprès de leurs égaux, de leurs enseignants, d’employeurs potentiels.

Running experiments on Twitter? Don't forget the bug

Just a quick post to point you to an interesting article about tie formation on Twitter – which is also the place where I found this reference, a couple of days ago:

ResearchBlogging.org
Scott A. Golder and Sarita Yardi (2010). Structural Predictors of Tie Formation in Twitter: Transitivity and Mutuality. Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on Social Computing. August 20-22, Minneapolis, MN.

Here I summarize the results:

  • The more followers you have, the more followers you attract (ok, admittedly this doesn’t come as a surprise…);
  • Reciprocity in tie formation doesn’t seem to be due to similarity in interests but, more likely, to some kind of social obligation (well, this is getting more interesting);
  • Self-presentation (pic, bio and location) doesn’t seem to matter, except for location which appears to be negatively correlated to tie formation (now they got my attention…);
  • Transitivity and mutuality predict tie formation if they are taken together, but authors “suggest that a consistent status hierarchy and some level of tie strength drive this effect” (this is definitely worth looking into).

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If you miss the sound of vuvuzelas, try listening to Die Antwoord!

I, for one, am not much of a football fan. But I have to admit that this year’s World Cup has been a mesmerizing spectacle. Not because of the actual playing (and not because of French team debacle, so aptly analyzed by SocProf), but mainly because of the soundscape. For me vuvuzelas were, like, you know, Luigi Russolo’s “Art of noises” and emergentist theory of human action rolled into one. Don’t get me started on that, because I could go on and on for days and – beyond this blog, you know, I have a life.

So, for those of you that miss that disturbing, spitty, heartfelt, proletarian sound, here’s a – seemingly unrelated – piece of South African culture: rap-rave music, as instantiated by Die Antwoord, the hottest band of the moment [of course, mildly NSFW].

Taxijam presents Die Antwoord from taxijam on Vimeo.

“Here in South Africa the taxis play rave music fokken loud my bru. You can hear it from the next city when the taxi comes through, you hear DOOM DOOM DOOM—they gooi the rap-rave megamixes pumping like a nightclub. So my main inspiration is the taxis. The whole album is based on the sound it’s gonna make when it’s pumping through a taxi—It’s that high energy shit you can’t compare.”

[Watkin T. Jones (aka “Ninja”), lead vocalist of Die Antwoord, interview in Vice Magazine]

Ps. On Die Antwoord’s official website you can listen to their entire first album $O$. It’s definitely worth it, especially if you are not planning to take a Cape Town taxi anytime soon. They are presently touring Europe and the US, so another thing that you might want to do is go to one of their live shows. With a vuvuzela, to blow along with their despicable zef-gansta rhymes…

Friendship on Facebook: an ethno-computational approach (Sunbelt XXX presentation)

Very happy to put online our powerpoint presentation – just delivered at Sunbelt international conference, world’s biggest conference on social network analysis. Thank you to Ilan Talmud (who chaired our session),  to the colleagues, to FB “friends” and to tweeps attending. Great feedback from the room, from Twitter, and even had Barry Wellman blowing a kiss when I mentioned his “little boxes”…