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5 Responses to “Week 10 - Student Presentations III”Leave a Reply |
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June 6th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Before I say anything else, I feel like I have to draw attention to Alabama’s location at the bottom right in pretty much every graph in chapter 22 of the Bowling Alone reading. (Alabama is my home state.) Go Bama!
Now, more seriously, I like the observation that Putnam made about the correlation between wealth inequality and a reduction of social capital, particularly the growth of the one in the face of a reduction of the other. He also points out that there is less segregation on almost all other fronts, but insists that has very little to do with the collapse of social capital.
I would tend to agree with him, but I think that he downplays the importance of growth of social equality. First, he mentions Scandinavia as nations with high social capital, but they are also rather xenophobic, so there’s some nice evidence that shows some relation between social inequality and social capital.
Trying to relate this to the other reading: if homophily is still important, but most demographic homophily is becoming less important–except for wealth–and it takes money to have social capital, especially as more and more people fall below the middle class line. Thus, we could see income class as becoming the primary means of “homo”ness in status homophily, which would lead the people with the means to support social capital (the rich) to value their relationships with the “others” much less. And since there are fewer people in the middle who can support even modest civil society, we can see the decline.
Of course, Putnam sort of mentions this as a possibility, but he says we don’t have enough evidence for this kind of hypothesis, and we don’t, but we do however have enough evidence from homophily in general to see that you will not bother spending time with people who aren’t similar to.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
I think this topic is a great one to wrap up the course. Homophily is cool because, as will hopefully be the meat of our discussion, it is a two-edged sword. Often, homophily is discussed as a negative phenomenon, and it certainly has it’s obvious negative consequences. But the reading we chose for this week I think were much more impartial, and it becomes clear as you read deeper into the subject that there are many positive consequences of homophily as well.
What is interesting about this two edged sword is how hard the effects (good or bad) are to predict or index in any sort of generalization. People can “flock together” according to an infinity of different possible traits, from race to age to interest, and grouping along each of these axes seems to come with a unique set of positive and negative consequences. The final chapter we gave from Bowling Alone I think eloquently introduces this idea. For every social problem, there are different types of homophily that are good and bad for it.
The thing is, homophily happens whether we like it or not; and certain /types/ of homophily tend to happen more naturally than others. So, the question is, are these types of homophily good or bad overall, and if they are bad, can we change them?
The feedback loop(s) that fuel homophily are in large part detached from their effect. That is, people often flock even when it is bad for them or society in a broader way. Interestingly the same sociological influences that make homophily such a hard phenomenon to curb, also give some hope that we /can/ change homophily. That is, if we can start groups, joined on the right axes, in small places, with small groups, then the same feedbacks can help these types of similarities take hold in a larger social context. Today we can look at the current trends in socialization, and discuss whether our current formulas for group identity might lead to positive affects, or if we should seek change.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
I think that the rise of the internets has important implications for both homophily and social capital. Interestingly enough, according to the Wikipedia entry for Meetup.com, the founders of Meetup.com cite “Bowling Alone” as their primary inspiration for starting the website.
Connections made over the internet are likely to be homophilous when it comes to education, but as the internet continues to grow stronger in our culture that is likely to decrease. It decreases the effect geography has on homophily, which could mean weakening racial and religious homophily, but I think that it probably strengthen homophily when it comes to beliefs/values…liberals would frequent liberal message boards, atheists would be more likely to frequent websites aimed at atheists, and so forth. However, since the most enduring relationships are face-to-face relationships, it’s hard to say how much an effect this will ultimately have.
