Uncommon Sense Season Two Episode Two: Breakups

foreign sense from the sociological review I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney Australia and I'm Alexis utrong in Ottawa Canada and this is where we take a sideways look at everyday Notions we don't normally pause to examine things like intimacy taste the idea of home and give them sociological twists seeing them differently more critically today we're talking about breakups I'm guessing that word makes you jump straight to the romantic or perhaps we should say unromantic connotations of that term being dumped ghosted consciously uncoupled or whatever and we're going to go there for a bit kind of but really Today's show is going to take that term in a whole different direction opening up questions to do with connection and disconnection in contemporary life because I guess while we've often been told especially if you came to Sociology as a school kid around the time we did that globalization is bringing us together shrinking time space it's also the case that contemporary capitalism indeed neoliberalism also tears us apart at least it feels that way Our Guest today with whom we're going to talk around this stuff is Ilana Gershon an entropolis an anthropologist based at Rice University in Texas she's interested in how people translate neoliberalism into guidelines for moving through actual real life in how we use New Media to take on complex and messy social tasks like yeah breakups she's also written about work and what she's termed the quitting economy Elana hi and thanks for joining us thank you so much for bringing me into this fascinating conversation and I have to say I love the fact that as a sociologist you can't quite say Anthropologist like that's a lovely stumble uh well I mean speaking about this this like divide between the disciplines Alana you know you are an anthropologist but you're more than welcome here I have to say um and you know sociology and anthropology do share ground um and you know given we're basically talking about relationships today I'm curious where you think the two meet harmoniously and where the fault lines are like you know if sociology and anthropology we're together in couples therapy what what would they say to each other oh I've been thinking about this in a very particular way this week because I've been teaching some of the people that we share in common in my classes and I've been thinking about how the guard rails that were built in the early years in terms of sociology and anthropology so if we were in couples therapy kind of our fathers and mothers and how they were interacting and I've been thinking about how the guard rails that were built up really had slightly different questions in mind so the sociologists were going to nearby neighborhoods and looking at questions of stigma and poverty and asking why are these particular people facing the problems that they're facing and anthropologists were trying to go as far away as possible and noticing that while everybody deals with particular problems like birth and death and trying to figure out how to deal with their in-laws the answers were completely different and so I think of sociologists as tending to answer questions about how large institutional structures are affecting the personal and kind of like when you say the personal is political it's the sociologist who has fabulous answers for this and the Anthropologist is trying to think about how to deal with really radical difference how to talk about living and working alongside people who believe that gods exist who believe in witches who have very different answers to what happens when someone dies and who also tend to organize their lives very differently so I often talk about kind of how important social organization is and it's not that social organization isn't important for sociologists but anthropologists I care about it in a very specific way and given today's theme of breakups I'm curious how do anthropologists typically talk about relationships or rather what kind of relationships are they interested in for example political theorists might be typically interested in ideas that have to do with the social contract what relationships do anthropologists look at and I'm guessing like some things that I've heard before right so kinship but I feel like it's broader than that yeah I think we look at all relationships like you you mentioned the social contract that's that's the theme of my current book like I'm completely fixated on the ways in which assumptions about contracts have been shaping so much about the decisions that people are making around work especially in the pandemic So today we're going to move around the theme of breakups uh you know a wee bit I'm thinking about connection and disconnection really um via reference to a couple of your books what would work but the first being 2010's the breakup 2.0 in which you explored how students use New Media to manage relationships to communicate key romantic information including it's over what prompted that research and how did you go about it well I was teaching a class that I teach many times I was teaching kind of intro to language and culture and thinking about how many cultural assumptions are getting embedded in the ways in which we speak and communicate and so on the second day I always do the same kind of experiment I know that the students don't know each other very well and I ask them to kind of write down without talking to anybody else all the things that go into a first date and then I know that I have a video clip from Tom Hanks Big to be able to show them that I'm leading