312 Part V: Sociology and Your Life
As it happens, the world hasn’t ended. Babies are still being born, teenagers are still disobeying their parents, people are still falling in love (and out of love, and in love again), people are working hard at jobs they’re proud of, and fighting and praying and laughing and crying and, eventually, dying. I don’t know who you are or where you’re living, but even if you’re somehow picking this book up in the year 3001, I’ll bet you’re living in a form of social organization where most people, most of the time, care for one another and work to make the world a better place for everyone. You’re probably living in a place where most people are happy most of the time, but even if you’re living in a place where some terrible things are happening, you probably have hope for the future, hope that things will get better. And sociologists would say that you have many, many reasons to believe that.
Sociology in the Future
Enough about the possibility of world peace or global catastrophe . . . let’s get down to brass tacks. What’s the future of sociology? In this section, I look in the direction(s) sociology itself might be heading in decades to come.
Will sociology continue to exist?
It may surprise you to find that heading in a book full of useful sociological information: Why wouldn’t sociology continue to exist? Clearly, it’s been useful in the past. Why wouldn’t it be useful in the future? I think it will be, and I think sociology will be around for a long, long time. The interesting question is whether people will continue to call it “sociology.”
There’s no question that the sociological worldview has become more and more common since sociology was founded in the 19th century. The idea that it would be interesting, productive, or even appropriate to study human interaction scientifically was something that was not at all taken for granted in the time of Comte or even Durkheim. (See Chapter 3 for more on these thinkers.) Both of those sociologists spent a lot of their time defending the social sciences generally — and sociology specifically — against people who believed the humanities and the natural sciences could together tell the world everything it needed to know about society.
Today, it’s safe to say, the basic premise of sociology is taken for granted. Can you imagine a university that didn’t offer course in economics, psychology, political science, anthropology, geography, education, regional studies, women’s studies, or business administration? All of those disciplines, today, are social sciences, built on the same premise as sociology: that society can, and should, be studied scientifically. Further, disciplines ranging from history
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to law to even theology are using more and more of the tools of the social sciences. As long as human interaction is studied scientifically and systematically, sociology will be around in some form.
But with all those other disciplines studying society scientifically, what’s the point in having a separate discipline called “sociology”? After all, there’s no one thing that sociologists study that isn’t studied by people who don’t call themselves sociologists. There are political scientists — what’s the use of “political sociologists”? There are economists — what’s the use of “economic sociology”? There are social scientists working in schools of education — what’s the use of “sociologists of education”?
There’s a real possibility that “sociology” could go the way of “philosophy.” Centuries ago, most scholars were called “philosophers.” The ancient Greek and Roman “philosophers” studied everything from society to art to medicine to astronomy. The wide-ranging legacy of the term “philosophy” lives on in the fact that the highest degree in any basic academic is a Ph.D. — its holders are “doctors of philosophy” whether they study plants, people, or Plato. But who, today, actually calls themselves a “philosopher”? Only a relatively few people studying the history of philosophy and highly abstract, theoretical questions.
Way down the line, that could happen to sociology — it could become the very basic science of human interaction in groups and networks, with all the details about ethnicities and governments and places and times left to scholars in other disciplines. For now, though, sociology is standing strong on the basis of its claim to be the only social science that studies all aspects of social life.
For me, the most exciting thing about sociology is seeing the connections between how people interact at one time and how they interact at another, how one place is unexpectedly similar to another. To see those connections, you have to be open to studying wildly diverse situations, places, and times; you have to be open to looking, scientifically and systematically, at politics and education and the economy and the family and the church and everything else about human life. That’s what sociologists, and only sociologists, do. It’s not easy, but it’s tremendously, sometimes unexpectedly, rewarding.
The paradox: More data, less information
Sociologists look at the entire social world — and thanks to advances in technology, there’s more and more of the social world to be seen. That sounds like a good thing, but it can also be a challenge.
In his 2000 inaugural address as president of the American Sociological Association, Joe Feagin pointed out that sociologists are used to working with only a small sample of what could possibly be known about the world.
314 Part V: Sociology and Your Life
How, he asked provocatively, would things be different if we suddenly knew everything? It might actually make sociologists more necessary than they are today.
Of course, sociologists still don’t know everything, but as more and more of the world moves online, they know vastly more than they could have imagined knowing before. Consider these facts:
Not only are social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter becoming more popular, they’re increasingly linking with one another and with other sites. As I write, you can use your Facebook account to log on to many other sites — which means that information about what you do on those sites, to some extent, exists on the Facebook servers. Facebook administrators don’t know everything about the online social world, but they know a lot . . . and what they don’t know, their colleagues at Google or Microsoft may well know.
Banks have histories of credit card transactions, and various companies track the progress of products from the factory to the warehouse to the retailer and possibly even to the individual home of the consumer.
When you buy your car, and when you subsequently take it in for service, its vehicle ID number is recorded. This gives organizations who care to do the legwork access to detailed records of a car’s history.
Cell phones enabled with GPS can be tracked around the world, and there’s serious discussion of implanting trackable microchips under children’s skin. (If you think that sounds scary, think about how you’d feel if your child was missing and there was a technology that could tell you precisely where they were.)
What this adds up to is an almost inconceivable amount of information about human activity being — or potentially being — gathered. That has sparked concerns about privacy, but the fun and convenience of being networked seem to be irresistible for most people not to embrace. In the not-too-distant future, there could be in existence a minute-by-minute record of the average person’s life. Imprecise tools like surveys would be a thing of the past; already, network surveys (“please list all the people you know”) are being replaced by the far-superior data available from social networking sites.
So once the world has all this data, will the mystery of human life be solved? Not likely — without the help of sociologists to draw useful information from that mountain of data, those gajillions of bits of data will be about as useful as a phone book that isn’t alphabetized. In the new world of infinite data, sociology — a tool for making sense of social life in all its boundless diversity — will be more important than ever.
Part VI
The Part of Tens
In this part . . .
Sociology, what can I do with thee? Let me count the ways . . . to be precise, 30 of them. The first ten are
books you can read if you’re looking for another sociology fix, the second ten are ways you can use sociological insights in your everyday life, and the final ten are myths about society busted by sociology.