Dehumanisation, Superhumanisation and Racism

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Dehumanisation, Superhumanisation and Racism
Dehumanisation, Superhumanisation and Racism

Dehumanisation and “super-humanisation” are two sides of the same coin serving a racist agenda. Dehumanisation is the process by which conscious and unconscious bias leads people to see a racial minority as less human – less worthy of respect, dignity, love, peace and protection. Psychology research finds that White police officers and young White students are more likely to see Black children as young as 10 years of age as being less worthy of protection and inviting violence in comparison to White children. Super-humanisation is on the other end of the dehumanisation continuum. It is when majority groups harbour latent ideas that minorities have special qualities or powers that make them less deserving of bodily consideration and pain relief. Research finds that White people have a tendency to see Black people as being stronger and therefore more able to withstand pain. These two twin processes, that place Black people outside of humanity, are steeped in colonial practices and they contribute to excessive policing and violence aimed at Black bodies. There are implications of dehumanisation and super-humanisation on the ongoing events in Ferguson. This social science research speaks to the issues raised by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Continue reading Dehumanisation, Superhumanisation and Racism

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Blonde white students seized the opportunity to testify that they had never realized racism had this impact upon the psyches of people of color until they started hanging out with black friends, taking courses in Black Studies,or reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. And better yet, they never realized there was such a thing as “white privilege” until they developed non-white connections.

I left this class of more than forty students, most of whom see themselves as radical and progressive, feeling as though I had witnessed a ritualistic demonstration of the impact white supremacy has on our collective psyches, shaping the nature of everyday life, how we talk, walk, eat, dream, and look at one another.

bell hooks (via wretchedoftheearth)
Source: wretchedoftheearth

“69 Billion Friendships” on Facebook – How Sociology Can Make This Meaningful

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
By J.C. Duffy, Night Deposits.

Last week, the Facebook Data Team released its social network analysis research, Anatomy of Facebook (on Facebook of course!). They have annotated their algorithms in two academic papers The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph and Four Degrees of Separation. Facebook claims their data show that connectivity between people around the world has dramatically increased – so much so that we are only four links away from someone in the most remote part of the world, whether that is a tundra or rainforest. A sociological look at the data dispels this notion. Despite its impressive sample, which includes 721 million active Facebook users and their “69 billion friendships”, Facebook’s findings replicate widely-held sociological knowledge about the way people form social ties. Nonetheless, Facebook’s data has great potential to address important social questions, if we can just set aside those pesky social science concerns about research ethics, informed consent and privacy…

Facebook’s study has an extraordinary sample of ‘active users’ representing one tenth of the world’s population The term active user is defined by Johan Ugander and colleagues in one of the aforementioned academic papers. This refers to someone with at least one friend who had logged on once in the past 28 days from the study’s commencement in May 2011. This is less frequent than the Facebook’s company definition of an active user, but the divergent definitions are not explained. For the record, Facebook currently reports it has 800 million active users and 50 percent of them log in at least once a day. Lars Backstrom, computer scientist and one of the Facebook Data Team’s lead researchers in this study, reports on the aims and key findings. The Team found that only around 10 percent of active users have less than 10 friends, while half have a median of 100 friends (the average is 190 friends). See below for more detail.

Continue reading “69 Billion Friendships” on Facebook – How Sociology Can Make This Meaningful

The Sociology of Unfollowing on Twitter

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Agent X Comics (2009)

A new sociological study finds that unfollowing people on Twitter has little to do with frequency of interpersonal contact between two parties. Rather it has more to do with people who break specific social norms of Twitterverse etiquette. This got me thinking about the unique aspects of Twitter connections, as well as the ways in which unfollowing on Twitter might be similar to the way other social networks operate offline.

The International Data Group has blogged about a study by Professor Sue B. Moon from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Moon took daily snapshots of 1.2 million Korean-speaking Twitter users for 51 days and she also conducted 22 in-depth interviews to get a qualitative understanding of their behaviour. Moon’s study finds that 43 percent of active users ‘unfollow’ someone at least once in 51 days. The average person unfollows 15 to 16 people in that time period. According to the article, people are more likely to be unfollowed when the relationship is:

Continue reading The Sociology of Unfollowing on Twitter