into kind of a radical misunderstanding of what a sleepover is so I know all this is coming and I was getting answers that just were like so retro I had answers like the woman always spent a lot of time getting ready and getting dressed and the man gets to look really casual and then the man always pays and you know I was significantly older than my students and the man always paid was not the answer that I would have given in my day so we were suddenly going backwards everybody was assuming that the couple was straight and then the thing that made me really really sad was that no one actually dated at the time like this was before people were using dating apps so this was an ideal type and I kind of imagination of a date that they weren't actually doing themselves and it was taking me 10 minutes to get them to admit that they didn't actually date and that this was a fantasy that they were telling me about what the ideal types were on the other hand it was a really good exercise because everybody had the same answers and so I was able to show look you all have these shared assumptions but one day one day I looked down and I thought oh I can't say this again so I said okay what makes a bad breakup and I got really flat answers people said it was on Facebook it was by text one young man said I sent my best friend to break up with my girlfriend because she was really psycho and then every woman in class looked at him it's really hostily yes and I thought like he just lost any opportunity to hook up with anybody in my class after saying that and I paused after he said that I thought but that's mediated too it's really interesting that I'm not getting the answers of we argued till 6 a.m or they kept my stuff and now you know I never was able to get this CD back that I really loved right like none of these complicated stories that I thought I was asking for did I actually get everybody just said it's mediated and that cut off the answers and so I started thinking about what does it mean that people are now trying to break up using technologies that are all designed for connection and so they're often using these technologies that aren't designed to allow easy breakups and have all these open questions because these are all new technologies like I I loved asking people if you are Facebook official who ends it after the breakup because Facebook doesn't tell you like no one is telling you what these answers are but people have to solve these problems or brutally my ex when we broke up deleted every single photo of the two of us together and on Instagram so it was like our relationship just vanished that that hurt I broke up but I was the I was the instigator but that happened and it was like oh ouch but it's interesting because I heard the opposite story where one person responded to the breakup by deleting every photograph other than this couple Oh weird to kind of say I still I would still like to get back together with you we still were a thing and not allowing any other signs of his life I'm invisible so so it can go everywhere actually I need to share like a personal experience and maybe I can get your advice on this Solana but I don't know if you remember you talked about retro stuff like icq mirc like before MSN before my space like 20 years or so ago when I was in my teens I actually broke up a relationship on that digital and was in a program I guess uh online right and I was like oh wow this this went really well actually and my friends at the time was like wow I can't believe you did that that's so inappropriate and like we actually I guess we didn't even break up on the phone during those those days right we have to break up and face their face and yeah that that's so bad Alexa that was really bad like yeah really big faux pas I didn't I didn't even know I thought it was that's fine but yeah but that's think that as an anthropologist I'm committed to and this is not what I do in my regular life but as an anthropologist I'm not there to judge whether that was bad or not what I'm interested in is do other how do other people respond to you did you get pushback from your friends about it why did they think that was a problem like it's not it's not my job to be the ethicist In This Moment it's my job to understand why and how do people think mediated breakups are actually a problem because let's face it there's so many other things about breakups that are really horrible why are people focusing on this yes it's so interesting I guess what I'm hearing is that people are using New Media for disconnection rather than only connection but that the rules around that were the time of your study and actually maybe maybe they still are still being negotiated so you did you did do a follow-up study a few years later once things like Twitter and Instagram and dating apps had really taken off and I mean I would assume that a lot had changed but had it can I back up a little bit yeah so you had you had asked me how did I do this research and one of the things to know about how anthropologists do the research that they do is that at the end of every interview they normally say do you know anybody else I should talk to we borrow the term from sociologists and call it snowball sampling because we can't be bothered to come up with our own terms for methods and it turns out that breakups don't allow for snowball sampling I would ask people at the end of every interview do you have anybody you can suggest and no one wanted to volunteer anybody so I ended up talking to people who weren't in the same friendship group and the other thing that you learn about doing all these interviews over time