The Concept of Prestige in a Social Media Age

Prestige:

1. reputation or influence arising from success, achievement,rank, or other favorable attributes.
2. distinction or reputation attaching to a person or thing and thus possessing a cachet

Journals seen as prestigious have a reputation for possessing favourable attributes: they are well managed, have high editorial standards, publish good papers. In fact all these factors are, in practice, related. They’re also seen to be related – perhaps, one might suggest, to an extent which outstrips the reality. Great faith has been placed in their capacity to filter – with high rejection rates, stringent editors, thorough review process and imposing reputations, the readership can be confident that only high quality papers make the grade (with the often implicit corollary that papers not in these journals aren’t high quality).

As a cognitive category, a presupposition which undergirds our evaluative judgements – meant in a way which encompasses this notion - it’s profoundly 20th century. But if you question it too naively, people are likely to construe this as an  attack on academic standards. Why would they leap to this conclusion? Because the conceptual architecture of alternative judgemental practices had not, until recently, emerged: this is where social media comes in.

The notion of ‘prestige’ – with its hierarchical connotations and intrinsic links to bureaucracy – rests on the assumption that filtering, as a social and culture process, relies on fixed elite organisation and, contingently, commercial motives to meet the inherent costs. But that obviously isn’t true anymore. Social media enables an ongoing process of communal filtering which, depending on the dynamics of participation, can be come profoundly refined – for a trivial example, if you use Twitter in an engaged way, just look through your feed and see what percentage of the links posted are things you find interesting. For me it’s often 90% or more. Now imagine the same process, working in an organised way, with the radical difference that there are clearly delineable  communities of practice within academia (and, if you see this as a venn diagram, with specific topics and sub disciplinary areas co-existing within disciplinary and methodological clusters, the notion becomes a very sharp one) which, in principle, means the filtering process can be incredibly powerful.

…. which is what open access online journals, run non-hierarchically as collectives, organised thematically in a way which maximally connects with the values and passions of those involved would be. Thoughts?

Mark Carrigan
4th Year PhD Student 

Software for Textual Analysis Workshop (Feb 27th)

In recent years powerful new tools for analysing large quantities of textual data have emerged. Yet in many cases, there is little awareness of these tools or how fruitfully they could be applied across a range of disciplines. This introductory workshop explores these new tools and their uses, aiming to leave participants in a situation where they could feasibly incorporate them into existing research projects after the workshop.

Monday 27th February, 12pm till 2pm, Seminar Room 1, Wolfson Research Exchange, Warwick Library

TOPICS COVERED:

An introduction to corpus linguistics
WMatrix (basic training + examples)
Google Ngram Viewer (basic training + examples)
Wordle (basic training + examples)
How can these be incorporated into my research?

Register Here

All participants will receive a short resource pack via e-mail for going further with the tools discussed.

Contribute to the Blog

If you’re a Sociology@Warwick student, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, we’d like to hear from you. Here are some of the types of posts which will feature on the blog:

• Academic articles
• Commentary on current affairs
• Book reviews
• Reports from events
• Announcements
• Podcasts
• Videocasts

If you’re interested in contributing then please get in touch, either to discuss a potential submission or to submit something already written. Likewise if you’d like advice about producing videocasts/podcasts for the blog or if you’d like to get actively involved in the department’s social media activity.

We’re also happy to host any CfP’s, event announcements etc which are relevant to Sociology@Warwick.

Call for Papers: what does the Sociological Imagination mean today?

It has been over 50 years since C. Wright Mills wrote the Sociological Imagination. In that time the world has changed beyond recognition: the Cold War ended, the Keynesian consensus broke down, a globalizing neoliberalism rose to the ascendancy and the internet began to transform human communication and culture. In recent years, with 9/11 and then the financial crisis, it seems that history has returned with a vengeance. Is Wright Mills’ notion of the ‘Sociological Imagination’ still pertinent today? How can Sociology help shed light on the rapidly transforming world around us and the consequences of these transformations for the people who inhabit it? What does the ‘Sociological Imagination’ mean today?

The Sociological Imagination website is seeking short articles which engage with these themes, or particular aspects of them. Submissions should be 500 – 1500 words and e-mailed as a Word document. There is no deadline for submissions.

