Resonance, Bach, and Noisy Congregations

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Mark Porter
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Set Up

This chapter takes, as its starting provocation, Tanya Kevorkian’s suggestion that performances of Bach’s cantata compositions would originally have taken place within a somewhat noisy social environment. Drawing from the wider field of literature on listening and noise in other historical and contemporary contexts, it examines the potential for sonic interactions between different actors to set up patterns of social resonance. It draws out the consequences of taking these sonic and social interactions seriously in understandings of musical performance and experience. Many analyses consider noise primarily as a distraction to attentive listening. This chapter, however, highlights its role in processes of meaning making and in establishing different sets of relationships between performers, congregation, and the divine.

scholarly journals Dominance relationships and coalitionary aggression against conspecifics in female carrion crows

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedikt Holtmann ◽  
Julia Buskas ◽  
Matthew Steele ◽  
Kristaps Solokovskis ◽  
Jochen B. W. Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The Third ◽  
Dominance Relationships ◽  
Dominant Individual ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Cooperation is a prevailing feature of many animal systems. Coalitionary aggression, where a group of individuals engages in coordinated behaviour to the detriment of conspecific targets, is a form of cooperation involving complex social interactions. To date, evidence has been dominated by studies in humans and other primates with a clear bias towards studies of male-male coalitions. We here characterize coalitionary aggression behaviour in a group of female carrion crows consisting of recruitment, coordinated chase, and attack. The individual of highest social rank liaised with the second most dominant individual to engage in coordinated chase and attack of a lower ranked crow on several occasions. Despite active intervention by the third most highly ranked individual opposing the offenders, the attack finally resulted in the death of the victim. All individuals were unrelated, of the same sex, and naïve to the behaviour excluding kinship, reproduction, and social learning as possible drivers. Instead, the coalition may reflect a strategy of the dominant individual to secure long-term social benefits. Overall, the study provides evidence that members of the crow family engage in coordinated alliances directed against conspecifics as a possible means to manipulate their social environment.

scholarly journals Doubling down on serendipity

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Snow
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Doctoral Student ◽  
To Come ◽  
Minority View ◽  
The Relationship

The lessons I have learned over the last many years seem always to come in pairs – a lesson about the findings that brings with it a lesson about life as a researcher...Lesson 1. Even as a doctoral student, I believed that the sorts of social interactions young children had with adults supported language acquisition. In 1971, when I completed my dissertation, that was a minority view, and one ridiculed by many. I was, unfortunately, deflected from a full-on commitment to research on the relationship between social environment and language development for many years by the general atmosphere of disdain for such claims. In the intervening years, of course, evidence to support the claim has accumulated, and now it is generally acknowledged that a large part of the variance among children in language skills can be explained by their language environments. This consensus might have been achieved earlier had I and others been braver about pursuing it.[Download the PDF and read more...]

scholarly journals What does social support sound like? Challenges and opportunities for using passive episodic audio collection to assess the social environment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anubhuti Poudyal ◽  
Alastair van Heerden ◽  
Ashley Hagaman ◽  
Celia Islam ◽  
Ada Thapa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Support ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Mobile Phones ◽  
Adolescent Mothers ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The Social ◽  
Audio Data