is that if you've done around 30 or 40 interviews you kind of know the answers to expect and what surprised me about my breakup interviews was I was always shocked now I learned to develop a poker face and not actually say what I was feeling in the middle of an interview which is what you do what but that was my constant inclination and I had to think why by my 50th or 60th interview was I still being so completely shocked and I realized that because I couldn't do snowball sampling I was talking to people who weren't chatting with each other and coming to agreement about how to deal with the particular problems that all these new media Technologies were offering them like every communicative channel does something slightly different and that's slightly different poses a problem for when you're disconnecting and people would ask their friends like breakups don't happen just between two individuals breakups happen with people getting advice and getting a lot of input into how to manage it or criticism when they've done it badly and so I got really curious if I went back 10 years later and started asking people the same questions would widespread Norms have had been established what we ended up discovering was that people were really focusing on the aspects of the technology that all these technologies have in common so how do you connect and how do you end and how do you send back channels because a lot of these technologies have kind of back Channel ways like direct messages instead of the open public Twitter account and that's what people began having etiquette around and Norms built around not the Technologies not the individual Technologies themselves yeah wow so it sounds a bit like in a way despite all of these amazing functionalities from these new technologies we are still on those basic communication questions but I mean separately we should also note that not everyone's equally positioned or welcomed when it comes to using New Media or presenting themselves on online things like ableism sexism Prejudice all play a role and that's something raised by a sociological Review magazine piece by Christian J Harrison called becoming ourselves online and we're going to put that in our show notes along with work from Francesca sobande on the digital lives of black women Ilana kind of bouncing back on the idea of your mother or your father like your grandparents kind of getting onto your account and not looking really cool the students you talked to insisted that Facebook could threaten their relationships at some points that they actually chose to deactivate their accounts um so as to keep those bonds sometimes you suggest that that platform basically encouraged people to bring a neoliberal logic to that part of their lives and that it made them into cells that they didn't want to be can you explain that and how it overlaps with another idea you bring up that of representing a manageable self so I have to say that this was another Quirk of the kind of field work that I was doing which is I never knew what story I was going to get I find the interviews I was doing for the breakup interviews like writing a bucking bronco someone would come in all I would know was they thought they had a good story to tell me about how they used New Media when they were breaking up with each other and for around two months I was getting the same kind of story young women women in their 20s were coming in to chat with me and tell me about how they had quit and Facebook recently because it was turning them into a self they didn't want to be and a lot of what was going on was that the ways in which Facebook managed information for them turned them into detectives that they were unhappy about that they were constantly trying to determine the signals that were being laid out on Facebook and read how stable their relationships were but what I also began to realize was that kind of their idea of how information was circulating and how underdetermined it was was a little bit like kind of the ways in which information signals in the marketplace are fairly underdetermined and they come together to create a momentary value for something and that people were really beginning to experience Facebook as encouraging them to bring an idea of themselves as a business into their daily lives right into their romantic lives that they didn't want and what I mean by that is that people start thinking of themselves as a bundle of skills and assets and qualities and experiences that they have to consciously manage and then continually enhance and by enhancing it would be worrying about how many friends you had on Facebook and trying to enhance that number so that you were growing the number of alliances that you have all the time that people were beginning to see their personas as something that they had to manage in the same way that people metaphorically are managing businesses and that that is what I think the neoliberal self is so what you've shared like with mentioning these words like management presentation it kind of reminds us of the sociologist Irvin Goffman and his books from the late 50s or 60s like the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life or stigma as that informed your work or was the bane of my existence at the time that I was writing this so Irving Goffman thinks about this very much as an issue of performance and he has at his heart of his idea of this is that everyone is an actor in their lives and he brings in all these ideas of stagecraft into his understanding of how one occupies roles but what I saw wasn't that kind of performance as much as what I saw was people weren't