Each person nudged into violence, they believe, hints at a community that has become broadly more hostile to refugees. For most users, the effect will be subtler, but, by playing out more widely, perhaps more consequential.

In each, they analyzed the local community by any variable that seemed relevant. Wealth. Demographics. Support for far-right politics. Newspaper sales. Number of refugees. History of hate crime. Number of protests.One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees.

They’ve encountered racist vitriol on local pages, a jarring contrast with Altena’s public spaces, where people wave warmly to refugee families.

The ability to develop these ideas across the globe is a new precedent, and with recent reports on style guides for white supremacist news outlets, we are learning more and more that words and language are deliberate choices to get disaffected people on their side. The final point I wanted to mak

Our professor often asks us, “so what?”

The third post, In Trends, took a look at statistical trends in public

The next post, In Pictures, was intended to be a look at violence against black people from the foundation of America and its politics.

it is not always grounded in theory,

For example, when is a person’s heritage identified as South African versus Dutch (the Boer colonists in South Africa during the late seventeenth century)? The modern answer seems to depend on their physical appearance: white = Dutch and black = South Africa.  Despite these issues, the consumer market for genetic testing has boomed and is expected to reach $340 million by 2022.

As a result, the second blog post (In pictures) looks at some of the available images online obtained through a simple keyword search, which have been used by various individuals on blogs or discussion forums as evidence either for the biological nature of racial differences or the socioeconomic disadvantages/cultural construction of race.  

While I intended this post to somehow lead towards validating the scientists when interpreting genetic findings, my research veered away from the scientists and analyzed the scientific basis for claiming genetic differences between groups of people.

The new social contract, as briefly as I can say it, is “You are on your own.”

Union organizing is extremely important not because it directly impacts higher education, but it affords workers different and better choices. And when workers feel less insecure in their labor arrangements they are much less likely to take on a high risk credential.

TANF (which was created during the Welfare Reform Act of 1996) lead to an expansion in for-profit colleges that don’t provide the education that people need and put them into debt they can’t get out of?

That’s what workers are feeling, and they’re feeling it at the same time that wages have stagnated, so they have less money to pay for anything, the costs of things like healthcare (which in the short term can seem a little bit more critical than education), and things like taking care of elderly parents and navigating the inevitable cost of living life. Workers are feeling that, and they are angry. And they should be angry. Because our politicians and our political system has not done a good job of protecting us against those changes.

You would think so, except for how one of the consequences of the typical American worker becoming more efficient (which we have become, mostly through developments in technology) is that employers no longer have to rely on the workers’ development of skills to keep them efficient. Workers have become more expendable than they were thirty or forty years ago. If the worker is more expendable, we don’t need to worry about developing their skill set. We need the technology, and we need to train the workers on how to manage that technology on the ground in real time, but we don’t need to develop in our workers the capacity (for example) to develop new technology.

They say things like, “This wonderful trend is happening in the United States: we have produced more high school graduates, but because of how we have produced them—through unequal K-12 schools—fewer people are qualified to go to college. And isn’t that great for us? There are people who have graduated from high school who aren’t prepared for college. That’s wonderful. We can enroll those people. That means we’re a good economic investment for you, the potential investor.”

That’s one of the things that I hope my work does, is shift the conversation away from everybody in these schools being predators preying on vulnerable students. The more disturbing story is the truth, which is that even when the people in these institutions think they’re doing a good thing, because of the way the institutions are set up, they are still preying on people.

What they say at for-profit colleges is, “We will only train you for a job, because that’s what matters.” When you say that, though, we have a really concrete way of measuring whether or not you are delivering on what you promised. Do you get your students that job you promised them? That’s the problem that for-profit colleges have. We have a really clear way to measure if they are successful or not.

I think so. The promises are lofty, no matter where you go. Traditional not-for-profit education promises all kinds of things. “We’ll change your whole life! We will teach you how to be an informed, critical-thinking citizen!” Whether we always manage that depends on who you ask and what data that you like. But with for-profit colleges, the real problem is the nature of the promise that they make. It’s just as lofty, but it’s also more concrete.

So your question, Chuck, was how we know that people know what they know.

This is one of the really brilliant moves that the for-profit college sector has done, the sleight of hand of saying “customer” instead of “student.” We understand a “student” as someone we’re all collectively responsible for. We’re responsible for the health, well-being, and development of students. We think of “customers,” however, as being on their own. Buyer beware. And if you make a poor decision, hey, customers have to learn.

There is no for-profit college sector without access to federal student aid money.

