Category: Generations

Kylie Jenner and Society 2020

When I’m asked where to start a sociological analysis, I think of how I began, in 2020, to introduce my students to society. I started with this statement; ‘Kylie Jenner is the youngest self-made billionaire.’ Then I asked students to say what they thought about this. Student responses are very revealing. What they understand turns out to provide a perfect starting point for thinking about society.

Some students doubt the claim that Kylie Jenner is truly self-made; they point to the Kardashian family’s earlier fame and success. Some also guess that, in reality, her cosmetics business is worth less than a billion. But what students do all agree on is that she is famous and has a business. These universally known facts are profoundly important. As a sociologist, I see this knowledge as anchoring young people into society in ways that have previously been overlooked.

What is it that students know and how does this tell them about society?

  • Students learn through objects that express what Kylie is. Items of her cosmetics business are bought, worn, and displayed in photographs. Through these objects, the essence of ‘Kylieness’ is possessed and displayed.
  • Kylie’s objects are attached to the performance of the feminine.
  • As a person and as a designer, her objects anchor students’ experience in one particular year on the calendar. Kylie things will be understood and associated with the year 2020 when she was popular.
  • Kylie’s product-based fame constitutes her ‘price’ or ‘worth.’ This is a valuation of the behavior and activities associated with her objects. This is simultaneously both sociological and economic.
  • Kylie’s name and products will lose their ‘value of the moment’ as time elapses. In a year or two, these particular objects will no longer signify the exciting features of the feminine. New objects will be needed – which Kylie herself may be able to evolve into and create its replacements.

Taken together, we can see that meaningful objects root people into society in a variety of ways. You don’t yourself have to be feminine or interested in cosmetics for these objects to connect you; being in your age group and knowing your generational peers is enough to involve you in society. Everybody your age will know Kylie Jenner, what her family does, and what Kylie’s personality and brand stand for. The sociological lesson this gives my students is that generational objects connect the entire age group with their society.

Unfortunately for social science, Kylie Jenner and popular culture is absent from current explanations. Serious political and sociological thinking steers away from today’s material objects. Instead, theory directs social scientists toward institutions and word-based explanations. Political theory, of the ‘problem of order’ in Hobbes and Locke, looks to government and economic property to explain people’s behavior. Objects don’t get a look in here; they are not considered capable of influencing people. Sociological theory hasn’t done any better. Durkheim’s ‘anomie’ and Marx’s ‘alienation’ both claim that people are disconnected from society or alienated by harsh money economics. Weber emphasized rational action in the institutions of government and business. But celebrities, meaningful objects, and how we dress to express ourselves in our own generation is totally missing from official social science. This makes it impossible to see how buying and sharing meaningful objects integrates people into society.

Student understanding of Kylie Jenner reveals that seeing, possessing and performing with key objects connects an entire generation with its society. This is a great way to start thinking about sociology. People’s choice of stars and merchandise gives each generation shared bonds. If a celebrity like Kylie can be known and admired through her image and her products, the way is opened up to discover what else binds generations to their society – which is the purpose of studying sociology.

Youth and the Covid Crisis

I enjoy postings and news items on youth because I learn from them and like commenting on them. Youth is fascinating to me, not for some particularistic concern, but because it illuminates so much about wider society. The sociology of young people reveals our most formative stage of life.

People who don’t care about youth usually dismiss all stages of the life course. In this superficial view, children are relegated to mere dependents, and all adults are regarded as independent grown ups. What this misses is the sociology that creates each new generation. In youth we can witness how individuals connect into relationships, and how these combine into one, shared society.

So when a single topic Tweet or blog describes youth, it opens a door into wider subject matter however narrowly it starts. For example, do university students involved in sex destroy the Covid lockdown? This seems like a narrow concern of the sexologist. But correctly understood, this question opens wider and wider circles of sociological events. For example, have present governments underestimated the significance of courtship for youth? Do the needs of teens necessarily destroy the interpersonal separation intended by lockdown? Does increasing evidence from the United States of partying at universities, and from the United Kingdom of raves involving thousands of people, show that, for young people, lockdown is unsustainable?

