ReviseSociology

Category: Sociology on TV

  • The Twinstitute – An interesting example of the experimental method

    The Twinstitue on BBC2 usefully demonstrates some of the strengths and limitations of ‘laboratory’ experiments. The series subjects a number of twins to various experiments in order to try and isolate the effect of one variable on another. For example in one experiment in a recent episode, the twins were split into two groups and…

  • A few Sociological Observations on ‘The Circle’ (Channel 4)

    ‘The Circle’ is a new ‘reality’ show currently airing on Channel 4 in the UK…. It is quite literally a ‘popularity contest In which 8 contestants compete over a 3-week period to be the most popular person in ‘The Circle’. The most popular contestant at the end wins £50K. The rub is that there is…

  • The State COULD be watching you: and other lessons from #Hunted

    In case you’ve been living in the dark-ages and missed it (like me) Hunted is a T.V. show in which ordinary individuals take on the role of fugitives on the run from ‘Hunters’ who take on the role of agents of the state (think of MI6 meets special ops). The latest C4 series kick-started with…

  • The Church of Stop Shopping – A Sociological Analysis

    The Church of Stop Shopping – A Sociological Analysis

    Reverend Billy and The church of stop shopping are critical of our addiction to shopping – especially at Christmas. They suggest we are facing a ‘Shopocalypse’ – arguing that over consumption fuels the debt crisis, global warming and destroys local economies and communities if products are purchased from TNCs. Instead, they suggest that we should…

  • Mary Berry Doffs Her Bonnet – and Legitimates the Class Structure (Again)

    I’ve blogged about how Mary Berry’s uses her middle class cultural capital to maintain the class-order through demonising working class taste , but in her latest series of outings – Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets, she takes this to another level… I could only stomach one episode, which I watched to confirm my suspicions about…

  • Rich House, Poor House – Spreading the Myth of Meritocracy

    In this Channel 5 series, one family in the ‘wealthiest 10%’ of Britain swap lives for a week with a family in the ‘poorest 10% of Britain’. As I see it this programme performs an ‘ideological control function’ – spreading the myth of meritocracy. They two families swap houses, budgets and leisure-timetables for a week…

  • Postmodern Methods in Louis Theroux Documentaries

    Louis Theroux documentaries are a great example of ‘postmodern’ research methods. I say this for the following reasons: Firstly, these documentaries select unusual, deviant case studies to focus on, which is especially true of the latest series – ‘Dark States’ which consists of three episodes about heroin users, sex trafficking and murder. Secondly, they tend…

  • Meet the Natives (Sociology on T.V.)

    Meet the Natives involves five people from a tropical island visiting a ‘strange land called England’, where they find many of the customs unusual. At various points throughout the video the ‘natives’ from Oceania have problems understanding British dinner rituals, the food we eat, housework/ the amount of stuff we have and even the concept…

  • Return to Eden and Eden Lost – A Case Study in Problematic Masculinity?

    Starting in Spring 2016, Channel 4’s ‘Return to Eden’ was a year long social experiment in which 23 people moved to Inverness-shire in the Scottish Highlands – their mission – to form a community and survive for one year. The experiment was a somewhat artificial community-experiment – in that the people were selected by the…

  • Social Experiments on T.V.

    There have been a lot of T.V. productions which have run ‘social experiments’ in recent years. This post simply outlines a few examples of these and some of the strengths and limitations of social experiments run by media companies. Channel 4 seems to be the main outlet for these experiments…. Some (relatively) recent examples of…