social change – Holley Sociology

‘Brat’ Summer 2024: Grasping a Media Moment

At a time when wars, political campaigns, and an Olympics were going on, in Summer 2024, ‘brat’ popped up with no apparent connection to these. Here was a girl youth phenomenon expressing itself through Charli xcx’s sudden, huge celebrity.

It started with singer song writer Charli xcx’s sixth album, ‘Brat.’ Its bold green rectangle on the album cover could have writing on it. The whole package, the singer’s style, songs, and visual image, suddenly took off and became a mega hit.

Are those who study youth ready to include this moment’s splash? In a general way, sociologists recognize that media objects illuminate young people’s lives and relationships. But are we capable of grasping this phenomenon in all its various pieces? Here is a social space, radiating its meaning in a particular slice of time. Let’s list some of the dimensions of this. Its many components deliver different messages, all in a very short time.

The album cover has a catchy green rectangle. On this text can appear.

The music and lyrics are themselves memorable – Charli xcx has been recording for a number of years.

The album title is ‘Brat,’ which is a pejorative term; the written word catches attention by being unusual. The verbal meaning is deepened by Charli’s extended explanation.

Charli said that “brat” means “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party … maybe says dumb things sometimes … who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown but parties through it … is very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile.

The word brat is used adjectivally in the phrases ‘brat girl’ and ‘brat summer.’

Note that the vision of girlhood here has contradictory opposites; it describes a girl who has many feelings and contrasting behaviors.

Brat turns out to be a good thing, not a term of disapprobation. It is a cool persona for its, mainly Gen Z, audience. It has been use supportively for the woman American presidential candidate with the phrase ‘Kamala is brat,’ suggesting that she is young at heart and cool!

My question for sociologists is whether we have put enough effort into understanding how suddenly appearing, generationally embraced images redefine what is desirable and acceptable in people. Does each generation change what it wants people to be like? Does this express what a generation feels society needs? Are social scientists able to see what is going on in this densely expressive mode of communication? My impression is that influential media events, like ‘brat’ in Summer 2024, are still dismissed by older people as too complicated, and disappearing too fast, to be credited with being influential.

This is sad because people in every generation remember the big media events of their growing up; these are defining moments, unforgettable for how they changed the picture of what produces successful and happy people. We can all remember examples of these; illuminating moments are part of our collective understanding and should not, surely, be missing from social science descriptions of modern of life.

How good are the social science disciplines – 2 economics

My second social science is economics. Sociology is not alone in having deficiencies. Economics is another discipline which cannot explain its own subject matter and leaves non-academic researchers to use the most effective methods. The deeper question I am addressing in these comparisons is why the social sciences today haven’t got their act together.

Economists do correlations. They are good at crunching data. They have now taken away what sociologists used to do in stratification. Economists like Raj Chetty publish on upward mobility in America today. But this is done utterly without theory; it is no help to people who need conceptual explanations. Correlations at the individual unit size cannot explain the big changes in society.

The big picture economists’ have is of macro economics. They discuss central bank and government policies and look for measures of how the economy is doing. This is lively and interesting stuff. (See Krugman’s recent https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/opinion/monopsony-rigidity-and-the-wage-puzzle-wonkish.html ). But this whole area exists without such theory as micro economics provides and is conducted without any pretense to explain big questions of social change. This is not a new deficiency; economists have never been able to explain how economic growth happens. How the first Industrial Revolution happened remains a mystery despite the efforts of economic historians (See McCloskey). Today’s courses in micro and macro economics won’t tell you how the economies of today grow or fail to do so. One thing economists don’t seem able to do is explain their own subject.

In the meantime, people whose job requires them to study the economy look at ‘industries.’ Researchers in finance and business divide the economy into different sectors, knowing that industries operate under different conditions. Academic economics won’t let economists do this; theoretically, its all one market and one economy. No theory exists of what an industry is or why industries should exist at all. To my mind, industries are probably created by sociological and demographic factors … and disciplines don’t like explanations from outside their own field!

So it turns out that sociologists don’t have to be envious of economists; they can’t answer the important questions in their field either.

Generations: A Mystery to Social Science

It is now widely understood that generations exist. Their patterns of change are regularly reported by the Pew Research Center, and their consumer preferences are sought by marketers. People recognize that generations have contrasting styles of life and ways of doing things.

But the existence of generations poses multiple problems for social science, most basically why generations even exist at all. Let’s look at the theoretical problem here. People’s lives are separated into successive phases during which they do different activities; modern people don’t just grow up and repeat the same thing all their lives. In different generations these phases remain pretty similar. Young people, for example, pursue the same general activities that they have done in every generation.

But generations become really important because at specific moments they alter these patterns in significant ways. For example, Pew Research found that young people have increasingly delayed their marriages or don’t marry at all. The chart below shows that each generation is clearly identifiable by name, as is the year when most of its generation is aged 18 to 32 years old – the peak point of its activities.

The problem here is how all generations go through the same phases of life but handle them in contrasting styles. There are two puzzles then. First, why do generations accept the same sequence of life phases in the first place? Why are activities segregated and why should they be pursued in a strict order? And second, what makes generations different from each other? Why is each one distinct from the previous? Is it possible that generations construct their own lives, and if so, by what means do they become the authors of their own collective style?

Social science should be able to answer big questions like these. Can it simply be an accident that modern society gives birth to these different generations? Unfortunately for us, social science is completely stumped; generations remain a huge unsolved mystery. It’s not politics or institutions that create them; no formal organizations or policies can be found that design contrasting generations. And it’s not the economy that appears to be creating them either. Economic inequalities exist within every generation, but these don’t stop people from sharing much of the same outlook, priorities, aesthetics and preferences as their peers.

The discipline that is best positioned to answer these questions is sociology. Generations are voluntary, based on attraction not coercion, and become effective by using temporary informal associations. These are all sociological qualities. But past sociology suffers from obstacles to recognizing generations; specifically, it holds onto concepts which actively deny that generations exist.

For example, ‘socialization’ theory states that parents create children who are photocopies of themselves. But to be part of their own distinct generation, children cannot be reproductions just like their parents. The existence of generations tells us, logically, that parents regularly fail to socialize their children. Different generations keep on appearing. Have parents failed?

An alternative sociology suggests itself. Perhaps social science could see generations, not as a problem, but as something that carries out a purpose or function for society. Maybe our society loves its generations and supports those parents who peddle back on the “socialization” and let generations come into being.

This possibility has fascinating implications. Perhaps generations can reshape society. This suggests that we live in a world full of exciting creative possibilities. A new and improved sociology that understands generations may be the first social science to shed light on this remarkable feature of modern society.