Tag: Social media

  • A very Sociological Analysis of the Royal Family…

    I quite like Russel Brand, as a lot of his content is very sociological and critical and the video below in which he analyses aspects of the recent ‘Royal Rebrand’ of Will and Kate is fit to appear in a sociology text book IMO! This content is, of course, most relevant to anyone studying the…

  • New social norms revealed by Twitter data?

    It is possible to analyse qualitative social media data to reveal social trends in attitudes.  Twitter recently released an analysis of the content of 4 billion tweets made over the past three years, from users based in the United States. (Source) The fastest growing theme which Twitter users are talking about is ‘creator culture’, with…

  • Depression leads to more social media usage, not the other way around!

    Depression leads to more social media usage, not the other way around!

    Recent longitudinal research from Brock University in Canada suggests that depression leads to people spending more time on social media, rather than those who spend more time of social media being more likely to develop depression. This study contradicts many of the ‘moral panic’ type headlines which suggests a link between heavy social media use…

  • Screen Time and Children’s Well being

    Screen Time and Children’s Well being

    The UK’s Chief Medical Officers are now officially advising parents to ban their children from using phones and other electronic devices in their bedrooms and during meal times. These are two out of nine specific recommendations made in a recent official report entitled: Screen-based activities and children and young people’s mental health and psychosocial wellbeing:…

  • 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…

  • Russell Brand’s Wedding Present for Harry and Meghan

    A Windsor counsellor recently suggested that the homeless of Windsor should be cleared off the streets in time for Harry and Meghan’s wedding. One person (probably among many others) that’s not happy about this is Russell Brand, who pointed out that yet again it’s the marginalised and powerless who are being made to suffer so…

  • Revise Sociology on Facebook, Twitter and the Rest…

    Below are some links to the main social media sites I use. If you like this sort of sociology thang, then you might like to follow me by clicking on any, or all of the icons below…. Blog Twitter – @realsociology         Facebook Page         Google Plus     …

  • The Internet as an Object of Content Analysis

    Websites, social media posts and similar virtual documents are all forms of secondary data, and thus amenable to both quantitative and qualitative content analysis.     There are, however, many difficulties in using web sites as sources of content analysis. Following Scott’s (1990) four criteria of assessing the quality of documents, we need consider why…

  • How Many Likes Does it Take?

    I just typed in ‘how many likes does it take to be satisfied’ into Google and got the responses below (second picture) – although just as interesting are the auto-complete options which cropped up. I guess we live in a virtual world where many more people are asking themselves how to get more likes, without asking…

  • Twitter Users by Occupation and Social Class

    The middle classes and especially those in creative industries are more likely to be on twitter, but finding this out is more difficult than you might think, at least according to some recent research: Who Tweets?: Deriving the Demographic Characteristics of Age, Occupation and Social Class from Twitter User Meta-Data This post is a brief…