sociology

After spending a relatively stressful weekend in St. Louis trying to find the perfect wedding dress, UCLA sociology Ph.D. candidate Kjerstin Gruys decided on the flight back to L.A.--which could arguably be dubbed the city of mirrors--that it was time for something drastic: a year without them.

This was back in March, and her "mirror, mirror...OFF the wall" project would include the six months leading up to (and the six months following) her October wedding.

So far so good, according to Gruys' near-daily blog posts. But as someone with only a tiny bathroom mirror … Read more

There was something very much in the vein of Utopian science-fiction fantasies to Facebook's announcement of "Places," its location-based "check-in" product that it launched on Wednesday night. (CNET was the first to report its impending debut last week.) In short, Facebook not only wants to be the digital sovereignty toward which all other geolocation apps direct their figurative roads, it also wants to be the Web's own omniscient historian.

"Too many of our human stories are still collecting dust on the shelves of our collections at home," Facebook vice president of product … Read more

When faced with a technology breakdown, levels of optimism and frustration vary depending on age and gender, according to a new study to be released on Sunday.

That's the straight lead. The one I was pondering writing is:

I'm a late-baby-boomer woman and I hate technology.

That's not entirely true. I love technology when it works and is easy to use. But I get annoyed when my computer gets jangy or my wireless goes down. And apparently, I'm not unusual for my demographic.

"Younger users are generally much more optimistic than older adults when their gadgets fail," says the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project which sponsored the survey of 2,054 U.S. adults.

"Although young adults age 18 to 29 years old are no more likely to be able to fix devices on their own, they were significantly more likely to be confident that they were on the right path to fixing it, and they were significantly less likely than older adults to feel discouraged or confused about fixing devices," according to the report.

There is no data on whether they were successful in fixing the devices, only that they thought they could. (Elsewhere, the data shows that of the 52 percent of tech users who are comfortable learning to use new devices on their own, 35 percent fix broken technology on their own.)

Meanwhile, the gap between the percentages feeling confident when their devices fail versus discouraged and confused narrowed as the age ranges went up.

Now for gender-based differences:… Read more

It's a wonderful headline for a wonderful life: "Technology found to strengthen U.S. families."

Technology doesn't allow people to ignore their parents, siblings and pet rats and disappear into their own hugely self-referential, self-reverential world, otherwise known as Facebook.

No, technology promotes family love.

So, at least, say the headlines from a survey published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an organization that "creates and funds academic-quality research."

Because life and love interest me greatly I decided to look at the report, which was prepared by two researchers from Pew and … Read more

Welcome to Sinobyte. Coming to you from Beijing, I'm Graham Webster, and I'll be bringing you news and commentary on technology and society in China.

Why China? Because China is home to one-fifth of humanity (and millions of bloggers). Because even with government controls, the internet is connecting millions of Chinese to the outside world. Because mobile phones and social networking are coming alive here as quickly as anywhere. Because my laptop was shipped directly from Suzhou to my old office in the United States. And because chances are good that if this computer gets thrown out in the United States, it'll end up being dismantled in China.… Read more