Tag: social

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Social promise

In the beginning and middle of the 2020s the social promise to younger generations has been broken. The latest figures from the USA reveal that 2 million students (WSJ 2025-6-25 A3) who have financed their studies and potential social mobility by taking out a substantial loan are very likely to default on their credits. This observation was less a surprise to labor market analysts as the stalling of student hiring in many countries has happened for several years now. The more surprising finding is that the Wall Street Journal 2025-6-25 has been reporting on this. Banks or universities who are highly exposed to this kind of risk will themselves become downgraded for their credit rating. Higher interests for universities means higher fees and higher student loans eventually. The social promise to reach higher status and earnings through higher education as the social promise of the meritocratic society becomes an illusion. Investors in student housing might also find the sector less juicy for them. Students and their parents were taken hostage by an excessive commercialization and commodification od education. Lifelong learning is a still a promising route to revitalize the social promise.

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Contextual Vision

The attempt to define a sociology of vision has had a hard time to build on hard evidence that vision may depend on context or in a broader sense your visual heritage. A standard definition of context in vision highlights the areas around a focal point. The findings by Krupin et al. (2025) show through the comparison of persons from very different populations that our vision depends on our cultural background. It is the social background and upbringing in a specific cultural setting, which determines what we see in an image at first sight.  The so-called Coffer illusion test (Deregowski 2017) reveals what we see in an image spontaneously and maybe after some longer staring at the image or doing it repeatedly, we learn to see that there is more to see than our original impression. Depending on our cultural heritage we might focus unconsciously on rectangular or round shapes in a geometric image. This fundamental finding questions the view that there is only one universal kind of vision common to all humans. In fact, there is variance around what we see and thereby how we perceive an image. This research provides a justification to delve also into the field of a sociology of the visual. Because of the common term in informatics “WYSIWYG”, (what you see is what you get), we might  spend more efforts on research of how human vision is shaped over generations or according to social background. We know that in some images different people see different things. What appears as a splendid opportunity for some, is a very risky situation for others. Eyes are so closely wired to our brain that inscriptions of vision on the brain functioning are quite likely. The plasticity of this process over the life course remains a crucial topic to understand the process(es) of how a person’s social background shapes her/his vision.

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Fertility Fecundity

The scientific debate around changes in fertility has focused on social, economic and cultural factors to explain the drop in total fertility rates in OECD countries. The baby boom years of the 1950s and early 1960s had come to an end following the spread of new forms of birth control like contraception from the late 1960s onwards. The trend is very obvious and yet, the explanations of the trend might lack a more profound analysis of fecundity in addition to the socio-economic explanations. Shakkebaek et al. (2025) point for example to the little known effects of environmental (pollution) factors on the biological reproduction capability of humans (men and women).
Additionally, psycho-social factors like “the German Angst” fear about future developments in many social and economic fields might have direct effects, but also indirect effects on human biology. We know still very little about such feedback loops or feedback effects. We are more convinced, than we actually have hard evidence, that the BSP, SPB or PSB (B=Bio, S=Social, P=Psycho) spheres are interwoven, but an ambitious research agenda is called for to enlighten the issue. The big invisible elephant in the room might be environmental issues that enter into the fertility equations more than we have expected for many years. A nice working hypothesis for an ambitious and overdue research agenda.

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Artist Development

For many artists it takes years before they find their idiosyncratic style. Testing different forms of art before zooming in on a particular style of art is the  common trajectory for most artists. Maybe the art marker and collectors of art are in search of a “defining style” for an artist so the uniqueness becomes more easily identifiable. Being part of a group of artists has been beneficial as well. The “Neue Nationalgalerie” in Berlin makes this development of an artist, in this case Lygia Clark transparent through the organization of a retrospective devoted to her evolution from abstract paintings towards participative and more organic forms of art. Berlin offers to interact with the pieces at the exhibition. You become part of the exhibition and the happening of art instantaneously. The form stays the same, the persons interacting change permanently. The piece of art is never the same. Just the idea of it thrives. In the Corpo Colletivo the performers wear an overall, all of them are linked to each other and movements happen organically as a group rather than individually. This is like a tutorial in sociology as individuals move as part of a collective body and feel the embeddedness and multiple links to other persons (Image: Corpo Collectivo 1970, exhibit in Berlin 2025)