It’s another way that we haven’t managed the problem well—but I won’t say that accreditation is the issue. Accreditation is a really weird thing. People who bring it up don’t always really know how accreditation works. When we say a school is or should not be accredited, we generally mean: is it a good school? Is it high quality? And that’s a little different from what accreditation does in practice.

would say, “All colleges are for-profit.” What makes the place where you worked, Technical College, or University of Phoenix, different from Harvard or Northwestern? TM: I hear that one all the time. I now actually tell people: “I promise you I’ve heard that joke. You don’t have to do that one for me anymore.” All schools are for-profit. I get it, I do.

Because that shift happened, and because of our belief that the way to address the problem was to provide more market opportunities instead of more public social safety supports, it was a perfect opportunity for profiteering from the for-profit colleges.

“new economy”

the secretarial school

but you point out that for-profit colleges have been around for two hundred years

Thank you so much, Chuck, for welcoming me to hell.

printed with permission. Edited for space and readability.

Transcribed from the 11 March 2017 episode of This is Hell! Radio (Chicago

Here is an attempt to articulate those thoughts more clearly – and maybe end up with a research question and theoretical agenda.

This technical dimension of bureaucracies goes to the heart of what a sharing economy does: divide up labor

Kreiss et al. ask whether “peer networks serve less as alternatives to Weber’s iron cage of rationalization, than as implements of its diffusion.” (Kreiss et al. 2011:256)

This perspective becomes crucial as newer peer economy platforms move further into the service sphere, where online coordination and offline services are mediated by platforms as brokers.

as well as a literature on trust and reputation systems

The most interesting parallel to me is that these platforms are similar organizations

But surely the dedication I show in the lab, and the subsequent data I collect, should speak for itself. I do not – and should not – have to parade myself online to please my employer or to stake my claim as a good researcher. Can’t we save the showing off for where it’s really needed, in the dreaded grant applications?

These are not social media representatives or marketing executives, but scientific staff. I

Hillary knows we can work through racial divides in this country when we realize the worry black parents feel when their son leaves the house isn’t so different than what a brave cop’s family feels when he puts on the blue and goes to work

It’s every American who believed we could change this country for the better, so many of you who’d never been involved in politics, who picked up phones, and hit the streets, and used the internet in amazing new ways to make change happen.  You are the best organizers on the planet, and I’m so proud of all the change you’ve made possible.

And it’s got me thinking about the story I told you twelve years ago tonight, about my Kansas grandparents and the things they taught me when I was growing up.  They came from the heartland; their ancestors began settling there about 200 years ago.  They were Scotch-Irish mostly, farmers, teachers, ranch hands, pharmacists, oil rig workers.  Hardy, small town folks

If you want to protect our kids and our cops from gun violence, we’ve got to get the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, who agree on background checks to be just as vocal and determined as the gun lobby that blocks change through every funeral we hold.

  And that’s why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as President of the United States of America.

who’s made me a better father and a better man; who’s gone on to inspire our nation as First Lady; and who somehow hasn’t aged a day.  I know the same can’t be said for me.  My girls remind me all the time.  Wow, you’ve changed so much, daddy. 

Hope in the face of difficulty; hope in the face of uncertainty; the audacity of hope!America, you have vindicated that hope these past eight years.  And now I’m ready to pass the baton and do my part as a private citizen.  This year, in this election, I’m asking you to join me – to reject cynicism, reject fear, to summon what’s best in us; to elect Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States, and show the world we still believe in the promise of this great nation.Thank you for this incredible journey.  Let’s keep it going.  God bless the United States of America.

Time and again, you’ve picked me up.  I hope, sometimes, I picked you up, too.  Tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me.

It’s the painting I keep in my private office, a big-eyed, green owl, made by a seven year-old girl who was taken from us in Newtown, given to me by her parents so I wouldn’t forget – a reminder of all the parents who have turned their grief into action.

We don’t look to be ruled

But for all the tough lessons I’ve had to learn; for all the places I’ve fallen short; I’ve told Hillary, and I’ll tell you what’s picked me back up, every single timeIt’s been you.  The American people.

That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.

in fact, they were the same values Michelle’s parents, the descendants of slaves, taught their own kids living in a bungalow on the South Side of Chicago

You know, there’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America’s lost – people who tell us that our way of life is being undermined by pernicious changes and dark forces beyond our control.  They tell voters there’s a “real America” out there that must be restored.  This isn’t an idea that started with Donald Trump.  It’s been peddled by politicians for a long time – probably from the start of our Republic.

