The Venus Project: A Revolutionary Social Movement

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The Venus Project began as the brainchild of Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows (pictured above) in 1975. Together, they had conceptualized self-erecting, energy efficient architecture, partially based on Fuller's geodesic domes, that could serve as both housing and research facilities.  This was only the tip of an iceberg that would evolve into one of the most grandiose and revolutionary futurist social movements of the 21st Century.  Fresco and Meadows had a vision of a globalist society that would make war obsolete by means of a resource-based economy, beyond bartering, governed by an artificially intelligent system.  It would develop into a postmodernist outlook that melds premodern and modern societies, wherein the emphasis is on scientific advancement rather than management, and engineering benefiting humankind rather than bottom-line profiteers.  The project eventually became an official non-profit organization, and their group created a living breathing model located in Venus, Florida.  One can tour it, or even live and work there.  But this is still a mere glimpse into its potential.

By way of a simplified example, suppose that your research comes to involve the ability of desert reptilian life to adapt to a colder climate, and you're based somewhere on the California coast.  Someone in Arizona is researching desert fauna in its natural habitat.  In your neck of the woods, someone else may be filtering the Pacific's water for the sake of potability, while another may be involved in the producing computer chips from the silicon extracted from the surrounding sands. The facilities in Arizona can trade you the necessary biological samples for clean drinking water, silicon chips, or even both.  In general, whatever one location across the globe holds in abundance could be traded, by necessity, with whatever another location has, and these trades would be determined by the governing system mentioned above.  

In this brave new world “the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt, environmental degradation and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable, but totally unacceptable (The Venus Project, 2019, About).”  It would make for a global society whereby “human rights are no longer paper proclamations but a way of life (The Venus Project, 2019, About).”  We would all become the change we'd like to see in the world, whether our interests lie in researching sustainable food and energy, educating the young, or even a life dedicated to the arts, everyone would contribute to the whole.  

What could bring about such a radical concept?  Why would Jacque Fresco come to promote such a profound futurism?  Let's examine the birth of the Venus Project from several sociological angles.  The most obvious approach would be that of Marxist Conflict Theory.  It makes a certain amount of sense to begin here, since Fresco hit his teenage years, growing up in Brooklyn, at the advent of the Great Depression (Gore, 2011), Jacque learned first-hand how capitalist classism can become an open invitation to the oppression of the majority.  But it should be pointed out that at one point, “He was thrown out of the Young Communist League for declaring that Karl Marx was wrong (Kelly & Carlisle, 2014).”  Besides which, Conflict cannot fully explain how an American like Fresco would take such a huge leap from a proletariat uprising to such a flamboyant geopolitical shift.  The Venus Project may have had its roots in Conflict, but it landed somewhere else entirely.   

A Symbolic Interactionist might look at the project from the initial perspective of what's currently abound in international affairs.  In order to gain some perspective of the kind of person Fresco was, he once joined the Ku Klux Klan for the sole purpose of performing a feasibility study into the potential to change White Supremacist minds, and actually made a slight bit of headway (Fresco, 2012).  From this, it seems perfectly probable that Fresco took a look at the social interactions of the world, and began to churn out ways of changing that.  We could be satisfied with this and delve further into the matter using this theoretical framework, but I want to look at this from one more sociological theoretic.   

Functionalism is not a theory I tend to turn to.  All too often it seems, in my personal opinion, that functionalists think in terms of some universal guiding hand.  In their world, it appears to me, all social organizations serve their purpose, ultimately contributing to good on the balance, even when their output tends to be negative. But in this particular case, it does seem realistic to me that Jacque Fresco considered the functions of social constructions which led to war, poverty, inequality, and the like, and pondered a way of life in which those outcomes had become so impractical that they're abolished.  Furthermore, every base of operations in Fresco's world serves a positive function to the holistic realm.  He saw a global effort where the function of every province and state, the purpose of every nation, is enforced to provide gains to humanity, or perish. Within this context, I could see Social Functionalism lending an explanation.

For whatever reason it began, the Venus Project exists, and it speaks to a world that I would personally like to see come to fruition.  Based on Neil Smelser's value-added theory, it well may.  As time marched on since 1975, the structural conduciveness of such a shift became more and more widely apparent, with the arrival of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Peoples Climate Movement, and with both of these social movements being largely ignored, social strain is waxing, and this opens the door to precipitating factors, where finally, should general belief lean towards such a shift, mobilization could occur (lumen).  

You can learn more about The Venus Project by watching the film below. At the very least, I believe you'll find it a fascinating thought experiment.  Perhaps you'll even come to join the movement.  

References

Fresco, J. (2012, March 6). The Immaculate Pig Experiment.

TVP Magazine. Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://web.archive.org/web/20120306181818/http://www.tvpmagazine.com/2012/01/the-immaculate-pig-experiment-by-jacque-fresco/

Gore, J. (2011, October 12). The view from Venus. Orlando Weekly.

Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando/the-view-from-venus/Content?oid=2248863

Kelly, L. C., & Carlisle, F. C. (2014, June 18). Utopia and the

Golden Corral. The Miami Rail. Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://miamirail.org/essays/utopia-and-the-golden-corral/

lumen. (n.d.). Collective Behavior | Introduction to Sociology.

Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sociology/chapter/collective-behavior/

A Look Back

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It's always a good idea to occasionally step back and look at where you are, how you got there, and what you've gained from the journey.  Self-reflection is not only key to understanding and retention, but it also aids in understanding one's current position.  In that regard, I'd like to talk a bit about my experience in this Sociology class.  

Many of the issues that arose I had previously discussed, and continue to discuss in some detail, through the years.  I think the most important thing I got out of the course was a foundational basis.  We looked into several key theoretical frameworks, and examined their strengths and weaknesses for explaining more specific sociological factors, such as that of race, gender, and class.  It provides me with a structural approach to those conversations, which I feel I had lacked before. It also places things within a context that I had been missing.  At an absolute minimum, these approaches will make life much more interesting, but ultimately I can see them doing much more than that.

We began by investigating the world through the perspective of the sociological imagination.  There are things in life that human beings tend to take for granted.  Perhaps they bother us, maybe they make us happy, but aside from the typical emotional response, there's little intellectual examination.  Peering through this lens, we begin to perceive patterns within our behaviors, our interactions, our means of approaching life, not only on the individual level, but within various sized groups.  These patterns provide clues as to why we do the things that we do.  While this is hardly necessary for survival, it does tend to lead to enrichment.  As Socrates once put it, "The unexamined life is not worth living."  Further placing them within their historical context is essential for widening our understanding.  The former focuses the lens on the foreground and takes us beyond our cultural ethnocentricity of place, while the later adjusts its focus to the background and allows us to peer beyond our own ethnocentricity of time.  

