Matt Yglesias asks “What are Today’s Protests Missing?” Turns out he asked much the same question a few years ago, and I had some thoughts at the time about what seems to be a common feature of both the left and right: When compared to the protest of ye old days, contemporary mass mobilization is greeted by public intellectuals with a sigh and either one of a) regret that it isn’t ye old days anymore when protests were coherent and organized, or b) dismissive sneering about how the hippies have never been good for anything and still aren’t good for anything.

This time around, Matt makes a really important point, that coherence of movements often is really only sensible in hindsight:

Both Gandhi and King led movements that were committed to vaguely defined and quite sweeping visions of social change that, among other things, included opposition to capitalism and all forms of war. Their goals look well-defined in retrospect because they achieved a great deal so, in retrospect, MLK’s leadership resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Gandhi’s leadership led to independence for India. But all mass-movements are prone to ill-defined goals.

That’s a part of one of the key observations I made in response to this same thread a few years ago:

The single largest event of the period was a Washington, D.C., antiwar rally of November 15, 1969, attended by an estimated 250,000 people. A quick read of the coverage of that weekend—like yesterday’s march, it really was a series of events, not a single event—demonstrates that participants were there to take part for many reasons, although they all ended up under the anti-war banner: Students protested the draft; religious activists ranging from Catholic to Quaker participated; radical leftists were there, as were elderly women and parents with their children, as were small groups seeking violent confrontations; also present were African American organizers and advocates for the poor, protesting the war’s diversion of funds from domestic programs. This is still an oversimplified list of participants; it’s clear that while the war was the most tangible target of the protests, many grievances actually brought protesters out. Like this weekend’s march, officially organized by United for Peace and Justice, that series of events had a nominal set of organizers, but plenty of other groups also participated. In a sister protest across the country, where another 100,000 people demonstrated, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Gay Liberation Front were among notable organizations represented.

This is not to say that the context for contemporary protest hasn’t changed: Political opportunity structure is different, modes and tools of mobilization are transforming, and movement organizations are functioning in some very different ways. But we need to be aware of the reality of the good old days of American protest in order to make sense of what has changed and what hasn’t changed.

Update: Brayden King, one of my old office-mates, has more thoughts on this topic. Typically for him, it’s good, smart, well-researched stuff.

Quick ‘n dirty visualization of the clusters of relationships among my facebook friends:

Data generated with Bernie Hogan’s My Online Social Network app on facebook, and visualized with GUESS. Good stuff, Bernie!

Thanks to Marc Smith — he’s one of the nodes up there — for the link to the flickr version of this image over at Connected Action.

Brayden King and Kieran Healy (they’re up there in my visualization, too) have posted their own plots over at orgtheory: one, two.

In the past 30 days or so, I estimate that I have driven approximately 5,000 miles, between Flagstaff, Tucson, Fort Collins, and Salt Lake City. About 900 of those miles were driven to growing sound of doom from under the hood. Fortunately, while it sounded terrible, the unusual hole in the muffler flange could be welded up at the muffler shop for $90. Alas, not so for the $50 joint at the end of the driveline. That repair involved replacing the entire piece, to the tune of $800. (Sternly-worded letter to Subaru mentally composed; never sent.) Getting hustled to replace my wiper blades at the Quik Loob didn’t bother me so much after that.

The driving season commenced with a trip to Tucson for my dissertation defense. I am happy to say that the defense itself went really well. I have some revisions to make, but am looking forward to carrying them out. Having essentially passed, and with some really constructive feedback shaping what I work on next, is extremely freeing, mentally. It gives me some renewed enthusiasm for a project that was feeling pretty stuck by the time I finished. Also noteworthy is that we dragged the department a little bit further into the Jobs Age, with Kieran sitting in on the defense via iChat. Slick.

I had an interesting conversation, afterwards, (was that with you, Jeff?) about how the department has an odd culture with regard to how these defenses work. It borders on the Fight Club Rule: Don’t Talk About The Dissertation Defense. This may happen everywhere, actually, and it’s likely less a rule than a function of how defenses take place: Students frequently return to town for a day or so (as in my case), do the defense, and then head back to jobs/home/research elsewhere. This doesn’t leave much time afterward for younger students to get a feeling for what the experience is like. It’s a really sharp contrast to the normal workings in a department like mine, where grad students extensively share information and experiences about things like prelims and oral exams. If someone had said to me earlier, “Hey, it will be an interesting and constructive conversation,” I would have been much more pleasant to be around the week before.

