This New Yorker story about sociologist Howard Becker is an efficient way to learn about the field. I wonder if it also shows why American politics is more fragmented today than 50 years ago when everyone watched the same TV shows at night (since there were only three channels). It seems that each group has its own rules and considers other groups to be “deviant.” If there is no popular culture that is truly universally popular then a society can support more groups.
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Conversely, we French find utterly inexplicable the American academic infatuation with Derrida, just as Americans do the French love of Jerry Lewis. I had never even heard of Derrida until I read some American physics journal at the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève a stone’s throw from the Sorbonne. It featured a letter from a US physics professor trying to be a good cross-disciplinary academic but admitting defeat in trying to understand Derrida, or even fathoming why he was supposed to care, yet persisting doggedly instead of realizing the Emperor has no clothes.
Becker’s great insight is that ” Some people may march to a different drummer—but, when they do, they’re usually all marching in rhythm, too. ” But the thing that I find hilarious is that those who belong to these sub-cultures are usually themselves completely lacking in that insight – they see themselves as non-conformists but it totally escapes them that they are non-conforming in exactly the same way as all their fellow “non-conformists” in whatever little subculture they belong to – they have just traded conformity with one group’s norms for conformity for a different group’s norms but they haven’t escaped conformity at all.
Fascinating article. For an interesting sociological argument on the effects of television on politics (and other realms such as male-female relations), see Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1984). Draws on the work of Erving Goffmann, mentioned briefly in the New Yorker article.