She’s been there for us – even if we haven’t always noticed

But she knows that’s what happens when you’re under a microscope for 40 years.  She knows she’s made mistakes, just like I have; just like we all do.  That’s what happens when we try.  That’s what happens when you’re the kind of citizen Teddy Roosevelt once described – not the timid souls who criticize from the sidelines, but someone “who is actually in the arena…who strives valiantly; who errs…[but] who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement.”

Look, Hillary’s got her share of critics.  She’s been caricatured by the right and by some folks on the left; accused of everything you can imagine – and some things you can’t. 

If you want more justice in the justice system, then we’ve all got to vote – not just for a President, but for mayors, and sheriffs, and state’s attorneys, and state legislators.

We all need to get out and vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, and then hold them accountable until they get the job done.

this business of democracy

striving students and their toiling parents as loving families

She knows that acknowledging problems that have festered for decades isn’t making race relations worse – it’s creating the possibility for people of good will to join and make things better.

America has never been about what one person says he’ll do for us.  It’s always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.

Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago; We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that together, We, the People, can form a more perfect union. That’s who we are.  That’s our birthright – the capacity to shape our own destiny.  That’s what drove patriots to choose revolution over tyranny and our GIs to liberate a continent.  It’s what gave women the courage to reach for the ballot, and marchers to cross a bridge in Selma, and workers to organize and fight for better wages.

That is another bet that Donald Trump will lose.

America is already great.  America is already strong.  And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump. 

She is fit to be the next Commander-in-Chief.

And then there’s Donald Trump.  He’s not really a plans guy.  Not really a facts guy, either.  He calls himself a business guy, which is true, but I have to say, I know plenty of businessmen and women who’ve achieved success without leaving a trail of lawsuits, and unpaid workers, and people feeling like they got cheated.

You know, nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office.  Until you’ve sat at that desk, you don’t know what it’s like to manage a global crisis, or send young people to war.  But Hillary’s been in the room; she’s been part of those decisions.

Now, eight years ago, Hillary and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination.  We battled for a year and a half.  Let me tell you, it was tough, because Hillary’s tough.  Every time I thought I might have that race won, Hillary just came back stronger.

There are pockets of America that never recovered from factory closures; men who took pride in hard work

we have real anxieties

The America I know is full of courage, and optimism, and ingenuity.  The America I know is decent and generous.

and turn away from the rest of the world. 

But what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican – and it sure wasn’t conservative. 

We need to keep making our streets safer and our criminal justice system fairer; our homeland more secure,

So tonight, I’m here to tell you that yes, we still have more work to do.  More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who hasn’t yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years

And through every victory and every setback, I’ve insisted that change is never easy, and never quick

We put policies in place to help students with loans

We brought more of our troops home to their families, and delivered justice to Osama bin Laden. 

401(k)s recover

How could I not be – after all we’ve achieved together?

But I was filled with faith; faith in America – the generous, bighearted, hopeful country that made my story – indeed, all of our stories – possible.

I actually drove her home to Park Ridge, Illinois… (APPLAUSE) …to meet her family and see the town where she grew up, a perfect example of post World War II middle-class America, street after street of nice houses, great schools, good parks, a big public swimming pool, and almost all white. I really liked her family. Her crusty, conservative father, her rambunctious brothers, all extolling the virtues of rooting for the Bears and the Cuba.

The first time I saw her we were, appropriately enough, in a class on political and civil rights. She had thick blond hair, big glasses, wore no makeup, and she had a sense of strength and self- possession that I found magnetic.

And so I say to you, if you love this country, you’re working hard, you’re paying taxes and you’re obeying the law and you’d like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back. (APPLAUSE) If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you. (APPLAUSE) If you’re a young African American disillusioned and afraid, we saw in Dallas how great our police officers can be, help us build a future where nobody is afraid to walk outside, including the people that wear blue to protect our future.

She sent me in this primary to West Virginia where she knew we were going to lose, to look those coal miners in the eye and say I’m down here because Hillary sent me to tell you that if you really think you can get the economy back you had 50 years ago, have at it, vote for whoever you want to. But if she wins, she is coming back for you to take you along on the ride to America’s future.

And you should elect her because she’ll never quit when the going gets tough. She’ll never quit on you.

When I was president, I worked hard to give you more peace and shared prosperity, to give you an America where nobody is invisible or counted out. (APPLAUSE) But for this time, Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face.