The several weeks since have rushed past: Christmas in Fort Collins (where I recommend the Armstrong Hotel, and we ducked in and out between blizzards, but only just and that by cutting a week-long trip to three nights) a few days at home, and a week in Utah. I finished a paper along the way, and have been bunkered back in Flagstaff for the past handful of days, wondering just how cold it can get here. (Several mornings of -12F, so far, suggest the answer is “pretty cold.”)

So what next? Seattle is what’s next. On Friday I trundle a few packages to the post office and then make my way to the airport — which I hope will not be closed in the face of another winter storm headed our way — for a twelve-week excursion to the Pacific Northwest. I’m headed to Redmond, more specifically, where I’ll be an intern at Microsoft’s Community Technologies Group. Doing what? I’m not exactly sure; the research group is involved with all kinds of neat stuff that dovetails nicely with my interests in collective behavior and new forms of organization. But I do know that doing sociology with an assortment of cool tools, data, and diverse colleagues will be great. It will be a very different kind of environment from what I’m used to, and I hope to be both challenged and invigorated by that. And, hey, Seattle is a great place to spend some time, though I hear they’ve had quite a winter, so far. I’m bringing my long underwear.

(“Fist bump” is what they’re calling it, right?)

Anyway: Thanks, bro.

Dan Myers has a blog. Cool. (And he rocks out.)

That’s all I’ve got.

If I make it to Monday, I get to leave the house.

* Not this countdown, though.

Here’s something I’d like to see the music recommendation sites try out: Volume-sensitive proximity. How cool would it be if last.fm kept track of the relative volume with which I listen to tracks, and made recommendations based on the intersection not just of tracks in common with other users, but with respect to how much I crank any given song?

You cranked up Richmond Fontaine’s “1968.” LikeMindedUser cranked up the same song, as well as whatever-whatever.

I’ll tell you. Way cool.

To get really deep, iTunes could turn on my camera and listen to me singing along.

You and LikeMindedUser both sang along with Ray Parker Jr.‘s “Ghostbusters.” You should try out Another Song You’ll Be Embarrassed to Own.

What? Bustin’ makes me feel good.

It turns out there is a good QCA (qualitative comparative analysis) package for R.

I was lucky enough to land a co-author gig on a chapter that is part of this cool MacArthur digital media and learning initiative, and did a little work on the latest draft of the chapter this week. Among other things. Here’s the chapter blurb:

This chapter focuses on contestation over cultural products associated with youth culture, using research on social movements, culture, and technology. We argue that conflict over who controls cultural products is an important form of civic engagement and we explore these conflicts using data on electronic petitions related to youth culture.

One of the things that Jenn and I consider — and that turns out to be a theme of the volume, tackled in a number of interesting ways — is a new kind of relationship between consumers and producers that emerges when there is the capability to do more stuff (“more stuff” broadly defined, of course) with cultural goods. Entirely coincidentally, I also came across this old blog entry of mine on DIY culture, this week. It turns out I’ve been thinking of this stuff for years, now, though the earlier entry was from a different perspective: Whereas this chapter considers the remaking of existing cultural stuff, I had previously wondered about what we might make of commercial platforms for DIY products, like flickr, blog software, and the like? I thought at the time about the effects of consumers producing large amounts of DIY stuff that essentially became the property of the platform on which they built it.

Somewhere in there is some material that would be cool to explore further. But right now, all I can think of is a bad Yakov joke, and I assume that somebody already beat me to it: “In Web 2.0, content owns you!”

As long as I’m here, here’s something else to look at.

Sometimes you just have to count stuff.

A thread on R-Help recently discussed using Sweave/LaTeX for complicated projects. Two really useful tips were highlighted in that conversation—I use the first of them regularly: In the beginning of a Rnw/Snw file, use the prefix.string option to set the location of an includes directory: \SweaveOpts{prefix.string=/Path/to/directory}

This is really useful for organizing all the files that built by your project. (Mine are all directed to an includes directory that lives beneath my main manuscript directory.)

The second tip is to use a makefile to build a project that consists of multiple Sweave files. I like makefiles as much as the next guy, but here is my TextMate-specific solution for the same dilemma: Within the TM project, use the TM_SWEAVE_MASTER variable to name a master file, and in this file, simply plug in a single Sweave section that invokes source (for R-only files) or Sweave for your project’s various files. When you want to build the whole project (for example when you begin work for the day and need to load up all your data) all you do is open up the project and invoke the Sweave -> Sweave Project in R command.