So, what I come away with is, I would say, a better way of examining these issues.  And all of those issues, be they political, economical, philosophical, or what have you, I have come to notice throughout this course, have had one thing in common.  I stated that my intended purpose coming into this class was to gain a more humanistic perspective of the world around me.  I feel that this new bedrock that was provided within the course has left me with something even broader than I had originally hoped for.    

The Dramaturgical Scripts of Slavery and Racism in Modern America

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When ex-Grand Wizard David Duke flipped his script, he began from a place of Holocaust denial.  This gained him traction, not because it was a ground-breaking revelation to his followers, but because they’d been buying it since the German Nazis began to whitewash their actions during World War II.  Lest you think it ends there, Kenneth Stern (2001) tells us, “Americans were prominent in early postwar denial circles. Austin J. App, a professor of English at the University of Scranton, had defended Germany during World War II, claiming that it didn't desire to ‘dominate’ Europe, but rather was legitimately attempting to get raw materials.”  Later, under the heading “Institutionalizing Anti-Semitism”, he discusses the Washington, D.C. Institute for Historical Review.  “It presented itself as a legitimate historical research group, devoted to ‘revisionism’... But in fact, it was made up of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and it would draw expertise from the like-minded from around the world (Stern, 2001).”

In her review of Starz’ American Gods, a tale that states emphatically that America consists of immigrants and slaves, Katie (2019) quotes a powerfully riveting speech from Anansi, the spider god of African slaves,

My worshipers know: freedom ain’t free. They know the most potent weapon of control for the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. They know slavery is not a condition. Slavery is a cult. Human trafficking is a cult. Slavery got a rebrand like motherfucking the alt-right. And snatched, another one gone. Every thirty seconds another chocolate, brown, caramel, yellow, high yellow, redbone refugee girl with melanin in her skin gets snatched. Every thirty seconds.

This was the second time the matter came up in this program with such fervor.  In the opening scene of the series, Anansi spoke directly to east Africans being transported across the Atlantic to the New World, and after revealing what they have to look forward to basically told them, “A hundred years later, you’re fucked. A hundred years after that? Fucked. A hundred years after you get free, you still getting fucked on the job and shot at by police (Leon, 2017).” In an article focused on that scene, Julia Alexander (2017) quotes Orlando Jones, the actor who plays Anansi in American Gods, “Black people don't know what white privilege is. We've never experienced it before and white people don't know what racism is. They've never experienced it before. It always feels like two sides are yelling at each other.”  Jones further says, “… you truly have to be in power to be a racist. A person who has no power really can't be racist (Alexander, 2017).”

Herein lies the dilemma in this country.   Just as Anti-Semitism has become an institution, so has slavery and racism.  The dramaturgical script may have changed, but slavery is conceptually still alive and well, for all intents and purposes. I may not hold the kind of power to be racist, as Orlando Jones describes it, and perhaps neither do you.  But if I turn a blind eye to white privilege, do I not empower those that do?  After all, cults don’t die, they simply become rebranded.  

While the Black Lives Matter movement and its detractors are screaming across a chasm, deep down inside that chasm a very real issue stemming from socialized race is transpiring.  Defending their actions with statistics of higher rates of crime on the part of the Black community, police tend to target African-Americans, at times quite literally with their sidearms.  Ignore what brings the Black community there.   Ignore the fact that residential segregation socializes African-American youth to that way of life.  Ignore all of the statistics that demonstrate a clear disadvantage for African-Americans when it comes to education and income.  Focus on the crime rate.  It’s a parlor trick.  

While statistics can be used to distort the overall picture, they’re still wonderful things that can clarify the world around us.  In this particular case, the picture is not so clean-cut as they would have you believe.  For example, according to The Sentencing Project (2017), “Since the official beginning of the War on Drugs in 1982, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S. skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 450,345 in 2016. Today, there are more people behind bars for a drug offense than the number of people who were in prison or jail for any crime in 1980.”  And how do Blacks fare in this matter?  “African-American drug users are almost three times more likely to be arrested for illegal drug use (Tsai, 2018).”  Is this because, as has been purported, that African-Americans have a genetic predisposition to addiction (Tsai, 2018)?  Absolutely not.  As Kane-Willis and Schmitz (2018) inform us, “The reality is that African Americans and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. Yet the narrative that most Americans believe, and that the media perpetuates, is that African Americans are more likely to use drugs.” This, in essence, is the crux of the matter.  

When slavery was abolished in the latter half of the 19th Century, the southern states rebutted with the invocation of Jim Crow legislation to keep the Black community separate.  When the passage of the Civil Rights Act abolished their Jim Crow laws, they turned to propaganda to ensure the same effect.  Years ago, an uncle said to me that, from his own personal experience, Black men are inherently lazy.  This was ultimately the end-result of his being fed that narrative in the 70s.  When authoritative violence against African-Americans became mainstream in recent years, the same sort of rhetoric that originated all the way back to the days when they were used for slave labor were heard once again from white voices.  The defense of this imbalanced violence is due to socialized race in the absence of scientific evidence.  It’s a story that whites have told and retold time and time again, across generations, while ignoring what’s staring us right in the face.

In the realm of institutional racism we don’t need to be racist in order for racism to thrive, and this is the key to any institution. Economists speak of an “invisible hand” guiding market forces. What they actually mean is that what we each choose on an individual level doesn’t matter, but what we all choose on an individual basis does.  It’s the aggregate effects that make the world go round.  It only takes one story to induce a bank run, incentivizing most of us run to the banks in mass hysteria to grab our money before it’s gone, thus triggering a lengthy recession.  We may not harbor the power to be racist, but the story invariably holds all the cards. Our power lies in our choice to refuse to bow down to that false god. But as long as we continue to do so in the aggregate, African-Americans can continue to look forward to unintended oppression from their fellow citizens.