Now, how does this square? How did this square with the things that you heard at the Republican convention? What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can’t. One is real, the other is made up.

(APPLAUSE) As secretary of state, she worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. And in what The Wall Street Journal no less called a half-court shot at the buzzer, she got Russia and China to support them. Her team negotiated the New START Treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons and reestablish inspections. And she got enough Republican support to get two-thirds of the Senate, the vote necessary to ratify the treaty. (APPLAUSE) She flew all night long from Cambodia to the Middle East to get a cease-fire that would avoid a full-out shooting war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza to protect the peace of the region. She backed President Obama’s decision to go after Osama bin Laden.

She worked for farmers, for winemakers, for small businesses and manufacturers, for upstate cities in rural areas who needed more ideas and more new investment to create good jobs, something we have to do again in small-town and rural America, in neighborhoods that have been left behind in our cities and Indian country and, yes, in coal country.

Her early years were dominated by 9/11, by working to fund the recovery, then monitoring the health and providing compensation to victims and first and second responders.

fast forward.

And as you saw last night, beyond a shadow of a doubt so has Michelle Obama.

In 1997, she also teamed with the House Minority Leader Tom DeLay, who maybe disliked me more than any of Newt Gingrich’s crowd. They worked on a bill together to increase adoptions of children under foster care. She wanted to do it because she knew that Tom DeLay, for all of our differences, was an adoptive parent and she honored him for doing that.

When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn’t break a Senate filibuster.

If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people’s lives are better, you know it’s hard and some people think it’s boring.

Within two days we had a house, I soon had a job.

For the next 17 years, through nursing school, Montessori, kindergarten, through T-ball, softball, soccer, volleyball and her passion for ballet, through sleepovers, summer camps, family vacations and Chelsea’s own very ambitious excursions, from Halloween parties in the neighborhood, to a Viennese waltz gala in the White House, Hillary first and foremost was a mother.

And time passed. On February 27th, 1980, 15 minutes after I got home from the National Governors Conference in Washington, Hillary’s water broke and off we went to the hospital. Chelsea was born just before midnight.

And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.

And she said, boy, that’s a pretty house. It had 1,100 square feet, an attic, fan and no air conditioner in hot Arkansas, and a screened-in porch.

I said I know most of the young Democrats our age who want to go into politics, they mean well and they speak well, but none of them is as good as you are at actually doing things to make positive changes in people’s lives. (APPLAUSE) So I suggested she go home to Illinois or move to New York and look for a chance to run for office. She just laughed and said, are you out of you mind, nobody would ever vote for me.

She never made fun of people with disabilities; she tried to empower them based on their abilities.

Then she went down to south Texas where she met… (APPLAUSE) …she met one of the nicest fellows I ever met, the wonderful union leader Franklin Garcia, and he helped her register Mexican- American voters. I think some of them are still around to vote for her in 2016.

Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by private citizens. In the summer of 1972, she went to Dothan, Alabama to visit one of those segregated academies that then enrolled over half-a-million white kids in the South. The only way the economics worked is if they claimed federal tax exemptions to which they were not legally entitled. She got sent to prove they weren’t.

She took a summer internship interviewing workers in migrant camps for Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee.

More to the point, by the time I met her she had already been involved in the law school’s legal services project and she had been influenced by Marian Wright Edelman.

lark she went alone to Alaska and spent some time sliming fish.

Don Jones. He took her downtown to Chicago to hear Dr. Martin Luther King

We’ve been walking and talking and laughing together ever since.

you’re going to keep staring at me… CLINTON: …and now I’m staring back, we at least ought to know each other’s name. I’m Hillary Rodham, who are you?

a president who truly believes in the vision that our Founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story.

That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight, how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith.

How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country.

So, look, so don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth!

That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. (CHEERS, APPLAUSE) And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.

Heroes of every color and creed who wear the uniform and risk their lives to keep passing down those blessings of liberty, police officers and the protesters in Dallas who all desperately want to keep our children safe.

I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.

No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.

Kids like the little black boy who looked up at my husband, his eyes wide with hope and he wondered, is my hair like yours?

What I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure.

but every child who needs a champion, kids who take the long way to school to avoid the gangs, kids who wonder how they’ll ever afford college, kids whose parents don’t speak a word of English, but dream of a better life, kids who look to us to determine who and what they can be.

So in this election, we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best. We cannot afford to be tired or frustrated or cynical. No, hear me. Between now and November, we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago.

And when she didn’t win the nomination eight years ago, she didn’t get angry or disillusioned.

