scholarly journals The prevalence of dyads in social life

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0244188
Author(s):  
Leonard S. Peperkoorn ◽  
D. Vaughn Becker ◽  
Daniel Balliet ◽  
Simon Columbus ◽  
Catherine Molho ◽  
...  

A salient objective feature of the social environment in which people find themselves is group size. Knowledge of group size is highly relevant to behavioural scientists given that humans spend considerable time in social settings and the number of others influences much of human behaviour. What size of group do people actually look for and encounter in everyday life? Here we report four survey studies and one experience-sampling study (total N = 4,398) which provide evidence for the predominance of the dyad in daily life. Relative to larger group sizes, dyads are most common across a wide range of activities (e.g., conversations, projects, holidays, movies, sports, bars) obtained from three time moments (past activities, present, and future activities), sampling both mixed-sex and same-sex groups, with three different methodological approaches (retrospective reports, real-time data capture, and preference measures) in the United States and the Netherlands. We offer four mechanisms that may help explain this finding: reciprocity, coordination, social exclusion, and reproduction. The present findings advance our understanding of how individuals organize themselves in everyday life.

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenhong Chen ◽  
Anabel Quan-Haase

The hype around big data does not seem to abate nor do the scandals. Privacy breaches in the collection, use, and sharing of big data have affected all the major tech players, be it Facebook, Google, Apple, or Uber, and go beyond the corporate world including governments, municipalities, and educational and health institutions. What has come to light is that enabled by the rapid growth of social media and mobile apps, various stakeholders collect and use large amounts of data, disregarding the ethics and politics. As big data touch on many realms of daily life and have profound impacts in the social world, the scrutiny around big data practice becomes increasingly relevant. This special issue investigates the ethics and politics of big data using a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. Together, the articles provide new understandings of the many dimensions of big data ethics and politics, showing it is important to understand and increase awareness of the biases and limitations inherent in big data analysis and practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-101
Author(s):  
V. Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

In this article I present the social life of camarones, a Peruvian river crustacean used in some of the region’s favorite dishes, and the liminal space they occupy in the geography, minds, and ecosystem of Peru and its people. I situate the relationship between these crawfish and the folks who capture them, known as camaroneros, within insights of environmental anthropologists and food scholars who also explore the connections between cultural and biological diversity and the entangled socio-ecological histories that inform the manner in which nature is mediated and understood by local societies. In this article, however, I expand this understanding to reveal unexpected spaces of engagement, especially those that emerge while eating, which tend to be overlooked by bounded notions of culture and nature and limit the ways we can imagine human-nature relationships. Via the story of camarones and camaroneros of one river valley of Peru, I argue that eating is a socio-ecological act that is imbued with profound cultural meanings involving a wide range of participants—not just farmers or producers—each with their own ecological identities yet still implicitly linked to one another through the process of producing, preparing, and consuming food.


Author(s):  
Murray Goulden

The internet of things (IoT)—the embedding of networked computing into the material world around us—seeks to reshape our everyday lives. To address the IoT is to address the material interface between the global digital networks of the twenty-first-century economy and the mundane doings, affects, and experiences which occupy the great majority of our existence. Taking domestic IoT, the so-called smart home, as a focus, the author argues that the IoT is more than simply an intensification of existing trends, the ongoing extension of computing connectivity which has already jumped from desktop to laptop to smartphone. In breaking out of the constraints of any single personal device, no matter how mobile, the IoT not only further dissolves the spatial and temporal distance between different social domains but also profoundly implicates social life within those domains, between the members of the setting. The IoT is constitutionally social in a way in which no type of social media is. The chapter provides a consideration of the political economy at play in the smart home, before addressing everyday life and the IoT in terms of information management, control, domestic labor, and resistance. In concluding, two key features of the IoT are highlighted: world folding, whereby incommensurate social domains are layered through one another with often problematic—even absurd—results and its misconceived efforts to erase the social frictions of everyday life, which fails to recognize that it is in these frictions that so much of what is socially valuable resides.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan C Clift

In the context of social welfare austerity and non-state actors’ interventions into social life, an urban not-for-profit organization in the United States, Back on My Feet, uses the practice of running to engage those recovering from homelessness. Promoting messages of self-sufficiency, the organization centralizes the body as a site of investment and transformation. Doing so calls to the fore the social construction of ‘the homeless body’ and ‘the running body’. Within this ethnographic inquiry, participants in recovery who ran with the organization constructed moralized senses of self in relation to volunteers, organizers, and those who do not run, while in recovery. Their experiences compel consideration of how bodily constructions and practices reproduce morally underpinned, self-oriented associations with homeless and neoliberal discourses that obfuscate systemic causes of homelessness, pose challenges for well-intentioned voluntary or development organizations, and service the relief of the state from social responsibility.


Africa ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daryll Forde

Opening ParagraphThe foundation and the broad policies of our Institute emerged from what proved a fortunate conjunction of diverse interests and opportunities that developed after the First World War. The initial phase of modern economic advance in tropical Africa, following the introduction of the telegraph, railways, all-weather roads, was by the twenties making apparent a wide range of needs and opportunities for further progress in Africa—progress in which both the interests of, and contribution by, its peoples would be closely concerned. Within African territories the demand for literacy and training in new skills both more extensive and at higher levels was becoming more and more obvious and pressing. The significance of the increasing and inevitable association of Africans and their communities with a world economy was beginning to be more widely appreciated. With this growing recognition of the need for a more positive and constructive response many questions arose concerning not only the means of fostering such developments, but also their effects on the attitudes, beliefs, and institutions that had hitherto sustained the cultures and the social life of largely autonomous tribes and chiefdoms.