References

Alexander, J. (2017, May 8). American Gods’ Mr. Nancy debut scene

was born out of a desire to challenge social injustice. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/8/15583418/american-gods-mr-nancy-racism

Kane-Willis, K., & Schmitz, S. (2018, January 22). Opioid crisis

‘whitewashed’ to ignore rising black death rate. Chicago Reporter. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.chicagoreporter.com/opioid-crisis-whitewashed-to-ignore-rising-black-death-rate/

Katie. (2019, April 1). REVIEW: ‘American Gods’ Season Two,

Episode Four “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” Retrieved April 9, 2019, from http://www.wesonerdy.com/2019/03/31/review-american-gods-season-two-episode-four-the-greatest-story-ever-told/

Leon, M. (2017, May 8). ‘American Gods’ Delivers a Powerful Black

Lives Matter Message. The Daily Beast. Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/08/american-gods-delivers-a-powerful-black-lives-matter-message

Stern, K. (2001, August 29). Lying About the Holocaust: Inside the

Denial Movement. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2001/lying-about-holocaust-inside-denial-movement

The Sentencing Project. (2017). Criminal Justice Facts. Retrieved

April 9, 2019, from https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/

Tsai, J. (2018, January 30). Racial Differences in Addiction and

Other Disorders Aren’t Mostly Genetic. [web log post]. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/racial-differences-in-addiction-and-other-disorders-arent-mostly-genetic/

Some Advice For Those Looking Into an Introductory Course on Sociology

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People often ask me what they can expect in college.  At times they ask for advice specific to my major.  It’s not very often that I’m asked about a class in particular, but in the case of Sociology, I think it might be prudent to get an idea of what’s coming.  The following are a few items of importance that have served me well throughout this course.

The first is a bit of a cliché, but I’ll mention it anyway.  Foster good time management skills.  Now, as far as that goes, let me tell you something that someone far wiser than I once said to me when it came up in conversation.  She asked me, “Are you trying to manage time?” I told her, “Well, yes, of course I am.”  She smiled at me, and said, “You can’t manage time.  Time rolls by, second by second, minute by minute, you have no control over that.  What you can manage are events in time.”  That has made all the difference in my life. Budget your time like you do your money, and manage your actions within those allocations.  And, always, always, always prepare for sudden changes, and learn to adapt.  

The second piece of advice I’ll hand you is more technical.  Use some sort of an application to keep track of your references.  Bookmarks are not a foolproof system.  Personally, I use Zotero and its associated browser add-on.  With one click at practically any web page, it will send your entry to whatever collection happens to be open in your PC app.  It doesn’t always pull everything over correctly, so you’ll need to check each and every one of them and alter details here and there at times.  But now they’ll all be sitting in one location, the hyperlinks are available, and it makes for easy reference when working out your in-text citations.  Then when you’re done, you can even export all of them to a bibliography in most major academic formats, thus providing a quick snapshot of your reference citations that you can copy and paste.  It’s been an invaluable tool for me since my first semester.

Finally, let me tell you a story.  A sign was famously placed on the door of A&M when Band Aid was scheduled to record We Are The World.  It read, “Check your ego at the door.”  I cannot emphasize this enough.   In this class, you are going to greet, head-on, topics that will very likely make you uncomfortable.  You’re going to encounter facts that fly in the face of your ideological foundations.  Just let it happen.  Leave your ego outside the door at each class.  It’ll be there to pick back up when it’s over.  If you don’t, you’re going to miss something in the experience.

I’ll conclude by saying that I have found this class incredibly interesting, and even a lot of fun. I hope you will as well, and I think if you heed the above you’ll enjoy it all the more.  And good luck to you.  

Racial Hegemony in the Modern United States

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I am Lenape.  I have absolutely no genetic justification for saying that, so why do I get to make that claim?  Because, back in 2005, I was “brought in under the blanket” by a Lenape Grandmother.  During those times, I attended several pow-wows to which I brought food to contribute, had many a conversation with Doris Turtlefeather, and I hung out with a guy named Two-Foxes, who had a lot in common with me, and his wife, Shoshana.   My young daughter even joined in with the drum circle once or twice.  And, honestly, everyone there couldn’t wait to see that kid.  She was passed around more than the brownies I’d bring for their children. 

When people ask me, though, I generally tell them that I’m German-Scots-Irish, which is actually oversimplifying the matter.  I have never taken a DNA test to confirm that, so why do I get to make that claim?  Because I’ve traced my lineage far back enough to ensure that it’s true.  I even once found my great-great-great-great-grandmother’s gravestone online.  But why do I really get to make these claims?  Because, being Caucasian in the United States entitles me to engage in symbolic ethnicity.  I get to openly show allegiance to my ancestral roots.  Not every alleged race here has that choice.  

Case in point, when my aunt told my grandmother that she was engaged to marry “a colored guy”, which was the politically correct term at the time,my grandmother had a fit.  My aunt married him anyway.  Both me and my grandmother were at the wedding, and the reception afterward was a very good time.   While her husband would go out of the way for any of us, all we had to do was ask, he never really felt like he was part of the family.  And, as far as I know, the man never looked into his own ethnic roots.  At least it never came up in the myriad conversations he and I had over the years.   Being white in this country has its advantages, whether I ever asked for them or not. 

In a previous blog, I discussed the matter of economic class, and how even the Hollywood elite are beginning to feel the sting of the wealth gap (Brill, 2019).   If you were to ask me if I feel sorry for them, my answer would be no, for one simple reason: white privilege.  Let me give you an idea of what that looks like in the criminal justice system.

Tanasia Kenney (2018) tells us, “A North Carolina woman cast a vote for President Donald Trump on behalf of her mother, who had recently died. The grieving woman claimed she had no idea she couldn’t vote on behalf of a dead person. No charges were ever filed in that case.”  It gets better, because Kenney (2018) further states that, “Over in Iowa, a woman named Terri Lynn Rote tried to vote for Trump twice… Rote was let off with probation and a $750 fine.”  And what happened when a Black woman committed practically the same crime in the same election?   “Texas woman Crystal Mason... was sentenced to five years in prison on Wednesday for unknowingly committing voter fraud by voting in the 2016 election (Kenney, 2018).”  

As far as the college admission scam goes, “all of the parents in the college cheating scandal have been offered plea deals, but prosecutors will only accept pleas with prison time attached (TMZ, 2019).” Apparently not much, though.  “Felicity's plea would enable her to serve as little as 4 months in prison (TMZ, 2019).” Now, it may hit Loughlin and Giannuli harder since they turned down the initial plea bargain, but if they “now want to plea bargain their cases, instead of a minimum range of 2 to 2 and a half years in prison... prosecutors would recommend to the judge a minimum range of 4 years and 9 months up to 5 years and 11 months (TMZ, 2019).”  To put this into perspective, “The money laundering charge alone carries a maximum of 20 years in prison (TMZ, 2019).”