See, I trust Hillary to lead this country because I’ve seen her lifelong devotion to our nation’s children, not just her own daughter, who she has raised to perfection…

And let me tell you, Barack and I take that same approach to our jobs as president and first lady because we know that our words and actions matter, not just to our girls, but the children across this country, kids who tell us I saw you on TV, I wrote a report on you for school.

Author Aldon Morris uses the first chapter of his book to describe the world that Du Bois was living in.  In the very first sentence of The Scholar Denied, Morris immediately posits a link between the birth of American sociology and the newfound citizenship of all black people in America.  In addition to pre-existing prejudices of most whites towards blacks, capitalist exploitation of both blacks and newly immigrated white Europeans in the North and the formalization of “Jim Crow” ideologies in the South fostered an atmosphere of growing racial tension in the years leading up to the twentieth century.  As a host of questions arose around the issues of race and immigration, Morris explains that newly founded American sociology was called to prove itself as a science and give answers.

In chapter 1 of The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, author Aldon Morris open the chapter with a discussion of the historical context that Du Bois was born into. This context is described as two distinct racist structures developing in parallel – in the North where blacks, whites and European immigrants are being forced into conflict with each other in order to serve the labor demands of capitalists, and in the South where the even more harsh Jim Crow laws are codified to maintain the social and economic order present before emancipation. Morris asserts that these conditions led to the coining of the “Negro Problem,” a phrase meant to convey the challenge of integrating newly freed slaves into American society.

The sample had graduated from college within the years 1999-2004; therefore, they are in the general age range of 30-35 years old

RQ: How does socialization of gender in the workplace contribute to the selfpresentation displayed on one’s LinkedIn profile?

Significant changes have occurred over the past thirty years that have allowed women more opportunities in the workplace. Working women today are starting their careers with a higher degree of education than men (Pew Research Center, 2013). Women’s pay is now 84 percent as much as men, which has increased from 64 percent in 1980 (Pew Research Center, 2013). The apparent barriers for working women are now dismantled, especially in white-collar professions (Schwartz & Zimmerman, 1992). The common assumption today is that women should be allowed to enter fields such as finance, law and higher education (Townsend & Mattis, 2006). 

valuable

Out of the initial 500 users that were followed, 40 agreed to an in-person interview. The sample was racially diverse but here I only present responses from the 17 individuals who identify as black or African American. Combining these three methods yields a more comprehensive view of Black Twitter – both on a micro level, encompassing the way individual users think about Black Twitter, and on a larger scale, offering a view of the formation of community within Black Twitter. Results

Middle class blacks assert public identity in order to convince others that they are legitimate members of the middle clas

Finally, I will argue that as a meaningful community, Black Twitter has the capacity to cause impactful change both on- and offline.

unified

Trending topics

If not questioning the integral properties of human relationships, some scholars contend that technology facilitates the departure from true face-to-face interactions; suggesting that the face-to-screen-to-face interaction presents negative unforeseen consequences (Turkle 2011).

Thus it is necessary to study the nature of software development and factors that drive the consumption in digital photography, given that both software and photography are being driven across the world by few technology giants.

Rationale

While Sontag’s description of photography as ‘a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power,’ applies to digital photography, another aspect of power namely the control over data becomes significant.

Though technology gives individuals the freedom to develop their own solutions, popular software products/services determines the patterns or features[10] that are being developed. Hence camera software developed by companies like Canon, Nikon, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft etc. hegemonize the industry. They are constantly working to converge the single purpose digital camera into a smart phone[11]. Therefore I would argue these global camera and software manufacturers influence the way visual cultural practices are being shaped across the world

Enabled by software, these functions converge seamlessly in digital photography transforming both the nature and the future of the form itself.

Given the proliferation of networked technologies it is now possible to extend our discipline’s reach even further—through web platforms, social media, and even massive online open courses (MOOCs)—into communities that have traditionally been underserved.

and the divide between f2f and computer-mediated relations is blurrier than ever before (Jurgenson 2012a; Davis 2014)

DH has thus far functioned primarily as a methodological intervention, rather than a theoretical or substantive project.

(Hargittai, 2010; Hughey and Daniels, 2013; Schradie 2011), digital culture and interaction (Boyd, 2014; Marwick, 2012; Trottier 2013, Papacharissi 2010), networked society and social movements (Castells, 2013; Rainie and Wellman, 2012; Earl and Kimport, 2011), medical sociology and the quantified self (Lupton, 2014), political sociology (Kreiss, 2014), and media sociology (Benson et al., 2012; Gillespie et al., 2014; Waisbord 2014)

. To accomplish this task, I begin with a brief history of digital sociology and its related sub-fields, including the broader tradition of digital humanities, in order to lay important groundwork for the continued study of digital dynamics from sociological perspectives.