Sociology@Warwick Blog’s Top 10 Most Popular Posts

1. What’s ‘pure and simple’ about what is happening on Britain’s streets?
2. INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE STUDIES: VISIT OF KAREN BARAD, MYRA HIRD AND ELIZABETH WILSON
3. The Impact Agenda
4. Steve Fuller on Humanity 2.0 
5. Steve Fuller interviewed about Transhumanism
6. What are we defending when we defend public universities? 
7. Modafinil and Cognitive Enhancement 
8. Why is Sociology important?
9. Social Epistemology
10. The Trouble with Being Human These Days

MSc Science, Media and Public Policy

In this podcast Dr Eric Jensen talks about the new MSc Science, Media and Public Policy which he is leading in the 2011/2012 academic year along with Professor Steve Fuller.

This course is designed to equip students with the theoretical and practical skills needed for understanding and managing the complexity of science, media and policy relations. It is based around two core modules (detailed below) alongside the wide range of other MA modules on offer at Warwick. There is also a bursary available for students on the module.

Contact Eric for more information about this or anything else relating to the MSc.

Term One: Understanding Science, Media and Public Policy (delivered by Steve Fuller)

Drawing on resources from history, philosophy and social studies of science, as well as recent social theory, this module will survey and critique various frameworks for conceptualising the relationship between science, media and public policy. Among the topics covered include: science’s public accountability, the role of peer review in authorising scientific knowledge, the comparative demands of scientific and journalistic inquiry, the role of public relations in science, the idea of science as a cultural product, media’s duty to educate, inform and entertain the public about science, scientists as political advisors, actors and advocates, the idea of the citizen-scientist, the role of new media as both information resource and research site for science. Emphasis will be placed on the two-way influence of theory and practice, as well as the challenges posed by the representation of specific types of scientific knowledge in specific media.

Term Two: Researching Science, Media and Public Policy in the 21st Century (delivered by Eric Jensen)

Across many domains of social and professional life, the sciences seek to influence publics through entertainment and news media, education, dialogue and debate. This module will identify the ways in which such attempts to influence or engage public perceptions of the sciences can be investigated through specific case studies. There have been particular flashpoints at the nexus of science, media and public policy in recent years. Controversies over human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, genetically modified crops, alternative medicine, the bioethics of zoos and the climate change agenda each hold important lessons for understanding the role of mass media, stakeholders and citizens in shaping public policy. These cases show how knowledge, power and legitimacy are marshalled in struggles for dominance and consensus over science in the public realm. A sociological account of these cases will be developed to critically assess the processes of public understanding and engagement with science, media coverage and science policy consultation.

Review of ‘Exploring the networked worlds of popular music’ by Peter Webb

The aim of this book is quite ambitious. Namely, developing a theoretical framework for the study of music-related subcultures that departs both from the position of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which conceived subcultures as class-based and symbolically ‘resistant’, and from a more recent ‘postmodern turn’ (Muggleton: 2000) that emphasise the flexibility and ephemerality of contemporary ‘tribes’ (Maffesoli: 1996). Criticising these perspectives, Webb tries to grasp both the changing nature of what he calls music ‘milieux’, and their very historical, social and cultural ‘substance’ (Hodkinson: 2002). Surprisingly, the author never mentions Hodkinson’s work on goth culture, as long as the two books show a similar tendency: a counter-postmodern stance that points to the concreteness of contemporary subcultures in relation to their increasingly global dimension and media-dependent relationality (Hodkinson: 2003).

Drawing on traditions as diverse as Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and globalisation studies (among others), Webb designs a methodology that enlightens the different but intertwined social forces that shape the structure of music milieux. As in the case of the neo-folk (Cap. 4), music subcultures still emerge as relatively coherent and enduring in terms of knowledge and systems of value. This is obviously nothing new in subcultural as well as cultural studies, but Webb’s theory put such cultural density in relation to different sets of structural influences, like subcultures’ groundedness in the local dimension and their place in the wider ‘field’ (Bourdieu: 1993) of music industry. At the same time, the individual becomes a key site of analysis. People can in fact inhabit different milieux at the same time, and their biography and social mobility will affect the ‘stock knowledge’ that they carry into such contexts.