It is incredibly likely that by the time Loughlin and Giannuli have their sentences handed to them, they will both serve less jail time than Crystal Mason will.  Felicity Huffman definitely will.  All three of them committed fraud, and only one of them did it unknowingly, and she is the one that will suffer the most.  I stand by my statement that even in the higher tiers they are beginning to experience the desperation to maintain the status quo that the majority of us have gone through for years.  I stand by my assessment that this demonstrates how wide the wealth gap has grown. But at the end of the day, only the rich Caucasians will benefit from a legal system that has been established in their favor since time immemorial.

References

Brill, J. (2019, April 6). A Symbolic Interactionist Take on the College

Admissions Scandal [web log post]. Retrieved April 10, 2019, from https://jtoybox.tumblr.com/post/183999003317/a-symbolic-interactionist-take-on-the-college

Kenney, T. (2018, March 31). Here’s What Happened When 3 White

People Committed Voter Fraud Vs. A Black Texas Woman. Atlanta Blackstar. Retrieved April 10, 2019, from https://atlantablackstar.com/2018/03/31/heres-happened-3-white-people-committed-voter-fraud-vs-black-texas-woman/

TMZ. (2019, April 9). Lori Loughlin Just Indicted for

Additional Charge of Money Laundering. Retrieved April 10, 2019, from https://www.tmz.com/2019/04/09/lori-loughlin-plea-bargain-prison-sentence-college-bribery-money/

A Symbolic Interactionist Take on the College Admissions Scandal

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The word privilege derives from the Latin privilegium, which literally translates as private law.  These are rights accorded only to a select few, while the rest of us get to sit back and let it happen. In a world of expanding inequality, this is a growing issue.  In fact, I was taken aback when something rather unusual happened a few weeks ago.  

I previously argued the value of a well-rounded education (Brill, 2019).  Within that world, it has become increasingly difficult to maximize your benefit.  “Even as selective schools opened their doors to a wider array of applicants in the early 20th century,” Annika Neklason (2019) tells us, “they put policies in place to maintain the advantages of wealthy white students.”   As Malcolm Gladwell (2005) put it, the president of Harvard in the 1920s, “Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit.”  

Neklason (2019) summarizes this quite succinctly when she says, “By design, the system favored the same kind of wealthy white students who almost exclusively populated elite colleges for hundreds of years.”  Which is why it was so odd when back in March of 2019, it made breaking news that “Fifty people -- from Hollywood stars and top industry CEOs to college coaches and standardized test administrators -- stand accused of participating in a scheme to cheat on admissions tests and admit students to leading institutions as athletes regardless of their abilities ( Holcombe, 2019).”

Neklason (2019) explains the reason this makes little sense from an historical standpoint when she says, “Those students have always enjoyed disproportionate access to elite colleges in the U.S. They were meant to.”  She states further, “The parents charged in the college-admissions scandal … risked criminal prosecution in order to gain an unfair advantage in a system that was built to offer them unfair advantages already (Neklason, 2019).”  Why then did Hollywood and corporate elite engage in such fraudulent activity?

My first inclination was that this was simply a snapshot of the typical corruption from power the elite tend to barter with.  But thinking on a bit farther, it occurred to me that these people were not only risking criminal prosecution, but also their reputations, careers, and potential future connections that make their world go round. That's a lot at stake, yet they still went through with it to ensure that their offspring retained their advantages.  These are children that have practically had everything handed to them their entire lives, yet in their parents' minds, that was no longer enough to maintain it.  That's when it hit me.  These weren't simply bribes, it was a desperate plea.  This is how bad the economic inequality gap has grown, and the high-end universities are taking full advantage of it.

Bribery is certainly nothing new in that world of the higher echelon.  It's not new in the world of Ivy League education. Neklason (2019) even tells us, “For centuries, family money has benefited applicants in admissions considerations...” However, there are far more legal routes into that game.   There are plenty of reasons to buck a system that is already bucked to your favor, but when an entire group is making a raucous of it loud enough to catch the attention of federal enforcement, it's a whole different ballgame. As the one percent drift further away from us, even quite a few upstairs are finding themselves in practically the same boat as the rest of us. 

A functionalist would draw the claim that this is the purpose of higher education. Perhaps, if the purpose of higher education is to fleece the very people it's been exclusive to since time immemorial.  In my personal opinion, these universities are utilizing the symbols of education, well being, the American dream, and entitlement for their own private gain.  And in that context, privilege should be perceived in a whole new light, because if it takes this much for them to protect their strata, what chance to those who have always been left out have? 

References

Brill, J. (2019, February 28). System Justification in the

Context of Conflict and Labeling. [web log post]. Retrieved April 6, 2019, https://jtoybox.tumblr.com/post/183126889632/system-justification-in-the-context-of-conflict

Gladwell, M. (2005, October 3). Getting In. New Yorker.

Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in

Holcombe, M. (2019, March 14). USC says students connected

to cheating scheme will be denied admission. Retrieved April 6, 2019, from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/13/us/college-admission-cheating-scheme-wednesday/index.html

Neklason, A. (2019, March 18). Elite-College Admissions Were

Built to Protect Privilege. The Atlantic Retrieved March 18, 2019, from https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/

The Gender Gap in STEM

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I remember my first job in the tech sector.  Two years out of high school, with a technical diploma in hand, I began working for a small company that designed, manufactured, and maintained automated timing controls. Before I worked on the troubleshooting desk, they needed me in the soldering department.  Out of the four in that department, only one of us was female. Her name was Elise. To put this into perspective, when I moved over to the troubleshooting bench, there were seven in that department.  Of those seven, only the supervisor and I were male.  Everyone else was a solder inspector.  Metaphorically, solder inspecting is the secretarial work of electronic manufacturing.  

One day, when I was still in the soldering department, the four of us were discussing how it came to pass that we became interested in electronics.  When it rolled around to Elise, she told us that in her case it was a bit of rebellion, as her father didn't think that women belonged in tech.  That was not the first time I'd heard that, nor would it be the last.  Has the paradigm changed since then? Well, as a mater of fact it has, in the sense that it's gotten worse.

