Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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СКАЧАТЬ The ease with which global interactions and transactions occur on the internet is a powerful indicator of, and spur to, the process of globalization.

      Smartphones are also having a variety of effects on consumption. For example, on the one hand, they are making it easier for people to find particular kinds of restaurants and to get to them quickly and efficiently. On the other hand, when people are eating in those restaurants, smartphones tend to slow down service because diners take time photographing the meal, taking selfies, and asking waitstaff to take photos of them (Griswold 2014). Many shoppers use their smartphones in stores to look up product information, compare prices, and download coupons (Skrovan 2017). Target now uses Bluetooth beacon technology to locate shoppers in its stores via a Target app on their smartphone and to direct them to products on their shopping lists (Perez 2017).

      Digital Living: Blogging and Tweeting about Sociology

      Blogging and tweeting are two popular ways to transmit and acquire information today. Current events are often posted in real time, sometimes by individuals who are witnessing them. The Arab Spring was referred to as the Twitter Revolution because people around the world were able to follow these political uprisings through tweets posted by protestors. Sports fans can follow their favorite teams and on game day receive instantaneous alerts when their team scores a touchdown or scores a run. Individuals who want to find alternative perspectives on social issues from the mainstream press can follow a variety of alternate online sites (e.g., the far-right-wing Breitbart News) and blogs (e.g., the left-leaning Mother Jones). Blogging and tweeting encourage individual agency. They offer the opportunity for all of us to participate in the social construction of reality and can be used as platforms to promote social reforms, such as #BlackLivesMatter. But there are a few structural constraints attached to these methods of communication. Twitter limits tweets to 280 characters. Many popular blogs and Twitter accounts are written and maintained by celebrities, professional experts, and representatives of formal organizations (some of which are highly politicized), who have more power to shape reality than the average person does. Especially notable in this regard is the use of Twitter by Donald Trump, both as presidential candidate and as president, to reach directly his supporters and thereby bypassing the traditional media. Trump’s Twitter account (@RealDonaldTrump) has about 60 million followers.

      Sociologists and organizations devoted to sociological theory and research use blogs and tweets to expose others to the sociological imagination, helping individuals at the micro level realize that their private troubles are connected to larger public issues. Popular sociologists who blog include the author of this book, George Ritzer (https://georgeritzer.wordpress.com), who discusses the themes addressed in this book, such as McDonaldization, globalization, and consumption, and Philip Cohen, who writes about family inequality (https://familyinequality.wordpress.com). The Society Pages blog (https://thesocietypages.org) includes a set of sociology blogs such as The Color Line (https://thesocietypages.org/colorline) and Sociology Lens (www.sociologylens.net) that keep readers current on issues pertaining to inequality, race, gender, crime, and health. The American Sociology Association’s blog (speak4sociology.org) offers a forum for its followers to debate sociological issues. A variety of Twitter accounts regularly post comments about and links to relevant sociological topics, including @Soc_Imagination, @SociologyLens, @DiscoverSoc, @SocWomen, and @SocImages. In addition, professional sociologists, such as Michael Burawoy (@burawoy), Matthew Desmond (@just_shelter), Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep), and Sudhir Venkatesh (@avsudhir), tweet to promote awareness about social problems and publicize their research and social activism.

      Globalization, Consumption, the Digital World, and You

      The three main issues discussed previously, taken singly and collectively, are of great concern not only to society in general and to sociologists but also to you as a college student. You live a good part of your life in these three interrelated domains.

      As a college student, you live a truly global existence in a college or university. A significant number of your classmates may come from elsewhere in the world. Your classes are increasingly being taught by teaching assistants and professors from other parts of the globe. The ideas you are learning are the most global of all, flowing freely from virtually everywhere in the world to become part of lectures and textbooks.

      As consumers, you and your classmates are likely well acquainted with the college bookstore and the nearby shopping mall. In addition, on the internet you are able to find a nearly infinite variety of goods (including textbooks, which are increasingly bought online) and services, the majority of which are likely to come from the far reaches of the world.

      Finally, an increasing portion of your education is obtained through the inherently global internet—for example, through e-learning on web-based courses and online degree programs. In 2017 the number of students enrolled in massive online open courses (MOOCs) increased to 78 million from 58 million in 2016 (Lederman 2018). With the emergence of MOOCs, you, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of students from around the globe, are increasingly likely to participate in global classes (including courses in sociology; Behbehanian and Burawoy 2014) and other programs available on the internet (see Chapter 11 for more on MOOCs; see also Lewin 2012).

      Globalization, consumption, and the internet are of great importance on their own. However, perhaps more important are the ways in which they interact with one another and interpenetrate with your life as a college student—and the lives of virtually everyone else.

      Sociology: Continuity and Change

      This chapter has emphasized recent social changes and their impact on society and on sociology, but there is also much continuity in society, as well as in the field of sociology. This section deals with a number of traditional approaches and concerns in sociology that are of continuing relevance to even the most recent sociological issues.

      The Sociological Imagination

      The systematic study of the social world has always required imagination on the part of sociologists. There are various ways to look at the social world. For example, instead of looking at the world from the point of view of an insider, one can, at least psychologically, place oneself outside that world. The U.S. “war on terror” might look defensible from the perspective of an American, especially one who lived through 9/11, but it would look quite different if you imagined yourself in the place of an innocent Muslim caught in the middle of that war (Philips 2016).

      The phenomenon of being able to look at the social world from different, imaginative perspectives attracted the attention of the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills, who in 1959 wrote a very important book titled The Sociological Imagination. He argued that sociologists have a unique perspective—the sociological imagination—that gives them a distinctive way of looking at data or reflecting on the world around them (Selwyn 2015). For example, the fact that many of us no longer use cash is not simply an individual preference, but the consequence of technological changes. Cash is not a viable option for online shopping. Most retailers make it easy and convenient to use credit cards instead of cash at drive-through windows and gasoline stations. Not long ago, Amazon began opening physical grocery stores (Amazon Go) that require consumers to use a mobile app on their smartphones to purchase items. Consumers scan their smartphones when they enter the store, and digital technology detects what they place in their carts. There is no need to stand in line to pay for any items because they are charged to a customer’s Amazon account when the person leaves the store СКАЧАТЬ