For example, my dissertation project sets TM_SWEAVE_MASTER to “diss-master.Snw,” and that file looks like this:

<<echo=false,results=hide>>=
source(file="˜/data/diss/R/clean-summary.R")
source(file="˜/data/diss/R/tables.R")
source(file="˜/data/diss/R/figures.R")
source(file="˜/data/diss/R/citystats.R")
Sweave(file="˜/docs/diss/manuscript/data-collection.Snw")
Sweave(file="˜/docs/diss/manuscript/longevity.Snw")
@

The several R files do a little bit of data tweaking and build some tables/figures. Once all that data is loaded up, the two Sweave files can be built. I do this once per work session, using the Sweave Project in R command, which makes sure everything in the project is up to date. Subsequently, I can simply Sweave any individual Snw file (using the corresponding TextMate command), without having to recompile the entire project. (This all of course integrates well with using TM_LATEX_MASTER, also set at the project level, to order LaTeX to typeset the overall document.) I have found it to be a really nice and functional workflow.

Via Kottke comes a link to Architectures of Control in Design, a really intriguing blog about the ways that products of all sorts are designed to control their use:

The intentions may be purely commercial, socially or environmentally beneficial, or a mixture, but the implications of such architectures of control in the years ahead are likely to become significant across many fields—e.g. the operation of markets, innovation growth, freedom of individual action and consumer engagement with technology.

The first page of the site runs through a bunch of neat examples, from keyboards to supermarket layouts to park benches and web sites. Really interesting, ejoyable reading.

I’ve spent the last handful of days going to and from Newark, New Jersey (There’s a story there that involves trying to plan a large gathering in Manhattan on United Nations Opening Day, the conclusion of which was ending up in Newark), for a workshop and meeting regarding a volume I’m contributing to. The volume (on online and digitally-facilitated civic engagement) is part of a series sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and has introduced me to some really interesting scholars, as well as given me lots to think about. The chapter I’m co-authoring uses online entertainment-related petitioning to explore some “movement society” arguments and a few ideas about cultural contestation. The whole MacArthur series is specifically about implications of digital media for youth, so we also try to think about the ways, if any, that online forms of contentious activity might be particularly relevant to or formative of young peoples’ politics. It’s fascinating project to be a part of. (More discussion coming, as our chapter firms up and moves from beta to production.) Now for some travel errata:

“Sterile area”

If the area where I bought it was really “sterile,” they’d let me bring that mocha on the plane with me.

Vitamins

Next time I travel, I’ll down less coffee and more vitamin C. Seems like every time I get on a plane these days, I deplane with a cold.

Heavy rotation

Travel usually means lots of iPod time. Between a few flights and some long days driving to Phoenix and back, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve logged a lot of tracks to last.fm. In heavy rotation right now are:

• Marah: If you Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry is a super album. Especially good are “The Hustle”, “Walt Whitman Bridge”, and “Dishwasher’s Dream.” (That last one, in particular, has this furiously dreamy sound that gets me every time.)

• Teddy Morgan: Morgan was based in Tucson for a while and became a local favorite, mixing (alt-)country, rock, rockabilly. Put on a killer live show. Then he went to Nashville and started playing sessions and producing for everybody back in Tucson. Morgan has a Myspace page with a few tracks, including a striking demo of “Thousand Miles” (from his album Freight). It’s a little lo-fi, but it has a great feel.

• Richard Buckner: Hard to classify. But good. His new Meadow is reviewed over here by Cheezeball. (No cheeze whatsoever, they say.) His Dents and Shells has some great tracks: “Firsts” and “Straight” are personal standouts. Buckner also has a cool album with John Langford that genuinely rocks out from time to time. It has to, with a title like Sir Dark Invader vs The Fanglord.

• Bob Dylan: Heather at Fuel for Friends put together a sweet, sweet set of tracks based on a recent Rolling Stone profile of Bob Dylan. One song I hadn’t heard before, “Sign On The Window,” features Dylan murmuring about moving to Utah, building a cabin, finding a woman, and catching lots of rainbow trout. Sounds like a plan.

Note (mostly) to self: I made a few small updates to the Sweave Bundle for TextMate. Interested parties, you know what to do.

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I’m a sociologist-errant. This site is powered by Textpattern, Joyent and the sociological imagination. For more about me and this site, see the long version.

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