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Aufklärung Enlightenment

The period of the enlightenment is a historically defined time period of the late 17th and the whole 18th century. Although often associated only with Europe as its origin, the American contributions and influences have been far-reaching as well, just thinking of the “Declaration of Independence“. This historical period is, however, most interesting through the unrivalled contribution and pivotal point to the history of ideas. The exhibition and catalogue on the “Aufklärung – Enlightenment” by the German Historical Museum in Berlin exposes many of the historical editions of books that “made the enlightenment”. Philosophical writings and readings (Immanuel Kant: Kritik der …) of the period (especially in German) are tough even for native speakers of German, unlike reading of French (e.g. Jean-Jacques Rousseau) or English (e.g. John Locke) contributions to the enlightenment. Maybe this is already one of the reasons why in France the revolutionary ideas were put into practice through population-wide political movements.
The historical period of the enlightenment came to a close in the early 19th century (1806 another pivotal year). The English or French terms of enlightenment or lumière maybe be interpreted in a way that other historical periods like the medieval ages were periods of darkness, even later periods again did not live up to the idealist prerogatives of the evolution of humanity. The German term “Aufkärung” has its etymological roots more in the action associated with “to enlighten”. This hints at the continuing process of the ideas of the enlightenment in modern terms the process of individualisation, tolerance and autonomy.
There many valuable short interviews shown in the exhibition and Jürgen Habermas contributed a short closing statement to the catalogue of the exhibition on the unfinished project of the “Aufklärung” inviting us to continue also with the “Kritik der Aufklärung”. After all the enlightenment did not save us from repeated events like “Apokalyses“.
(Image: Émilie du Châtelet, below book on Newton Physics in DHM Enlightenment exhibition 2025).

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Time Concepts

Tell me about your concept of time. How do you define time? Answers to this question are likely to depend on your upbringing, affinity to a specific scientific discipline or epistemological belief(s). Aristotle defines time to be subordinate to the more basic principle of change. To understand change we need the concept of time. Two points in time define time, intermediate points are possible, which might be interpreted as a precursor of infinitesimally short spells of time. To explain change, Aristotle refers to his concept of time. Other concepts of time build on the notion of succession of events or sequences of events.
Clocks going round in circles have been used to show the progression of time independent of events. Beams of atoms later allowed for more precision of time keeping. The prevalent concept of time still is dominated by the idea of time as an arrow, usually depicted in some diagram resemblance based on the Cartesian coordinate system, but usually starting at 0 or a particular point in time as diagrams in economics.
Following on from the old concept of change and time, we still claim for causality in most day-to-day experiences or for social processes the link to a chronological progression of time. In statistical analyses building on time-stamped occurrences we may use event history analyses or stochastic differential equations to analyze (social) change depending on one or several (earlier) factors. Even the theory of deterministic chaos, which is applied in weather forecasts for example, arises from the sequence of point of measurements.
Mainly since Isaac Newton we cherish the notion of a universal time, which helps us to coordinate different locations on our planet with reference to the Greenwich mean time. Other concepts of time make use of infinity of time and how to deal with this. Life before, or life after death, are human constructs trying to make time understandable or at least manageable for us beyond our own living time. Depictions of time in the arts, paintings or music opens up yet another vast space of thinking about, as well as, experiencing time. We did have and still do have a great time thinking about time.

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Mindmap Me

Tools like artificial intelligence allow all sorts of transformations and depictions. The photo editing tools are widespread and particularly popular among the young users. My own transformative exercises, latest with www.bairbe.me, have yielded interesting insights, well worth an intergenerational playmate. For the guys there is the www.yobrick.com version for brick gamers.
The App “Canvas” allowed me to delve deeper into my own mind by giving instructions of how to create an image of the structure of the blog entries on this webpage. Of course, it is not (yet) a real AI-generated content map, but it is only a matter of time until such tools will exist. After all, this would be just an arranged and rearranged list of contents using the hyperlink structure of the texts as well.
For the time being, I derive my own structure of the blog entries by topics, categories and tags including the hyperlinks or internal referrals. Interlinkages are mostly stated explicitly. However, there are many implicit links, which are obvious to some, but not others. AI-systems could use occurrences of words,  synonyms and antonyms . Colors in addition to bubble sizes and (in)direct lines may complement such mindmaps. This can help to reveal another, additional layer to connections between categories or tags. The Ai-generated image shown below was created with the APP Canvas as a first approximation and AI-augmented test version in form of abstract images).
Next steps on the way to understand human intelligence and, maybe, augment it with a next generation AI-system would use a colored-3D version of such a mindmap and use the chronological evolution of the blog posts in a kind of evolutionary animation. This should allow us to go beyond the usual psychological classification of fluid and crystallized intelligence. We might come to grips what it means to be “in a Paris state of mind” or when hallucinations become overwhelming.