Sharon Florentine (2018) asks us, "Did you know that in 1984, 37 percent of computer science degrees were held by women? Today, that figure is just 19 percent."  When men working in the tech sector are pressed for reasons, excuses vary, but not by much. Minda Zetlin (2018) says that "Google engineer James Damore," taking an essentialist stance, "famously suggested that there are few women in technology jobs because we're biologically unsuited for those rules [sic]."  Katy Preen (2019) says that "One of the more common complaints about women in STEM is that they’re 'not technical  enough'." Both of these statements are based on the assumption of biological determinism.  The question is, if that's the case, then why the 18 percent drop in the number of women obtaining science degrees over the past 34 years?  It doesn't follow.

One reason that I've heard many times is that women simply lack interest in technology.  That's a distinct possibility.  If I had it driven into me from birth that something was inevitably out of my reach, I might lose interest.  And it would make sense, if the 19 percent of women who obtain computer science degrees were using them.  However, "Even when women do choose STEM careers, only 26 percent work in technical roles, compared to 40 percent of men. And in technology specifically, the women who enter the industry leave at a rate 45 percent higher than their male peers (Florentine, 2018)."   Why bother going through the entire ritual of obtaining a computer science degree, which I can tell you first-hand is not an easy task, and then suddenly decide it's not interesting enough to show up and reap the benefits?  See, I don't think men understand why more women aren't working in STEM.  

What do women have to say on the matter?  Florentine (2018) addresses this.  "Lack of career growth or trajectory... this was the most common response." Why do they feel this way?  "...only half (53 percent) think they have the same opportunities to enter senior leadership roles as their male counterparts (Florentine, 2018)."   And this was hardly the only reason women are walking away from STEM careers.  “The second most-common reason for leaving was poor management... Slow salary growth came in as the third most-common reason (Florentine, 2018)." It's really no wonder that women are concerned about salary growth in the tech industry.  "An AAUW analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013 American Community Survey data found that overall, women in computer and mathematical occupations were paid 87 percent of what their male counterparts were paid. And in engineering and architecture, women were typically paid 82 percent of what their male counterparts were paid (Davidson, 2015)." As wide as this gap is, it is slightly better than the national average.  As Graff, Brown, and Patten (2019) state, "the Census Bureau found that, in 2017, full-time, year-round working women earned 80% of what their male counterparts earned." 

All of this paints a pretty ugly picture.  Forget the glass ceiling, because here is an entire industry wherein women could do better for themselves and build a lifelong career, but it is virtually impossible for them to break into and be taken even a bit seriously.  Access to the STEM field is one of the most disproportionately unfair advantages that men have over women.  But, as Florentine (2019) concludes, "The good news is that the youngest generation of women currently in the workforce seem well-positioned to actually do something about this... I hope the next generation of women in tech will continue to fight for equality and equity for all."

References

Davidson, R. (2015, April 14). Even in High-Paying STEM

Fields, Women Are Shortchanged. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from https://www.aauw.org/2015/04/14/women-shortchanged-in-stem/

Florentine, S. (2018, November 16). Why women leave tech.

Retrieved March 29, 2019, from https://www.cio.com/article/3321897/why-women-leave-tech.html

Graff, N., Brown, A., & Patten, E. (2019, March 22).

The narrowing, but persistent, gender gap in pay. Retrieved April 4, 2019 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/22/gender-pay-gap-facts/

Preen, K. (2019, April 2). Stop Telling Women They’re

“Not Technical Enough.” Retrieved April 4, 2019, from https://code.likeagirl.io/stop-telling-women-theyre-not-technical-enough-e419677f0684

Zetlin, M. (2018, March 7). Stanford Research Explains Lack

of Women in Tech: Men Make Them Unwelcome Before They Even Apply. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/stanford-research-explains-lack-of-women-in-tech-men-make-them-unwelcome-before-they-even-apply.html

Research and Critical Thought Pt II: The Rational Economy of Public Education

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My maternal grandfather was a TV repairman until the late 1990s.  Around the same time, I repaired VCRs for a short while.  Neither of those jobs exist anymore.  Over time, globalization has made it far more economical to discard and replace our consumer electronics.  In his theory of Rationalization, sociologist Max Weber labeled this phenomenon Appropriation, whereby "all physical means of production [become] disposable property (University of Regina, 1999)."   

I would argue that while the profession of teaching persists, the job itself, as it was in those days, also no longer exists. Public education has become a means of producing employable members of society, all of whom will ultimately make good consumers.  As Shelley Wright (2014) tells us, "Essentially, this imposition seeks the most efficient (read, easiest) way to get a student from kindergarten to grade 12."  George Ritzer (1983), speaking to what he calls the McDonaldization of society, wrote, "Administrators have difficulty assessing teaching quality and thus substitute quantitative scores. Of course each score involves qualitative judgments, but this is conveniently ignored (p. 104/375)."  With the 2001 passage of No Child Left Behind, public educators have been placed under an even broader microscope.  A Colorado teacher named Kathleen B. complains, “Reducing children (and teachers, too) to data points and numbers demoralizes us. Children (and teachers, too) are more than a number or a rating on a rubric (Education News, 2015)." 

Weber's Calculability, wherein "Results can be ... estimated by adopting assumptions and considering the methods by which results will be achieved (University of Regina, 1999)," has become the de facto standard of public education. Making the situation even worse, administrators aren't even good at it.  Two weeks ago, a local middle school teacher asked for my take on the samples and methodologies applied to two research studies, which allegedly demonstrate that connection is essential to a child's education, presented to her and her fellow middle school teachers during a training session.  

The first was an observational propensity score analysis from Zurich, Switzerland.  The heterogeneous sample of 1067 students were examined over several years, and the student-teacher relationship of each was assessed via 105 covariates against the backdrop of several variables of attitude.  What they found was that a positive relationship between the students and the teachers had a bearing on the students' later academics, as well as their lives in general (Obsuth, Murray, Malti, Sulger, Ribeaud, & Eisner, 2017).   My first point to her was that, being an observational study, causality cannot be inferred. The correlation, however, is impressive.  My second point was that, while the sample is clearly reflective of the overall population of Switzerland, that democratic socialist country is an entirely different world from the United States.  This is my first objection.