Abstract Background: The social environment, including social support, social burden, and quality of interactions, influences a range of health outcomes, including mental health. Passive audio data collection on mobile phones (e.g., episodic recording of the auditory environment without requiring any active input from the phone user) enables new opportunities to understand the social environment. We evaluated the use of passive audio collection on mobile phones as a window onto the relationship between the social environment within a study of mental health among adolescent mothers in Nepal.Methods: We enrolled 23 adolescent mothers who first participated in qualitative interviews to describe their social support and identify sounds potentially associated with that support. Then episodic recordings were collected for two weeks from the same women using an app to capture 30 seconds of audio every 15 minutes from 4am to 9pm. Audio data were processed and classified using a pretrained model. Each classification category was accompanied by a predicted accuracy score. Manual validation of the machine-predicted speech and non-speech categories (10%) was done for accuracy.Results: In qualitative interviews, mothers described a range of positive and negative social interactions and the sounds that accompanied these. Potential positive sounds included adult speech and laughter, baby babbling and laughter, and sounds from baby toys. Sounds characterizing negative stimuli included yelling, crying, screaming by adults and crying by babies. Sounds associated with social isolation included silence and TV or radio noises. Speech comprised of 43% of all passively recorded audio clips (n=7725). Manual validation showed a 23% false positive rate and 62% false-negative rate for speech, demonstrating potential underestimation of speech exposure. Other common sounds included music and vehicular noises.Conclusions: Passively capturing audio has the potential to improve understanding of the social environment. However, the limited accuracy of the pre-trained model used in this study did not adequately distinguish between positive and negative social interactions. To improve the contribution of passive audio collection to understanding the social environment, future work should improve the accuracy of audio categorization, code for constellations of sounds, and combine audio with other smartphone data collection such as location and activity.

scholarly journals Toddlers Watching TV - A study on the role of electronic media in the everyday-lives of one to three year old children

2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (Kinderfernsehen) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Stine Liv Johansen
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Children's Media ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Social ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Watching Tv ◽  
The Way

In recent studies on children and electronic media, children are acknowledged as active users, interpreting TV-texts in various meaningful ways, according to their previously constructed knowledge of narratives and relating the texts to their everyday lives. Still, there is a tendency that toddlers' (ages 1 to 3) viewing is neglected, and seen as mere fascinations of patterns, bright colours and movements without focusing on the social uses or uses in which television narratives come to play an important part in small children's experimenting with building identity and self-image. This article focuses on the meaning-making processes that take place when toddlers watch television and DVD, and the way in which they broaden the reception-situation to different arenas, for instance through play and different uses of merchandise connected to the television programs. Also, it studies the context of children's media use, the way both parents, media and market set up the frames of children's reception.

Variation III: Social Environment and Epigenetics

Mate Choice ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mate Choice ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Sexual Maturity ◽  
Horizontal Transmission ◽  
Epigenetic Modifications ◽  
Older Individuals ◽  
Mating Preferences ◽  
Sources Of Variation ◽  
Sexually Mature

This chapter focuses on social interactions, in the broadest sense, as sources of variation in mate choice and mating preferences. These interactions can be divided into three categories corresponding to when they are specified and which individuals are involved. The first includes effects that are determined before birth and transmitted vertically from parents: epigenetic modifications to the genome and the fetal or embryonic environment. The second includes influences between birth and sexual maturity, when the phenotypes of parents and/or other sexually mature, older individuals (oblique transmission) direct the development of preferences in choosers. Experience with courters and choosers after sexual maturity, or experience with other juveniles that shapes subsequent preferences, constitutes peer (horizontal) transmission.

The Social Price of Constant Connectivity: Smartphones Impose Subtle Costs on Well-Being

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostadin Kushlev ◽  
Ryan Dwyer ◽  
Elizabeth W. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Mobile Technology ◽  
Field Experiments ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Sampling Studies ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Smartphone Use

Smartphones provide people with a variety of benefits, but they may also impose subtle social costs. We propose that being constantly connected undercuts the emotional benefits of face-to-face social interactions in two ways. First, smartphone use may diminish the emotional benefits of ongoing social interactions by preventing us from giving our full attention to friends and family in our immediate social environment. Second, smartphones may lead people to miss out on the emotional benefits of casual social interactions by supplanting such interactions altogether. Across field experiments and experience-sampling studies, we find that smartphones consistently interfere with the emotional benefits people could otherwise reap from their broader social environment. We also find that the costs of smartphone use are fairly subtle, contrary to proclamations in the popular press that smartphones are ruining our social lives. By highlighting how smartphones affect the benefits we derive from our broader social environment, this work provides a foundation for building theory and research on the consequences of mobile technology for human well-being.