animating their personas in as though it was an animated character like if you think of animated characters animated characters are fairly underdetermined and you have a lot of people participating in constructing the characters that everybody is very aware of like in a theater performance you know there's a costume designer you know that there's a set designer but what you really care about is how the actor is occupying the character and the gap between the actor and the character but you don't actually worry about the gap between the voice actor and Charlie Brown like that's not the question you know that the animated character is a combination of all sorts of actors and in much the same way what was going on on Facebook was slipping rapidly between the ways in which people were all contributing you're you're into all your Facebook friends or on kind of on Instagram everybody is contributing to creating the profile in the way that it is right and whether or not it is a reflection of who you are Goffman talks about this as well in of like two pages in forms of talk like he has a slippery moment in which he talks about the figure and I prefer that Goffman to the other government which was what everybody who I was reading at the time that I was writing this everybody else mentioned the the different Goffman than what I wanted to talk about I wanted to think about this in terms of animation and the person who really helped me think about this in terms of Animation is Terry Silvio so Terry Silvio has this kind of wonderful theory about how animation is becoming the dominant way in which we're thinking about things and in response and in dialogue with the ways in which we used to think about performance okay we've been talking about breakups in private relationships but let's move now to your work on work which totally ties into what we're talking about in terms of the neoliberal self so after you looked at breakups you looked at hiring in Corporate America and as part of that you've written about the new economy and how it creates certain imperatives and behaviors including quitting and a kind of horizontal networking like with your peers rather than your superiors at work so one of the things that happens when you start asking questions about what is neoliberal logic and what does it mean to be neoliberal is you start being faced with trying to figure out how to make something historically specific and how to think about the ways in which how to sort when something is just standard capitalism or when something is a new version of how capitalism works and this was something that I became obsessed with at a particular point because everybody around me was talking about neoliberalism but I could never tell what that actually meant like they would say neoliberalism in every conference presentation and in every own like 70 of the articles that were being published in anthropology had neoliberalism in the title and I would look at that and think well this sounds just like regular capitalism so what I wanted to do was figure out a way to think more specifically and more rigorously about what was neoliberal and what was not and one of the things that kept coming up in my field work um when I was starting to try to think about these questions was that people kept telling me well companies in the 80s started to really not want to encourage their employees to live with company loyalty that company loyalty was a burden that maintaining loyalty was a problem and they wanted to switch and make sure that they could have people in the company cycling in and out at a faster pace and this is something a lot of people talk about all the time but this meant that people had to change the ways in which they understood how knowledge was stored in companies and they also had to think differently about the ways in which they would have a career and so people began to start thinking about connecting to each other emotionally in terms of feeling passion for their work and they also began to start thinking about the ways in which they were constructing a career differently and so when I began interviewing people about like what their life was like in their workplaces they would start talking about going from job to job and that if they stayed at a job for too long recruiters would start being suspicious about them and start thinking that they might be a bit too old-fashioned and not not able to manage the new requirements of the workplace and so that in order to have a career you had to switch on a regular basis from company to company or at least from seriously switch your job roles in a company in order to stay employable and when that happens all of a sudden what networking becomes becomes very different right and these kinds of imperatives Norms processes that that they're talking about is this the case in all kinds of work or some more than others so I'm assuming it's more applicable let's say to Media or consultancy than something relatively secure like some parts of Academia with tenure track are those extremely insecure and fragmented like maybe being a deliveroo driver working shifts on checkouts and stuff like that yeah no I think that's right I mean I think we're on a Continuum but what's happened is this isn't a new Continuum it isn't like in 1910 there wasn't precarious at work but what's happened is how people understand a precarious work and what contracts mean and short-term contracts mean has shifted right and different jobs have different ways of dealing with this new emphasis on the importance of being willing to have a career that is not connected to the company that you're at but