The second research study presented to me was not a research study at all.  Nevertheless, it was presented to her as evidence that the Zurich study applies here in the U.S.  As Dr. Donyall D. Dickey (2019) states, "Wanting to better understand the impact of student-teacher relationships and teacher expectations on student achievement, I extensively interviewed eight African American middle school boys in a high-poverty, urban middle school in the Northeast." No disrespect to Dr. Dickey, but this sample hardly reflects the student population of this country.  Therefore, his conclusions can be overlooked as assumptive, and based entirely on anecdote.  My first objection still stands.  It's not that I don't think that student-teacher connection won't demonstrate similar results here as was seen in Switzerland.  The issue is that it hasn't been properly examined, and assumptions are not a good foundation for policy.  

My second objection is that connective relationships are subjective.  This was qualitatively well addressed within the Zurich study (Obsuth et al., 2017), but that doesn't necessarily mean that their definition will translate to our society.  My third objection, and this is key, is that even if we were to give those trainers the benefit of the doubt and grant them that student-teacher connection is key, what the Zurich study (Obsuth et al., 2017) actually found was that by the time students reach middle school, it's already too late to see high retention rates.  Clearly, these administrators, pushing the Socratic Seminar Protocol, did not comprehend the very lesson that they intended to hand their teachers.  In fact, I am increasingly convinced that bureaucratic organizational structures don't truly understand the consequences of the rational economy under which they reside. 

References

Dickey,D. (2018, December 3). What do high expectations have

to do with authentic student engagement? Retrieved March 20, 2019, from https://educationalepiphany.com/what-do-high-expectations-have-to-do-with-authentic-student-engagement/

Education News. (2015, February 20). Educators share how No

Child Left Behind has affected their classroom. Retrieved March 20, 2019, from https://educationvotes.nea.org/2015/02/20/educators-share-how-no-child-left-behind-has-affected-their-classroom/

Obsuth, I., Murray, A. L., Malti, T., Sulger, P., Ribeaud, D.,

& Eisner, M. (2017). A Non-bipartite Propensity Score Analysis of the Effects of Teacher–Student Relationships on Adolescent Problem and Prosocial Behavior. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46(8), 1661–1687. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0534-y

Ritzer, G. (1983). The “McDonaldization” of Society.

Journal of American Culture, 6(1), 100–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1983.0601_100.x. Retrieved from http://fasnafan.tripod.com/mcdonaldization.pdf

University of Regina. (1999, October 14). Sociology 250

- Notes on Max Weber. Retrieved March 20, 2019, from http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/o14f99.htm

Wright, S. (2014, August 16). The McDonaldization of Education:

the rise of slow. Retrieved March 20, 2019, from https://shelleywright.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/the-mcdonaldization-of-education-the-rise-of-slow/

Research and Critical Thought Part I

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In class a few weeks ago I discussed an ABC News report from 2018 about a Rutger's University study (Riutzel, 2018).   A research team led by psychology professor Arnold Glass “divided 118 upper-level college students into two groups — each enrolled in the same course, taught the same material by the same instructor, in the same classroom at roughly the same time of day” in order to determine whether or not cell phone usage affects exam grades (Riutzel, 2018). At the onset, one can already see the problem with this study.  Not only is the sample entirely too small to generalize outside of its intrinsic population, but it's also entirely too heterogeneous. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a problem so long as the researchers acknowledge it. However, without even mentioning previous research which had been done since 2014, when asked, “Is this research applicable to high school, middle school or even meetings?” Glass replied, “No doubt. Absolutely, for sure (Riutzel, 2018).”  Glass, as well as others, have even gone so far as to call this research the new gold standard.

Furthermore, as Riutzel (2018) states, “this study shows the minimum reduction in exam performance, because this particular course used in-class questions to help students remember course material instead of just passive listening,” which makes these results suspect to begin with.  Claiming that it's readily applicable to the entire outside world is absurd.

To put this into perspective, allow me to demonstrate the far more stringent methodologies applied by a cross-university study performed a year prior to Glass's experiment. In the words of their own summary overview,

In two experiments, we test the hypothesis that the mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. We manipulate smartphone salience by asking participants to place their devices nearby and in sight (high salience, “desk” condition), nearby and out of sight (medium salience, “pocket/bag” condition), or in a separate room (low salience, “other room” condition). Our data indicate that the mere presence of one’s smartphone adversely affects two domain-general measures of cognitive capacity—available working memory capacity (WMC) and functional fluid intelligence (Gf)—even when participants are not using their phones and do not report thinking about them (experiment 1). Data from experiment 2 replicate this effect on available cognitive capacity, show no effect on a behavioral measure of sustained attention, and provide evidence that individual differences in consumers’ dependence on their devices moderate the effects of smartphone salience on available WMC (Ward, Duke, Gneezy, & Bos, 2017).

Details of both experiments can be found in the paper cited below in the references (Ward et al., 2017).  A cursory glance will inform you that this is on far more solid ground than Glass's research.  More importantly, in their general discussion section, the authors of this paper cite previous research, as well as discuss the implications and suggest future directions (Ward et al., 2017).  This is a far cry from Glass's bombastic claims, and that is important.  I am personally of the mind that the real reason Glass's comparative study received more media attention and accolades is simply because it came out of Rutgers.  

In a world of “publish or perish”, it's essential to apply critical thought to the research handed to us.  There are many pitfalls involved in statistical overviews.  Close examination of the techniques, methodologies, and analysis applied can go much farther than a quick glossing over of an abstract or a summary of p-values. Learning to read between the lines is key to a well-rounded education when examining the machinations of the world which surrounds us.

References

Riutzel, K. (2018, July 27). Cellphones in classrooms contribute

to failing grades: Study. Retrieved January 31, 2019, from https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cellphones-classrooms-contribute-failing-grades-study/story?id=56837614

Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017, April 3).

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research: Vol 2, No 2. Retrieved January 31, 2019, from https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462

System Justification in the Context of Conflict and Labeling

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As Saint Bernard de Clairvaux once said, “Hell is full of good intentions or desires.”  I once asked my mother why she let my niece watch Barney every day.  Her argument was that Barney instills virtues of kindness and consideration.  My argument was that this won’t prepare her for the real world, and would cause a system shock.  My niece eventually attempted to take her own life at age 17, mostly because she never reconciled the contradiction.  My mother honestly believed, as do most modern Americans, that by indoctrinating young children to these virtues, the world will improve. 