Dialogical and situated accountability to the public. The reporting of nuclear incidents

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Kerveillant ◽  
Philippe Lorino
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Nuclear Safety ◽  
Case Study Methodology ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nuclear Site ◽  
Study Methodology ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Exploratory Inquiry

PurposeThe paper aims to investigate how far the pragmatist concept of inquiry (Dewey, 1916, 1938) makes it possible to develop a processual and relational approach to accountability, moving the focus away from a representational conception of truth and subjectivist/individualist views on meaning-making, toward collective exploration and understanding of an issue by stakeholders with the aim of transforming social practices. The paper studies an accountability process in action, namely nuclear incident reporting, and its role in the construction of a community of inquiry investigating nuclear safety.Design/methodology/approachThis research opts for a case study methodology including 36 in-depth interviews, field observation and document analyses. The data are drawn from a three-year field study of a “Local Information Commission”, a body set up to represent the public living near a nuclear site.FindingsThe object of accountability needs to be constructed through a joint exploratory inquiry by accountors and accountees into reports of incidents as originally presented, to advance their understanding and capacity for action.Research limitations/implicationsIt will be important to test this processual and relational approach to accountability in other types of situation, involving different governance issues than nuclear safety.Practical implicationsTo turn theoretical stakeholders such as the public into real stakeholders (e.g. in the studied case, active participants in safety inquiries), specific social and managerial conditions must be fulfilled (concerning time, resources, commitment to open, taboo-free dialogue and legitimacy).Originality/valueThe paper argues that Dewey's concept of inquiry makes a valuable contribution to the processual and dialogical view of accountability.

Towards a Cultural Analysis: The Need for Ethnography in Interpretation Research

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua E. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Prominent Component ◽  
Social Act

The author examines a decade of interpretation research and focuses on the limited amount of qualitative research available, especially ethnographic. This highlights a trend in which there is a substantial absence of work derived from qualitative perspectives and even when studies are considered qualitative they are overwhelmingly geared towards individual visitor outcomes and large-scale studies and surveys. Drawing upon anthropological insights ethnography as both method and substance is explored. An argument is presented that ethnography, in its attention to context, making connections, shared social interactions, and holism is keenly suited to the study of interpretation and perhaps the best way of exploring meaning making, a prominent component of the field. Interpretation research is missing an important cultural analysis of the practice of interpretation, and ethnography offers a unique and invaluable lens by which to study interpretation as a cultural and social act.

The Meaningful City

2019 ◽  
pp. 465-486
Author(s):  
Ruth Yeoman
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
The Common ◽  
The City

This chapter applies the value of meaningfulness to a philosophy of the city. It argues that philosophies of the city can supply smart and sustainable city initiatives with human values and attention to the common good which they currently lack. By bringing the value of meaningfulness into a description of city-making, the chapter shows how city people have responsibilities to make the city when the activities of social cooperation associated with discharging such responsibilities are constituted by freedom, autonomy, and dignity, and when the social interactions of meaning-making are just. The features of an ethico-normative architecture which is capable of promoting city-level meaningfulness are specified. These include three core elements: public meaningfulness; the society of meaning-makers; and agonistic republicanism. City-making organized to manifest these features will generate a rich diversity of meaning sources on which city people can draw to craft meaningfulness in life and in work.

Russian Legal Culture: An Analysis of Adaptive Response to an Institutional Transplant

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (02) ◽  
pp. 337-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Kurkchiyan
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Adaptive Response ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Set Up

This article is an inquiry into Russian legal culture and is based on the assumption that any institution transplanted from one social environment to another will be reinterpreted and reshaped, so that it can be accepted into the receiving society. The process of adaptation creates an opportunity to examine the receiving society's established practices and way of thinking. To demonstrate their effects, this article explores the author's research findings carried out in two Russian towns where institutions of media self‐regulation were set up. The findings are analyzed comparatively in order to identify how the key players in the two towns interpreted the initial ideas, established procedures and rules for the newly set up institutions, and defined the roles that were attributed to them. The results of the two‐city case study are then used to interpret some specifics of the internal logic of the local legal culture.

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