a career that you put together individually with a string of jobs there's just kind of shift in emphasis and a shift in in career strategy but I think what has happened in general is under neo-liberalism the thumb has pushed down on the short-term contract and there has been more of value in being able to shift from job to job well before there was more value in seeming loyal so in a way what's interesting is that both your work on breakups and on professional life in one way point to disconnection as having a pretty powerful pull so using New Media to break up even if those Technologies Were Meant to keep us together or as we've just been talking about being moved to constantly quit your job as the only way to know your value but you know at the same time I kind of want to talk about this idea that you write about that you know connection and network still really matter and in fact one of your key points on work is that in this new economy we have to network not with their elders but with our peers because everyone's moving around so much that you know they'll be the people who vouch for you or not when you inevitably move someplace else yes so in in this way I was really inspired by Richard Senate I do read sociologists and Richard Senate made the point about neo-liberal kind of the change in capitalism saying what we used to have was the people who we performed for the people who were evaluating us were our managers who are staying stable in a company but now if managers are leaving after three or four years if there's a constant churn in who is going to be at a company then the people who are going to be evaluating you and supporting you and understanding that you are a good worker may not be the people at the company that you're at they may have left for another company but at the same time you have as I was discovering in my research on how hiring worked in in Corporate America you have pressure to be as I said constantly moving and constantly finding new jobs so you have this pressure to be evaluated and to make ties by the people who might be able to help you get a job in another place to be able to switch and so I think if you are being properly strategic there's a pressure to try to now be kind to everyone because you never know when someone in a two years or three years is going to be in a position to be able to help you there's more of a danger for being an [ __ ] in the workplace right now so how how does this all build on or challenge Mark granovet as thinking from the 70s on the strength of weak ties That thinking includes the idea that weak ties allow people who aren't that strong connected to each other to access new info and that can lead to things including a new job like what what are we seeing that's new so I got very lucky I was doing research when I was studying hiring on a question that had been asked in the 1970s so Mark ranavetter's idea about how weak ties are going to help you is actually based on a study about how people get jobs and what he was really interested in was how did someone move from one job to another and at the time that he was doing this research in the 1970s the major pain point in the job search is finding out that the job exists the media ecology at the time was such that people didn't always know that there was a new job out there that they could apply for they would find out by Help Wanted signs and windows by newspaper ads and by word of mouth and they would find out by running into people that they kind of knew but not terribly well that there was a new job that they might want and that was the weak tie that he was discovering turned out to be the useful information for people but when I was doing my research the media ecology had completely changed the problem wasn't finding out that the job existed the problem became how to make sure that your resume is noted noticed when there is a flood of resumes when too many people can apply from all over the country or all over the world to afford the job that you want and in those moments because the pain point in the hiring ritual had changed what became an important about networking changed as well and so it became really important not to have a weak tie or a strong tie but to have a workplace tie to have someone who could say I vouch that this person is actually a competent worker who Ann can get along with people because you know let's face it resumes and job interviews all the forums that we have all the things that I think of as genres in your job application are actually too narrow and too crappy to let you know the real answer to this basic thing but having someone around who can say oh I worked with this person and I'd love to have a beer with them after work and they can do their job that's incredibly value in Bill information that you don't get from looking at a resume there's a way in which some of this sounds pretty nice like maybe you don't have to agonize over a really awkward invite for a drink from some guy in your office who's more senior than you and 30 years older but at the same time what you're describing is networking with your peers and this dynamism and Readiness to quit is basically precarity yes something that you know as sociologists we love to talk about Rosemary I'm not seeing anything that kind I think now you have to be anxious about every invite oh no because you never know no but the other thing to say about this is that sometimes having an [ __ ] hate you means other people know that they're an [ __ ] and that may be a plus right like it's not always that being liked by everyone is important sometimes being disliked by the right person is going to really help you out hi I'm Alice and I produce Uncommon Sense from the sociological review this is where we meet a new guest every month and together we take an everyday concept so something like bodies or listening or emotion things we all kind of think we know about and we work to see that thing differently more critically today we're not actually with a sociologist we're with Alana Gershon from the closely related discipline of anthropology and we're talking about breakups head to the podcast page at the sociologicalreview.org to read more