If the top journals in American sociology are any indication, there is little support for the task of helping our discipline catch up to, and thus make better sense of, life in the digital age

Through the use of images, colleges and universities carefully craft their digital presence to reflect a specific view of campus life and the composition of the student body. Unlike more recent digital platforms that utilize computer algorithms and software to provide real world images that reflect the users and their preferences, websites of colleges and universities rely on a human, deliberately and carefully crafting representations of structure, “what is campus about”; identity, “what will students look like”; and experience, “what students can expect” to shape perceptions and decision-making of potential students.

Another change to the digital space of a university or college which would be recommended by Critical Race Theorists involves recognition of the pervasiveness of racism. Racial stratification is “ordinary, ubiquitous, and reproduced in mundane and extraordinary customs and experience,” and affecting the quality of life’s choices and chances of racial groups (Brown 2003:294). The concept of the pervasiveness of racism suggests that racist hierarchical structures are an endemic component of American life which govern all political, economic, and social life, including education (DeCuir and Dixson 2004; Dixson and Rousseau 2005). Historically, race emerged as a social structure – a racialized social system that awarded privileges to Europeans, the people who became white, over non-Europeans, the people who became nonwhite (Bonilla-Silva 2010). Its existence is connected to the distribution of jobs, power, prestige, wealth (Lopez, 2003; Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller &Thomas, 1995), educational access, and opportunity.

CRT is not simply a critique; it offers an alternative to dominant ideologies, policies and practices

Often, the carefully-crafted portrayals of a student population which can be found on a university website perpetuate taken-for-granted assumptions about race, providing a visual image of who is welcome to participate in these spaces of privilege and prestige and who is not.

Higher education as an institution must therefore be diligent as to not reinforce or increase socioeconomic and educational inequality. It is imperative that post-secondary institutions challenge the very foundation they stand on in regard to its policies and procedures, especially questioning its delivery of academic functions in digital spaces.

educational institutions have ethical obligations which mean they cannot remain blind to the inequalities and structural changes around them. Prejudice, discrimination, and disadvantage do not begin at the university, but universities are obligated to address these issues since they conflict with the basic principles of free thought, human rights, critical dialogue and education.

Schools do not exist as independent social institutions separate from economic, political, cultural and social contexts, accordingly they cannot be insulated from the challenges that each context provides (Carter and Welner 2013:218)

The socialization process that occurs in schools is one that is structured by the dominant group with their experiences and interests in mind which reproduces social inequality in policies, practices as well as in digital representations of a campus environment and the student experience.

needed

As a mechanism for upward mobility, education is arguably the single most important tool an individual can acquire in order to access better socioeconomic outcomes.

The legacy of racism is embedded in every social institution in America, including the education system which continues to tout ideologies of meritocracy and equal opportunity.

incorporate.

how teens make use of digital tools and media, tools that permit instant gratification and allow them to receive attention.

Electronic information will continue to increase and dominate our society,

In an age where tweets and Facebook statuses are being reported as news, Internet users need to be competent and intelligent users of information to the point of becoming culture jammers who critique popular culture in an effort to challenge the status quo and resist dominant cultural practices (Carducci, 2006; Harris, 2004; Lasn, 2005; Sandlin, 2007; Sandlin & Milam, 2008). An approach to reaching this level of critical media consumption is to impart literacy skills to Internet users. Specifically, critical information literacy (Elmborg, 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2004), digital literacy (Bawden, 2008; Bawden & Robinson, 2002), and cultural competence / literacy (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Overall, 2009) would facilitate the average Internet user’s ability to seek, find, and use appropriate information, which in turn would facilitate more thoughtful dialogues and learning. Literacy skills would facilitate a shift from the rote crowdsourcing of information on the Internet to substance based evaluation and usage of information.

an important topic not limited to any one area or group of people or any one discipline of study. The acquisition and implementation of literacy skills is a long-term and integral part of addressing the aforementioned issues.

d new techniques.

