Sociological Images
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Culture, Image, Web, blog
As like many other internet dwellers, I’m always coming across interesting sites, I often bookmark them and re-visit them rarely. However, since finding it a few weeks ago there’s blog I’ve started looking at regularly called “Sociological Images“, it’s produced by the American magazine Contexts:
Contexts is a quarterly magazine that makes sociology interesting and relevant to anyone interested in how society operates.
Anyway, wether your interested in sociology or not, the blog is very interesting and takes an unintimidating look at the topic, here are a couple Gender based examples from the blog:
Edit: While I’m on the topic, just come across this PR Nugget via Plashingvole/Feministing:
“This dance itself was a successful event.”
–West Contra Costa Unified School District spokesman Marin Trujillo looks on the bright side after the brutal gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside of her high school’s homecoming dance.”
Tags: blog, Context, Disney, Gender, Halloween, Princess, Sites, Sociology, Sterotype, Web
Redundant Data.
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Book, University, opinion
Earlier this week I had a Digital Media lecture about Social Networking sites, and there was a breif discussion about the differences between Myspace and Facebook. After the lecture I started thinking about my web habits and have decided to delete all the accounts that I no longer use (That is if i can even remember them at all)
One of the arguments raised in the class was that the proliferation of social networking sites, and in my opinion websites that require any personal data to be used effectively, are simply conditioning us to be more open to a surveillance orwellian-esq society. I can’t help but agree somewhat with this, it’s now just accepted that if we want to view a web-page we are going to have to provide personal data and make an account, (In fact this reminds me of The Gift by the sociologist Marcel Mauss) There was of course a time when this was in fact a rarity.
I was always of the opinion that I’d might as-well keep my online accounts open (such as myspace) just in case I might use them again, but in all honestly I most probably wont. I’d rather remove my data and only have it in places that I regularly use so I can try and keep more effective control of it, this ultimately is futile, but nevertheless knowing where data on me has been obtained in itself is useful.
I’ve so far successfully applied to have my myspace account deleted, it seems there is a 48 hour cooling off period before it is removed, I’m half expecting a torrent of e-mails from them trying to stop me from deleting it, in fact during the process of applying it kept saying things like “why don’t you add more friends?”, which I actually found quite insulting!
I’m going to, over the next few days, start deleting more accounts and updating information on others, hopefully it wont distract me too much from doing some much needed reading. I finish this post on a delightful image i found using a social network I do not intend to delete, stumbleupon.com
Note: I will make the image background transparent later, cannot be bothered to fire up photoshop at the moment.
Tags: Data, Digital, Facebook, Internet, Media, Myspace, Sociology