It’s a foredrawn conclusion in this country that system justification, “a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate (Anderson, 2017),” instilled in young, impressionable minds, will lead them to become productive members of society.  A study done in 2017 found that this is not always the case. “This study examines how beliefs about the fairness of the American system ... in sixth grade influence trajectories of self‐esteem and behavior among 257 early adolescents [Ninety-one percent of which were non-Caucasian] ... from a diverse, low‐income, middle school in an urban southwestern city (Godfrey, Santos, & Burson, 2017).” While this sample may seem spurious, “Godfrey said the findings are informative and mirror prior research (Anderson, 2017).”

Melinda Anderson (2017) tells us the results. “In sixth grade, among students who believed the system is fair, self-esteem was high and risky behavior was rare; by the end of seventh grade, these same students reported lower self-esteem and more risky behaviors.” While Anderson (2017) acknowledges that lurking variables, such as puberty, could be the root cause of this shift, she tells us that “the fact that the students’ outcomes started high in the sixth grade and then deteriorated suggests that psychosocial phenomena are at play.”  How could such a model of behavioral development in a Meritocracy bring about these deviant behaviors?  Two standing Sociological theories can explain.

The first theory, that of Labeling, is, in this particular instance, a double-edged sword.  By socializing youth to the value of system justification, we label them the progenitors of their every failure. As Brighton Elementary teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett puts it, “Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control (Anderson, 2017).” While primary educators may well have the best of intentions for their students, they are, in fact, engaging in social control, whereby the system is able to wash its hands of the marginalized. But it doesn’t end there.  “Godfrey said... that the behaviors … reflect stereotypes perpetuated about youth of color (Anderson, 2017).”  As minority youths harboring the value of system justification grow into a system that offers few pathways of opportunity, instead of perceiving injustice, they begin to own the prejudice fed to them, and even come to identify their group as inferior.

Is it a fair society when members of certain racial groups find themselves working twice as hard to get only nearly as far as others?  Perhaps Meritocracy is a myth.  The second Sociological theory, Conflict, addresses this.  Khen Lambert argues, “By awarding only those who possess the means to afford a higher-quality education, either through intellectual or financial merit, a disparity is institutionally created between the impoverished and the wealthy, those born with inherent disadvantages and those born into socioeconomic prosperity (Crossman, 2018).”  If the United States were a true Meritocracy, this power struggle would not exist.

To juxtapose the situation, Barrett decided that “weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice” into his lessons was essential for his students (Anderson, 2017).  The end result of his rejecting the imposition of system justification is telling.  “Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors (Anderson, 2017).”  Socializing those youth to the pervading injustice provided them with the tools to combat it.  

In this society, we emphasize one trajectory of success while ignoring the other.  While hard work is essential, equal opportunity must also be present in order for it to bear any fruit.  Socializing youth to the former while exempting itself of responsibility to the latter, the current system is self-defeating.  As long as it remains so, we should expect deviance to arise with each iteration.

References

Anderson, M. (2017, July 27). Study: Poor Kids Who Believe

in Meritocracy Suffer. The Atlantic. Retrieved February 26, 2019, from https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/internalizing-the-myth-of-meritocracy/535035/

Crossman, A. (2018, October 5). Understanding Meritocracy From

a Sociological Perspective. Retrieved February 28, 2019, from https://www.thoughtco.com/meritocracy-definition-3026409

Godfrey, E. B., Santos, C. E., & Burson, E. (2019). For Better

or Worse? System-Justifying Beliefs in Sixth-Grade Predict Trajectories of Self-Esteem and Behavior Across Early Adolescence. Child Development, 90(1), 180–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12854

Streisand and Dramaturgy

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In 2003, upon hearing that photos of her new Malibu, CA house were circulating, Barbra Streisand attempted to censor them. Unfortunately for her, people within this culture harbor a socialized curiosity to peek behind the curtain, so to speak, into others' private lives.  The greater the celebrity status, the more intense this curiosity tends to be.  What's more, the larger the attempt to hide one's private life,  the higher this curiosity piques.  As a result, those photos spread far more widely than they would have had she simply left well enough alone.  Since then, this phenomenon has been affectionately known as the "Streisand Effect" in certain sociological circles.  

In sociological terms, what Miss Streisand was attempting to do, per Erving Goffman's theory of dramaturgy, was save face.  Feeding off of Shakespeare's philosophical quip, "All the world's a stage," Goffman categorizes two major persona we all wear: our front stage personality, which we wear in public, and our backstage personality, or the way in which we carry on in private.  Goffman argues that when the lines between those two persona are blurred, we suffer embarrassment and attempt to compensate, or save face (Cole, 2018).* The trouble with Streisand's tactic was that it displayed even more of her private personality to the public arena, thus creating a feedback loop that amplified the unintended consequence of widespread publicity of her private existence.

Now, there are many ways to save face.  In fact, it needn't necessarily be performed by the victim of this blurred line.  Others can intervene on your behalf in attempt to save face for you.  This is essentially what happened when two YouTube vloggers posted critiques of a vlog hosted by Verge that handed out some rather bad "how-to" advice on building a gaming PC (Glaze, 2019). As Virginia Glaze (2019) tells us, "Popular tech YouTuber ‘BitWitKyle’ uploaded a reaction ... which later received a strike for copyright infringement." Glaze (2019) states further, "YouTuber ReviewTechUSA likewise saw a claim against his video critical of the Verge’s PC building skills, and claimed that the Verge had issued their strike in response to his criticism - not due to copyright infringement. " Rather than taking all of this in stride, Verge's "[legal] team issued ... strikes against the videos for featuring a 'racist caricature' ... and using '90%' of their footage without 'transformative use (Glaze, 2019).'” This was ironic coming from a media website that has engaged in heavy criticism of online censorship itself (The Verge).  They even succeeded in censoring both for a time before eventually retracting the strikes (Glaze, 2019). However, by doing so, The Verge evoked its own Streisand Effect, and both the inanity of their instructional video and their attempt to silence their detractors spread far and wide, leaving them with even more egg on their face than they'd started with.

There's a lesson to take from this, and perhaps the lesson is that this culture would gain from a paradigm shift in which we all wear more of our embarrassing backstage persona on the public front until it becomes an internalized social norm.  But until that day comes, it may well be in our best interests to own what we say and do, as embarrassing as it may be.  Had Verge simply apologized and retracted, instead of going off on their rampage, they would have saved more face.  We all slip up in this social game, but if we're willing to confess to it, we might find that we win half the battle.