This is qualitative research that focuses on the detailed trace data generated and collated by online systems, such as transaction logs, version histories, institutional records, conversation transcripts, and source code. Observation of how these various forms of data have been (re)constituted and (re)circulated within various systems can yield rich insights into the online practices, collaborations and coordinations of contemporary schooling – from virtual forms of parental ‘engagement’ through to the organization of pedagogic work. As Geiger & Ribes (2011, p.1) observe: “Analysis of these detailed and heterogeneous data … can provide rich qualitative insight into the interactions of users, allowing us to retroactively reconstruct specific actions at a fine level of granularity. Once decoded, sets of such documentary traces can then be assembled into rich narratives of interaction, allowing researchers to carefully follow coordination practices, information flows, situated routines, and other social and organizational phenomena across a variety of scales”.

There are many ways that technology in schools can be investigated in these terms – for example, through the use of decibel meters and light readers, as well as the use of audio editing software to visualize sound

The participatory and highly mobile nature of digital video and audio creation, for example, offers a ready means of researching the everyday places and practices of digital schooling. In particular, digital recording devices allow school-based research work to be conducted ‘on the move’.

As Les Back and colleagues’ recent writing has explored, the ‘Live Methods’ manifesto illustrates research approaches that are creative, playful and deliberately provocative (Back & Puwar 2012).

For example, with online technologies increasingly used as a means of sharing, re-purposing and out-sourcing pedagogic content, how are digital technologies implicated in the increased division of labor and alienation of teachers from their teaching?

Any account of schools and digital technologies must therefore take such issues into account – updating Bowles and Gintis’ (1976) account of the relations between capital and education. Indeed, the correspondence between work and school has long been seen to extend beyond knowledge and curricula into all aspects of social relations, interactions and identity formations. One key set of issues relating to the digital school, therefore, is how these conditions and correspondences might be reinforced and/or reconfigured in an age of ‘immaterial labor’, ‘cognitive capitalism’ and ‘knowledge economies’.

In contrast to the hubris-driven solutionism that pervades the ‘Ed Tech’ industry, a digital sociology of school offers a space to raise a number of contentions and concerns that are usually not part of mainstream conversations about schools and digital technology.

Yet there are many reasons to believe that digital sociology has emerged at just the right time to deliver a sharper, more pointed focus on the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of late-modern ‘digital society’.

The sociology of education (the obvious cognate field for such work) has proven to be surprisingly uninterested in technological matters and certainly lacking in technical know-how.

This is manifested, among other things, in that only 20 per cent of the respondents agree to the assertion that camera or video surveillance (CCTV) is a potential threat towards people’s privacy and personal integrity. Men seem to be generally somewhat more negative towards surveillance than women.

In order to gain a broad perspective of how people relate to questions such as monitoring and surveillance in a digital context, traceability, what kind of information people trust online etc., five central areas, that each in their own right represents different aspects of our daily life, were identified:

In Bentham’s ideal prison, the “Panopticon” inmates could be imperceptibly observed by a prison guard – a condition that was presumed to generate self-discipline. In the same vein, covert modern surveillance technology disciplines individuals. Those subjected to surveillance adapt their behavior in order to conform to what they believe those monitoring their movements and actions will find acceptable or normal (cf. Brannigan and Beier 1985; Goffman 2008; Westin, 1967). The private sphere shrinks: ”Electronic monitoring systems are a kind of virtual simulation of the Panopticon. All video recordings, electronic monitors, GPS signals, sound recordings create a prison environment in our daily lives by not allowing a single dark spot” (Büyük and Keskin 2012). MATERIAL AND METHODS The material has been collected within a multidisciplinary research project at Lund university, called DigiTrust – Privacy, Identity and Legitimacy in the Digital Society. The aim of this project was to further the understanding of trust ba

Based in capitalist production logic, it is reasonable to argue that the purpose of surveillance and control is to generate value for money when purchasing labor. The laborer not only sells his labor but also his capacity to work during a certain, prearranged time span (Braverman 1975; Thompson 1983 ).

The methods for monitoring employee online behavior are mainly email monitoring and/or Internet monitoring and filtering.

The Ms. Dewey character is theatrical in her performance of search results. She tries on different personas, sometimes affecting accents to support her character (e.g. a cowboy accent in a Western gunfight scene), donning costumes (a lab coat), and wielding any number of props. Two scenes in the data set involve Ms. Dewey switching into racially coded personas that are characterized in this study as stereotypical performances of urban blackness. For these responses, Ms. Dewey switches her default style of speech, which is characterized by formal wording and professional cadences. Instead, she moves into highly stylized performances that linguistically invoke culturally black, urban vernacular accompanied by finger wagging gestures, neck rolling, and posturing: In default Dewey voice. I only have one thing to say to that. Switches to racially coded performance (i.e. finger wagging, neck rolling, posturing) “No, goldtooth, ghetto-fabulous mutha-fucker BEEP steps to this piece of [ass] BEEP, just because you pickin’ some BEEP video, you gotta be out of yo’ muthaf*ckin’ mind to think yo’ rental bling BEEP, and your big booty ass [whore] BEEP crumping to your [bullshit] BEEP track is going to turn me out, [shit] BEEP no, uh-uh, you can’t [fuck] BEEP with me dawg!” Resumes default Dewey posture in a ready-to-assist stance, hands folded in front of her.