about our guests and to find reading lists to share and given today's theme of connection and disconnection do take just a few seconds to tap follow in the app that you're using to hear this it helps us to keep making Uncommon Sense for you back to Rosie [Music] so this is the bit where we normally take on a Trope or buzzword and look at it a bit more critically so in our show on cities we looked at the assumption that urban life is mean and lonely and in our show on intimacy we looked at the assumption that Modern Life is increasingly contactless in fact if you're enjoying this episode that's worth a listen along with Julia Carter's great piece for the sociological review on the sociology of love and all that's going to be in our show notes anyway today we're going to do something slightly different and look at something that's inspired Our Guest to think differently about networks and disconnection and our assumptions about these Elana you've brought along a piece by the Anthropologist Marilyn Stratton called cutting the network the title sounds pretty contemporary but actually it's from 1996. can you tell us a bit more about her before we hear about her work Mary Islands to turn is one of the most original thinkers in anthropology she's just fabulous but when you're a really original thinker sometimes the words and the concepts that we have available to us are complicated and problematic and she she writes in such a way that you think you know what every single word that she is using normally means but she puts it together in a way that's just completely new and Innovative and makes reading her not the easiest thing to do in the world she was the William Weiss professor at Cambridge and is now Dame Maryland strathern oh wow and it's the kind of woman that people make portraits of uh so you use this pacifist to think about disconnection in your own work which might surprise some people because strathearn's ideas here are based on work and places like Papua New Guinea which is hardly Indiana or Houston what is she setting up with this piece who's she talking against in cutting the network a very diplomatic woman who is very hard-pressed to say anything clearly unkind and yet she got very cross with actor Network theorists people like Bruno LaTour or John Law who were talking about how the world is filled with with networks that every person and every animal and every object in the world is a condensed version of a network which sounded very similar to Maryland strathern about like the ways in which people in Papua New Guinea think because in Papua New Guinea a baby is not a baby that needs to be educated a baby is a dense form of relationships already born and that as they grow up you begin to discover which of the relationships they want to activate and which ones they want to foreground in different contexts and that's very parallel to the ways in which these sociologists of science were thinking and yet people in Papua New Guinea know that they have a problem that these actor Network theorists weren't thinking about which is they are always having to prune the network to decide what to do when death happens or to decide what to do when they need to disentangle relationships when they actually have social obligations that force them to cut ties and not grow ties and so part of what she was doing was she was arguing in this article that people can't think just about networks as things that are easily and endlessly having to multiply for me she was pointing out that this kind of what designers want when they're making Facebook or Instagram this kind of endless form of networking and connection is actually a social problem for people and that what people really have to do is cut and figure out how to cut well so it seems she's essentially challenging our assumptions about networks then I mean could we go so far as to say that the peace makes us rethink things like the very social media indeed like social networks that we talked about at the start of the show so perhaps like um we were never really wired to use that that kind of New Media to Simply grow and grow and grow our connections that we as societies as humans don't work that way I hopefully don't work that way I mean part of what she's also arguing is that networks aren't the same all over and that what what she is telling back to these actor Network theorists is that anthropologists are actually particularly good at thinking about the ways in which networks are very specific and that different kinds of networks need to be understood on their own terms and so you can't just assume that a network is a generic category that all and that they all function in the same way and and how does this feed back into your thinking on the quitting economy day in Maryland's two third really had inspired me to try to become the Dame of disconnection myself and what she offered me as a caution is to think all the time about when is disconnection something that people are managing and thinking about consciously and when are they using it strategically I have to say also when I first