This health related policy of government isn’t being undermined by a simple ‘need for sex.’ The reasons are much wider. Government policy is facing the gravitational mass of large numbers of people in one phase of life, a time when sex is only one piece of involvement in relationships and learning about society. These formative years of youth present an entire demographic whose purpose is to meet and discover self and others. Is it reasonable to block these critical years of their essential purpose? Consider the long term consequences. An entire age cohort is being damaged during its formative years, and society is losing its potential future progress by damaging this generation. Do advisors to governments understand how they have failed particular sections of the community? Have they actually factored in the cost of injuring an entire demographic?

It is becoming increasingly clear that lockdown is unsustainable. One reason for this is clearly youth. How sad that policy discussions have not included the sociology of relationships. Countries that have locked-down their populations reveal ignorance of the needs of youth. Simultaneously, other sections of the community, such as the poor, have been ignored too. It is sad that sociological information has not been able to point the way to a better public policy in a crisis.

Do Sociologists Know what “Ghosting” is?

I teach a course called “Sociology of Romance” but I wasn’t familiar with the term “ghosting” until my students explained it to me. Class discussion quickly made clear that ending relationships by sudden non-communication was deplored by students; no one would speak to defend it. But for me that raised layers of problems about how sociologists explain courtship behavior.

Why do students continue to use a mechanism that makes them feel bad? A lot of easy explanations fall away when we look at this closely. For example, calling this ‘youth culture’ needs a lot of caveats because courtship changes every decade or so. It isn’t the same culture, indeed different generations find each other incomprehensible. Older people note today’s absence of dating and are suspicious of a “hookup culture” where there is no dinner and a movie Undergraduates today can’t believe older singles “dated people they didn’t know.” Each generation finds its own courtship familiar and acceptable while that of others is baffling.

Two further points on how we study this. First, the scant academic studies that do appear miss important aspects. Early discussions of the hookup dating scene missed the intense “talking to someone” by messaging and “Facebook stalking” which was going on. Young people were still getting to know each other, it was just being done though social media.

Second, the terminology sociologists use is inconsistent and doesn’t fit with broader explanations of society. Was “rating and dating” a tradition or a practice? Is today’s “hookup” best described as a culture, a script, an intimate tie, a fad, or even a social movement? Is a “group chat” something we should study as a formal organization? The difficulty of conceptualizing courtship suggests a broader problem. Perhaps sociologists aren’t much interested in romantic relationships because they aren’t prestigious in the profession. Ghosting cannot influence society; it just isn’t part of the conceptual framework. Sociologists generally dismiss private relationships because they are ephemeral, full of rapidly obsolete slang, and lack any sustained way to influence society. ‘Structural’ explanations have more prestige. So, with courtship outside sociology’s knowledge base, sociologists aren’t able to ‘know’ about dating in a serious professional and theoretical way.

But what if we can show that courtship matters? Does the way we date shape later life choices and indirectly create a cohort-wide understanding? Perhaps the speed with which courtship practices appear, along with universally understood rules, is a model of broader change in society? In this case, ghosting, and things like it, reveal a lot about society’s future.

Just being a professor and listening to undergraduates doesn’t change our profession’s concepts. Personally, we can acquire commonsense knowledge from many sources – as participants in dating, being parents and friends of young people, consuming media entertainment, and working as teachers in a classroom. But none of this theorizes ghosting or adds it to sociology’s professional knowledge. Without concepts, theories and cases that explain its importance, personal familiarity with current dating leaves the discipline of sociology without professionally “knowing” what ghosting is. Without concepts and a theoretical framework, none of us can use it in our writing, our lectures or in our critical assessments of the readings we assign. Hookups continue to be outside how we explain society.

In a recent paper I have tried to fill some conceptual gaps about courtship. I present this at ASA 2019 in New York in August. Please come. You will be most welcome and, with your help, we may all soon have courtship ghosting as part of sociology’s professional knowledge. Then we will truly be able to say that sociologists “understand” ghosting and we will all be able to write, teach and increase public understanding of it.