* I would like to point out that Goffman has been labeled Kafkaesque and shouldn't be taken too literally (Treviño, 2003, p. 35). Nevertheless, his model serves our current purpose.

References

Cole, N. L., PhD. (2018, January 22). What’s the Difference Between

Front Stage and Back Stage Behavior? Retrieved February 21, 2019, from https://www.thoughtco.com/goffmans-front-stage-and-back-stage-behavior-4087971

Glaze, V. (2019, February 15). The Verge under fire for alleged

censorship of critical YouTube channels. Retrieved February 20, 2019, from https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/the-verge-under-fire-alleged-censorship-critical-youtube-channels-369049

The Verge. (n.d.). Internet Censorship. Retrieved February 20,

2019, from https://www.theverge.com/internet-censorship/archives

Treviño, A. J. (2003). Goffman’s Legacy. Lanham, MD: Rowman

& Littlefield. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=GgAVw2EJpg0C&pg=PA35#v=onepage&q&f=false

Dungarees: A Prelude to Modern Consumerism

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When I think of social consumerism, what comes to my mind are jeans.  This pant is one of the few remaining markets in which no single manufacturer has enough stake in cotton to control it, and yet jeans have a staying power that just won't quit.  It doesn't even matter where one stands on the socioeconomic spectrum; practically everyone owns at least one pair of jeans.  But what is it about jeans that make them such a landmark for the consumer?

For one thing, jeans once played a major role in shifting sociopolitical attitudes. In an article written by Katherine Damm (2014) for Heddels entitled Soviet Denim Smuggling – The History of Jeans Behind the Iron Curtain, she quotes Life Magazine, "American students 'have been known to finance their entire summer European travels by selling off extra Levi’s,' and indeed, Western tourists were approached and offered exorbitant sums by young Soviets looking to buy the jeans right off their body."  The Soviet state rebutted with a slew of propaganda that largely fell on deaf ears of the young.  As Damm (2014) put it, "An embassy worker remembers Soviet questions changing over the years from 'Why [does the United States] treat African Americans so poorly?' to 'Isn’t it true there are stores where you can buy 16 brands of blue jeans?'" Yes, jeans contributed to the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War.  Damm (2014) says further, "By 1979, Blue Bell had signed a science and technology cooperation agreement to produce Wrangler blue jeans."

In that same year there came another shift in consumer attitudes here in the West.   When the Nakash brothers showcased their newly designed Jordache jeans, they were immediately turned down by every distributor.  In response, they pulled one of the gutsiests moves ever conceived by a designer startup. Dropping over half a million dollars for a television commercial that would only see airtime on the independent channels in New York, plus an additional million for full-page ads in major magazines was a huge risk.  Both the jeans and the advertisements were based on the single premise that sex sells, which was just as risky at the time.  Ultimately, this worked in their favor.  "Jordache had sales of $72 million in 1979 by selling more than three million pairs of its sole product--jeans selling at retail for between $29 and $34 (International Directory of Company Histories, 1998)."  Why would anyone in their right mind be willing to spend double for a pair of independent jeans?  Two words: conspicuous consumerism.

An educational video on supply and demand sponsored by Annenberg Learner (2011, 20:15) includes a special report on the Jordache phenomenon, featuring several interviews by David Schoumacher.  In particular, apparel research cosultant at Merrill Lynch, Brenda Gall, explains, "...this was a new lifestyle, and it would give them much, an image that they didn't have if they wore this jeans. So they were willing to pay a premium for it, for those reasons (Annenberg Learner, 2011, 22:47)."  To put it simply, Jordache jeans became an overnight sensation because they paved the way to status.  

To drive the point even further, while many factors account for Jordache Enterprises' dwindling sales in the 90s, Gall points out the major contributor.  "Everybody jumped on the bandwagon. Any designer who had a name was putting his name on the back pocket of a jean (Annenberg Learner, 2009, 23:03)."  She then says later, "When you see a designer jean on everybody's back pocket, regardless of their station in life, even though the product started at the higher end of the market, it worked its way down to the masses, and then lost its status or cachet, and then the consumer was no longer willing to pay that premium price for it (24:49)."

What does all of this imply about modern Western consumerism?  Jordache set off a chain reaction, changing the face of advertising and redefining what's fashionable. Klein, Valente, and Vanderbilt had all hopped on that gravy train long before the 80s were even half over. Within the context of the designer jean fad, Julianne Sivulka (2011) tells us, "By the end of the twentieth century, the expanding consumerism and the 1960s-style pursuit of personal fulfillment were inseparable (p. 318)."

We can talk until we're blue in the face about corporate power, e.g. - Disney acquisitions, but ultimately this peon of an uncontrollable market has proven a real mouse that has roared.  From changing the geopolitical landscape to ushering in the socioeconomics of the twenty-first century, jeans, a clothing line of very humble beginnings, is an undying force to be reckoned with.  Nothing speaks more to social consumerism, in my personal opinion, than a pair of jeans.

References:

Annenberg Learner. (2011). Supply. [Video]. Retrieved February

13, 2019, from http://www.learner.org/series/econusa/video/?pid=2455&uid=3&unit=Supply

Damm, K. (2014, September 14). Soviet Denim Smuggling - Jeans

Behind the Iron Curtain. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://www.heddels.com/2014/09/soviet-denim-smuggling-history-jeans-behind-iron-curtain/

International Directory of Company Histories. (1998). History of

Jordache Enterprises, Inc. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/jordache-enterprises-inc-history/

Sivulka, J. (2011, July 19). Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural

History of American Advertising. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://books.google.com/books?id=JxEYoXo8YB0C&pg=PA318&lpg=PA318&dq=Jordache+consumerism&source=bl&ots=48E82YAuuL&sig=ACfU3U3VZCdi4T14iF072GGjiXRNTid-8g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwij2N_m3LjgAhVQnOAKHZuhAVIQ6AEwDHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=Jordache%20consumerism&f=false

Allow Me To Introduce Myself

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I am a 44-year old college student, currently majoring in Mathematics/Computer Science at HACC. I also run a small store, selling toys and games on the weekend.  In my spare time, I enjoy writing code and tinkering with electronics.  It’s been a long-time hobby of mine

In our Introduction to Sociology class, we were encouraged to speak on pressing issues.  I created this blog to discuss whatever catches my attention from a sociological perspective.  I hope you enjoy it.