Overall, this position has the merit of putting the milieu in relation to a complex range of social activities and contexts. From this perspective, the question of the ‘independence’ of cultural producers is addressed as well (Cap. 6). In fact, producers belonging to a given musical milieu may have a significant degree of independence from the field of music industry, but this autonomy is ‘relative’ because the music industry still affects their choices and the institutional rules of cultural production (see Cap. 7). The analysis of Webb, in fact, shows the extent to which emergent labels and producers in UK experienced very different forms of pressure and influence in dealing with major record companies.

If there is any weakness in the book, it is related to the artistic (and to some extent political) value that the author attributes to some music milieux. The book reflects a certain difficulty in subcultural studies about departing from the idea that such groups are necessarily deviant or ‘non-normative’ (Gelder: 2005) to some degree. In this respect, Webb clearly expresses a sympathy for non-mainstream music genres (like Bristol-based trip hop) and milieux that flirt with radical political ideas (like the neo-folk). However, his theoretical perspective does not answer the question of why such music milieux deserve more sociological attention than the ones supposedly less radical. Also, Webb’s aesthetic judgements do not go farther than general statements about the creativity of given genres or producers.

This does not mean that his methodology can not evolve toward a more elaborate reflection about the relationship between cultural/aesthetic values and people’s agency (a line of enquiry recently discussed in sociology of culture, see Born: 2010). Moreover, the book remains more than valuable for the ways in which it explores the complex forms of social interaction and organisation produced by people’s engagement with popular music and culture. An area of enquiry that, as pointed by Webb in the Introduction (p. 7), is still underestimated in ‘mainstream’ sociology, despite the substantial influence of popular media on people’s life-choices. The greatest merit of the book is to show quite clearly the extent to which other spheres of social life (like politics and work) may be affected by the allegedly less important social activities – as well as fantasies and pleasures – enabled by popular culture.

Simone Varriale
2nd Year PhD Student

References

Born, G. 2010. ‘The social and the aesthetic: for a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production’, Cultural Sociology, Vol. 4/2, 171-208.

Bourdieu, P. 1993. The field of cultural production (New York: Columbia University Press).

Gelder, K. 2005. ‘Introduction: the field of subcultural studies’. In K. Gelder (ed.), The subcultures reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge), 1-18.

Hodkinson, P. 2002. Goth: identity, style, and subculture (Oxford: Berg).

— 2003. ‘ “Net.Goth”: Internet communication and (sub)cultural boundaries’, in D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl (eds), The post-subcultures reader (Oxford: Berg), 285-298.

Maffesoli, M. 1996. The time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society (London: Sage).

Muggleton, D. 2000. Inside subculture: the postmodern meaning of style (Oxford: Berg).

Making New Spaces for Learning

In this podcast Mark Carrigan talks to Kate Arnold, a 1st year student in Sociology, about Left Overs, a project setup by undergraduates across a range of departments which is trying to break down the boundaries between speaker and audience, between organisers and attendees, so as to create a new space for intellectual dailogue and discussion outside of the pressures and pitfalls of formal institutional structures. As well as being fascinating and worthwhile in its own right, projects like this represent an opportunity for academics to practice public engagement within the university.

Contribute to the Blog

If you’re a Sociology@Warwick student, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, we’d like to hear from you. Here are some of the types of posts which will feature on the blog:

• Academic articles
• Commentary on current affairs
• Book reviews
• Reports from events
• Announcements
• Podcasts
• Videocasts

If you’re interested in contributing then please get in touch, either to discuss a potential submission or to submit something already written. Likewise if you’d like advice about producing videocasts/podcasts for the blog or if you’d like to get actively involved in the department’s social media activity.

We’re also happy to host any CfP’s, event announcements etc which are relevant to Sociology@Warwick.

Spotlight on Asexuality Studies

“Spotlight on Asexuality Studies” was a groundbreaking event hosted by the Identity Repertoires/Mind the Gap research group in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK.  Academics, activists, community members, therapists and students gathered in the university library and online to discuss contemporary asexual research, with papers presented both in-person and from the United States and Canada via video-conference.

For more information about the event, see the website.