Screenshot
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Corridorisation Connectivity

In some cities, “I love Paris” (Jazz Song), we admire the “breath-taking” large corridors, right in the centre of the city. This has been the outcome of the urban planning in the 18th century. Haussmann designed large parts of Paris with huge corridors despite the medieval narrow streets in some of the arrondisements”. Ease of traffic, fewer riots and representative housing became the new mantra of urban planning and superb boulevards.
In the 21st century it is about time to question the notion and social process of corridorisation. This has been accomplished in a paper by Fatima Tassadq et al. (2025). Modern infrastructure like fibre-optic cables, energy or water networks are easiest to deploy in urban spaces with large corridors than the complex narrow inner cities with supposition of different kinds of network layers. The grand ideas of the 18th century should be questioned from time to time and some districts that have escaped the corridorisation might well have a particular charm about them, maybe just because they seem to escape the rational approach of making and structuring space by means of large corridors. Large corridors separate city districts and they are a major driving force of gentrification.
The rationality of corridors has some roots in maths or physics of complexity. A recent paper by Shanshan Wang et al. (2024) reports the surprising finding that the transport corridors in several cities across the globe allow for a 1.3 times the distance of transport networks compared to the so-called direct linear “bird’s flight line”. Hence, corridorisation is (has been) a rather pervasively applied model of urban planning.
Alternative approaches advocate in favor of the 15-minutes walking distance city. All amenities like shops, schools, maybe work and services should be reachable within a 15 minutes walk. This does include “walking corridors” that facilitate (social) connectivity in inner cities. Cyclists also claim their corridors or fast lanes across cities, which underlines the pertinence to take corridorisation seriously and apply the concept with care.
In any case, social connectivity is key. The big social media platforms operate similar to the traffic infrastructure in the 21st century and provide huge corridors to knowledge and people. We only realize this once a service (for example tiktok) or the internet altogether gets disconnected. We have moved from (social) categorisation to (social) corridorisation as technology and rationalisation have taken the upper hand to structure our (social) lives.

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Artists networking

Creating a network between rather idiosyncratic artists is no easy task. The more they develop a unique style separate from other painters mixing with other artists can be a challenge because you might find yourself in the position to continually defend your new style. Therefore, building a network of artists that understands the concept or emotion that drives you is a great advantage. In the catalog of the Caillebotte exhibition in the Musée d’Orsay Paris the map of living and working spaces of Caillebotte and his artists’ friends like Claude Monet is a great way to demonstrate the degree of networking and creative spaces that propelled the impressionist movement. The galleries and greater exhibitions of the impressionists took place in the vicinity of the established art institutions, but were not admitted into the traditional exhibition centers like the Louvre. The map from the catalog provides insights into the cognitive map of Paris which Caillebotte had in mind at his time. Artists see cities as opportunity spaces which facilitate or impede the creative processes.

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Animal Longevity

  1. From time to time it is interesting to study animals from many species to maybe learn from them about longevity. Roberto Salguero-Gómez (LINK) developed a sociality continuum and compared 152 species across 13 taxonomic classes. The study reiterates and generalizes the many studies of single species and finds that „more social species live longer, have more generation time and longer reproductive windows“.  Social structures amongst animals of the same species influence survival and reproduction as basic demographic processes. These processes determine to a large extent the size of animal populations. Sociality appears to be a major contributor to longevity compared across species. These processes determine the survival of rather solitary species like panda bears (running higher risks of extinction) compared to populations of bees with rather hierarchical predefined social structures. The spotted hyenas developed cooperative hunting and communal care which allows for effective survival compared to other species. Sociality is specific to species and therefore largely determined by genetic factors. Nature rather than nurture is at work. However, species where reproduction occurs later allow for learning curves of sociality. In other words even within species there is scope to improve longevity through sociality. Migration patterns or experience with migration might be yet another determinant of survival or longevity as climate change poses new challenges to many species.