The coding of search results and search terms revealed that Ms. Dewey provides culturally relevant, rather than informationally relevant, results.

Though the web design of Ms. Dewey is representative of a postmodern tradition, the visual themes depicted in the interface draw heavily on modern architectural and design features

This articulation of interface analysis is influenced by Brock’s (2009) Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), a bifurcated approach that “combines insight into the cultural biases encoded within technologies alongside insights into the technological biases encoded within the culture of the users” (Brock 2011: 2). CTDA, in turn, is influenced by critical discourse analysis (CDA) in its focus on making connections between “texts” to larger social systems of power and domination (Fairclough 2004; Van Dijk 1993; Wodak 2001). Combining these approaches, Ms. Dewey is situated as a textual object, locating the search engine as a site of power where both dominant and resistive discourses about gender, race, and technology circulate and are integral in shaping user experience with the interface and the search process.

Hey, if you can get inside of your computer, you can do whatever you want to me. – Ms. Dewey, Microsoft “Ms. Dewey” search engine

(see Harvey 2007, Goldberg year, Bonilla-Silva year)

Despite the suggestion that TripAdvisor does not represent “part of an established tradition” their analysis reveals that what makes TripAdvisor trustworthy is a combination of ‘personal trust’ and ‘systems trust’ which implicates it in the discursive traditions of the traveler’s tale as well as in established methods of digital computation.

The ultimate authority of online travel reviews lies in their ability to influence economic decisions made by both tourism producers and consumers, but this authority comes from different sources. Traveler’s tales are invested with positional authority by virtue of their strategic locations, meaning their authority is derived from their positions as stories which initially connect the reader, or potential tourist, to the attraction being described in the review, and thus play a role in the initial framing of the attraction for the tourist. The strategic formation of social media based discourse is invested with informational authority, which is derived from the value social media is given as an influential source of information in the global market economy. These sources of discursive authority converge within the organizational structure of a website like TripAdvisor, which is characterized by Jeacle and Carter as a site providing potential tourists with the trusted opinions of fellow travelers and also, “an expert system…governed by calculative practices (2011:96).”

In this sense, it is also important to remember that these reviews also constitute a contemporary version of a much older narrative form, the traveler’s tale, which is heavily implicated in the ways discursive constructions of social, cultural, gendered, racial and ethnic types of “Otherness” are formed (Said 1978, Smith 2012, MacCannell 2011).

The emergence of Chinese maternity tourism first surfaced and largely remained in popular news articles and online blogs. Therefore any opportunity to locate the public discourse on this new case of non-citizen reproduction necessitates a systematic examination of online data. Within the context of increased attention on birthright citizenship, the reporting of Chinese maternity tourism conceived a possibility: Chinese women’s reproduction could enter into the “anchor baby” discourse. The media coverage of Chinese maternity tourism invited the public to consider how they could make sense of this new case and judge to what extent the children of these mothers would be welcomed to the national polity.

By examining online comments by largely, if not exclusively non-state actors, I seek to account for how civilians serve as instrumental to the nonjuridicial policing of citizenship. In this vein, I share in the argument espoused by Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (2002) in that citizenship implicates questions of belonging by members of the community. Therefore, citizenship is not solely a legal designation as it is also a social category that denotes membership.

While the rhetoric surrounding cases of maternity tourism are not cases of undocumented women giving birth to “anchor babies”, the children of class-privileged Chinese tourists may still be constructed as such. Thus, while these cases are somewhat comparable, ultimately the cases are unequivocally distinct and raise questions concerning how race and gender-specific tropes intersect to construct or contest citizenship. Therefore, in this paper, I will investigate the “anchor baby” debate by engaging in a content analysis of online commentary responding to the recent reporting of Chinese maternity tourism. I ask: how do online commentators make sense of Chinese maternity tourism? How do online commentators contest, construct and articulate the boundaries of citizenship?

senate and the house

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