As for social capital, it seems that the internet, like TV would lead to a decrease in social capital, since people will be sitting at their computers more. However websites such as Meetup.com also suggest that the internet can be a positive force for organizing. Personally, I hope that as people engage in discussions over the internet rather than having messages delivered to them over TV, and as people meet others with similar interests over the internet, websites will come to make up for some of the loss in social capital that has occured over the last few generations.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
One idea that I read a lot about in social psychology is our innate desire to see ourselves as “normal”–to maintain a positive self-concept. In reading the McPherson article, there was mention of people liking to be around others that are like themselves, but didn’t really go into much depth as to why this might occur. Though I think that studying grouping/sorting processes that may be categorized as homophily is interesting, I am more interested in what processes underlie this overarching process to cause it to occur. Of course, one could easily say that surrounding oneself by like others reinforces one’s beliefs, self-concept, and any other like behaviors that might otherwise be questionable–but is there more to it than that?
While I do not contest that clusters of like people form in social networks far beyond the rate that would statistically be predicted as chance, I found myself continually questioning the assumptions made in the review article. Of course, given that we are reading an interpretation of studies done by others, I suppose I could be more charitable to the initial articles in my reading of the review, but it was nevertheless frustrating. For example, in the section on the progressions of methodology, there was relatively little historical context mentioned to shed light on the changing traditions in this line of research. As far as the section on race, I feel that reporting on studies nearly 20 years old without mention of how factors today may have caused (or not caused) the results of such findings to change a bit problematic. Have affirmative action policies affected homophilic processes? How does homophily explain the rise in mixed-race marriages that exist today? Robert Zajonc (at Stanford) did an classic study which showed that mere exposure to outgroup members has the tendency to increase liking–how would such a theory play in? I would like to comment on a recent article from the reading on race and exposure, but there simply wasn’t one in the section. Also, I’d like to suggest that in the Shrum et al study (1988) that homophily along racial lines among school children, especially during this period, may be due to the general racial homogeniety at most schools; at diverse schools, media representations of typical school relationships also socialized students to remain within racial lines. Only recently have interracial relationships been portrayed in the media.
I suppose I could go on to question a lot of the article, but will leave that for class. I think more important would an a discussion of what underlying psychological processes cause homophilous relationships to occur. I see the overlying positive feedback loop contributing to homophily, but wonder if the underlying processes act in this way as well.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I find it interesting that the Bowling Alone reading posits that social relationships with close friends or family are less valuable than ones that the article refers to as “weak” ties. Initially, this seems to undermine the argument supporting positive feedback in homophily. If it is the “weak,” “bridging” ties that are most important to personal effectiveness, then this does not lend itself to homophily. Once establishing a base of family and friends, people would seek out *dissimilar* people with whom to forge social relationships. This, in fact, would lend itself to greater and greater heterogeny of friends and acquaintances.
Yet at the same time, it is strong ties that have the kinds of grand effects on personality and ideology that McPherson et al mention in the first article. Acquaintances or contacts will not shape our view on how “people like us” behave or mold our deepest convictions about political or social issues. It’s the people that we interact with, indeed those we have chosen, that influence what kinds of people we will meet and interact with in the future.
I felt as though the passage, “In the parties and sects into which we are divided, we sometimes learn to love our brother at the expense of him whom we do not in so many respects regard as a brother” is one of the most profound in the reading. It alludes to the power of positive feedback in homophily. Like the prison debate where we tend to assume that punishment is a zero sum game, perhaps we can take a similar attitude towards homophily. It is a dangerous idea that we only love those who are similar to us as much as we are averse to those who are different. In my opinion, this is a somewhat prevalent idea in society – the fact that if you hold respect for many kinds of people, you haven’t really defined the notion of respect or admiration.
Later in the article, the author mentions that there are different kinds of social capital – both the kind that allows for cooperation and mutual benefits as well as the kind that allows gangs to function well and Timothy McVey to blow up buildings. Increasing the first while suppressing the second kind seems to be a big goal of the authors in the second article. I believe that suppressing idea of a dichotomous society is integral in achieving these ends. The positive benefits of social interaction still hold true even if the idea of “feeling connected” to people is more diffuse. The more we can promote universal connection in addition to the individual, the more we can curb positive feedback and use it to socially desirous ends.