1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Lambert ◽  
Stephen Israelstam

The mass media tend to shape the values and opinions of their audience as well as reflect the culture in which they exist. The comics have long been an integral part of the media, appealing to a wide range of age and social class. As such, they could have considerable effect on attitudes and behaviours regarding alcohol consumption. In this paper, we examine the comic strips appearing in the daily newspapers before, during and up to the end of the Prohibition era in the United States, to see how alcohol was portrayed during this period when its manufacture and sale were prohibited.


2010 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Łukasz Rogowski ◽  
Radosław Skrobacki ◽  
Dorota Mroczkowska

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the relationship between everyday life and special conditions seen in the context of the concept of crisis. The authors define everyday life and special conditions as two opposing ways of experiencing social life, but their differentiation does not depend on their content but rather on form and manner of their perception/realisation in everyday life. This differentiation is described on the basis of the example of the concept of crisis, understood as the breakdown of everyday life and the consequent creation of special conditions. Based on contemporary examples, concerning to a large degree the social consequences of the breakdown of the economy, the authors represent crisis as a moment of renegotiating the principles of social life, the disruption of the routines and habits of everyday life and the transition into the unpredictability and reflexivity of social practices which characterize such special conditions. Attention is paid in particular to the concept of power, which takes on new meanings in the sociology of everyday life, differing from its institutional meaning, closer rather to “everyday power” which is realised in the framework of direct interactions in daily life.


1970 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-67
Author(s):  
Efthymios Spyridon Georgiou

This paper is focused on the anthropology of space, in architectural and cultural monuments of the mountainous village of Konitsa. Epirus is region that presents a harmonious collaboration between nature and people. The purpose of the anthropological research approach was focused on the way in which the dynamics of cultural heritage are perceived by local residents. The main research question concerns the perceptions of the social actors of the village of Konitsa regarding the cultural monuments in the region. The methodology of fieldwork had as a key tool the use of interviews, charts, discussions with the locals, walks, tours and visits as well as observation of locations, people and monuments. The inhabitants currently living in the wider area of Konitsa, are directly related to the tangible reality of history, folklore and tradition of monuments, something that can be easily detected through a wide range of aspects of the region’s ‘’social life’’ (Appadurai & Kopytoff, 1986). Although the cultural and traditional heritage refer to the past, they have a significant impact on the present era and they also have the ability to determine the future. (Bulter & Rowlahds, 2012). The cultural management is an advantage of Konitsa and the cooperation with the social associations, for example agriculture partnerships, can reduce the unemployment as well as the immigration and help in the economic development. This research paper is based on the fieldwork and theoretical lessons in the Summer School Konitsa 2016 of Border Crossing Network.


2020 ◽  

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to radical interventions in healthcare and social life, the efficiency and appropriateness of which are now increasingly at the centre of controversy. In this volume, renowned scientists, academics and experts from a wide range of disciplines reflect and comment on how to deal with the pandemic. Among other things, the following topics are discussed: the statements of national ethics committees, the issue of triage, the acceptability of interventions in fundamental freedoms, the social isolation of those affected, the handling of religious and spiritual needs as well as deeper social changes during the crisis. Overall, this publication makes an important contribution to the resolution of the coronavirus crisis. With contributions by Maria Berghofer, Alois Birklbauer, Nadine Brühwiler, Barbara Derler, Stefan Dinges, Gerhard Falzberger, Eckhard Frick SJ, Isabella Guanzini, Karin Gubisch, Hartmann Jörg Hohensinner, Gerhard Hundsdorfer, Ulrich H.J. Körtner, Wolfgang Köle, Wolfgang Kröll, Martin M. Lintner, Univ.-Prof. Manfred Novak, Jochen Ostheimer, Sabine Petritsch, Brigitte Pichler, Gerhard Pichler, Johann Platzer, Franz Ploner, Regina Polak, Simon Romagnoli, Michael Rosenberger, Walter Schippinger, Christoph Seidl, Martina Schmidhuber, Eberhard Schockenhoff, Detlev Schwarz, Martin Splett, Willibald J. Stronegger, Jean-Daniel Strub, Christa Tax, Arnika Thonhofer, Andreas Valentin, Stephan Winter, Univ.-Prof. Werner Wolbert.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Anne H. Fabricius

Th is paper will discuss a particular hashtag meme as one example of a potential new manifestation of interjectionality, engendered and fostered in the written online context of social media. Th e case derives from a video meme and hashtag from the United States which ‘went viral’ in 2012. We will ask to what extent hashtags might perform interjectional-type functions over and above their referential functions, thereby having links to other, more prototypically interjectional elements. Th e case will also be discussed from multiple sociolinguistic perspectives: as an example of the (indirect) signifying of ‘whiteness’ through ‘black’ discourse, as cultural appropriation in the context of potential policing of these racial divides in the United States, and as a case of performative stylization which highlights grammatical markers while simultaneously downplaying phonological markers of African American English. We will end by speculating as to the implications of the rise of (variant forms of) hashtags for processes of creative language use in the future.


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