began doing my research on hiring I thought I was doing research on hiring and firing and I kept interviewing people about firing and discovering that the legal anxieties that companies have around firing make for really boring stories yeah so that I wasn't getting really rich and interesting discussions about what happened in the moment of firing and that the movie up in the air was the best thing about firing that I was able to see and that I wasn't getting anything like that in act in my field work but that quitting stories were really interesting because people really had to strategize around quitting they had to make sure that they quit in such a way that they stayed in good relationships with people and that the disentangling part of relationships that Marilyn strathearn talks about in cutting the network was really present in quitting and not in as much in firing as the future Dame of disconnection may I please ask to to be able to call you if I ever needed to uh seek your counsel absolutely I am there for anyone who is trying to think through how to quit in an elegant way okay well it's it's almost time to go but before we do this this is where we have a quick whip around to grab everyone's tip of something not academic that speaks to today's team no you're not allowed to say The Social Network maybe or Joy division's love will tear us apart a lot we'll let you think on it but I'm gonna jump in with my kind of recommendation it's something that I learned about recently and please excuse the language but it's the apparent phenomenon of [ __ ] posting on LinkedIn which I read about in Vice magazine it's basically where people write fake posts showing off about their highly productive working routine or place these kind of hustle culture-esque posts that ridicule all of the serious work Norms on LinkedIn so like it could be just a completely implausible morning routine that takes 14 hours to get through and I'm wondering whether this might signal a shift in some kind of positive direction like maybe we've reached Peak hustle maybe gen Zed and future Generations will laugh at us for being so absurd on these platforms Alana can I ask you now what your pop culture tip is I have been thinking a lot about the um television show Severance for two reasons one because it takes the work-life balance and makes it into a parody like [ __ ] posting and kind of takes takes it into a kind of whole new realm where who you are as a human being is completely erased when you go to work and you have a completely new personality which has odd resonances with who you used to be beforehand but I think about this all the time because before neoliberalism people didn't worry about work-life balance right when you had a metaphor that you were owned yourself as though you were property then you rented yourself to the employer and you got yourself back at the end of the day you didn't have to worry about balancing the the kind of amount of time that you were spending in at home doing work and what you were doing in the workplace but with neoliberalism making you use as a dominant metaphor that you own yourself as you are a business all of a sudden work-life balance becomes a problem and Severance parodies this in this lovely way but the other thing I think about all the time with Severance is that there is a character who wants to quit and is not allowed to quit because per the person who she is not at work will not allow that to happen yeah right I haven't seen Severance but I've definitely seen it on my on my streaming you know app so this is a good prompt to maybe try and check it out Alexis your tip for today you also wanted to talk about TV yeah yeah exactly but I'm going to take it in a bit of another Direction and making a link to our last episode on taste I want to suggest a reality TV show in Quebec called occupation that's been running since the early 2000s where participants go to find we are told love and Adventure right but I guess any reality a dating show would do so I'm suggesting this because I feel like these shows touch on a number of points you've raised giving us kind of new tools to think about them so for example how we look for authenticity in people even if we kind of know that they're playing a sort of game and might be building their brand um on the show right or how it's more than presentation of self where what you do also gets edited in various ways within the shows for the final product or how all of that gets debated in social media and ultimately how While most people just get dumped literally and figuratively on the public stage no less well those are three really diverse points there and I'm very impressed that no one mentioned Fleetwood Mac which is surely the ultimate band for the theme of breakups but we do have a piece that mentions them in our show notes but Alana I'm afraid this is the time for us to disconnect thanks for being with us today it's been really fascinating it has been quite an honor thank you thank you very much and that's it for this month we're all out of time but you can catch today's reading list including our pick of pieces from the sociological review over at the podcasts page at the sociologicalreview.org or just scroll our episode notes in the app you're using to enjoy this [Music] Harris campaign at the Stephen Lawrence Research Center where she'll be taking a look at the idea of solidarity thanks to Our Guest Elana Gershon our sound engineer with Dave crackles and our producer was Alice Block it's over and out for us or should I say a BRB ah Alexis bye bye

2023-04-21 08:02

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