MachineMachine /stream - tagged with sociology http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net The Chomsky-Foucault Debate [excerpt, part 1/2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:40:12 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8&feature=youtube_gdata Being Human (Blame it on Andy) http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/blame-it-on-andy/ Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs. ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:55:48 -0700 http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/blame-it-on-andy/ How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior. Over the course of 32 days, the scientists spent many hours recording customer’s “littering behavior” in their university’s main cafeteria, counting the number of people that cleaned up after themselves after they had finished their meals. In their study, the researchers determined the effect of the eyes on individual behavior by controlling for several conditions (e.g. posters with… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 03:14:15 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person The Digital Humanities: Beyond Computing http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23 The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production. Perhaps most notably, in what some are describing as a ‘computational turn’, it has seen techniques and methods drawn from computer science being used to produce new ways of understanding and approaching humanities texts. But just as interesting as what computer science has to offer the humanities is the question of what the humanities have to offer computer science. Do the humanities really need to draw so heavily on computer… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:36:29 -0700 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23 What the science of human nature can teach us http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks?currentPage=all We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.
]]> Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:17:38 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks?currentPage=all Is there a secular body? http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of what we mean by “secular society”? What intrigues me about this question is that, despite its apparent simplicity, the path toward an answer seems not at all clear. For example, are the scholarly sensibilities and the modes of affective attunement that find expression here elements of a secular habitus? What would be indicated by calling such expressive habits “secular”?

Clearly, they have been learned in a secular… ]]> Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:47:00 -0700 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ On Being in Japan and Elsewhere http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/on-being-in-japan-and-elsewhere.html

by Daniel Rourke

Japan. That's where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served - on holiday... I am the ultimate gaijin 1 and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an…

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