Category: Popular Culture and Consumption

Drinks, Anyone? Revisited

On By Karen SternheimerIn Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change1 Comment
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By Karen Sternheimer

A recent Gallup Poll found that the number of American adults who report being alcohol drinkers has fallen to an all-time low in the poll’s 86-year history. Just 54 percent responded that they drink alcohol on occasion, down from recent highs of 67 percent (2022 and 2010), and the all-time high of 71 percent (1976-1978).

I wrote about alcohol consumption for the Everyday Sociology Blog’s inaugural post in 2007, and thought it would be interesting to revisit the topic and consider what changes may have taken place in the past 18 years that might help us explain the decline.

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How Pizza Became International Cuisine

On By econnellIn Globalization, Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption1 Comment

By Karen Sternheimer

Do you remember your first taste of pizza? I don’t because I’ve been eating it all my life, as you probably have been too. Pizza is practically universal food; it’s one of those words that remains the same in multiple languages, although pronunciations might vary a bit.

Why is pizza something you can find nearly anywhere in the (industrialized) world? Yes, it tastes good, it can be portable, and sold by the slice. It’s a food with just a few ingredients that is relatively cheap and easy to produce. But it also teaches us about globalization and the way in which commerce and culture cross borders.

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Longboarding Towards Social Interactionism

On By econnellIn Popular Culture and Consumption, TheoryLeave a comment

By Joey Colby Bernert, Graduate Student, Michigan State University

The first time I fell off my longboard, I learned something about pain. The second time, when I got back up in front of all my friends, I learned something about performance. Longboarding, for me, has never only been about rolling downhill. It has been about meeting people, reading signals, and figuring out how to play a role in a scene.

This is where sociology comes in. Symbolic interactionism is the idea that people create meaning through everyday interactions. Gestures, objects, clothing, and language all matter. A nod from a stranger, a quick joke with someone you just met, or even how you take a fall can say more than words.

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The Drama of a Lost Credit Card: Living in a Culture of Consumption

On By econnellIn Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and ConsumptionLeave a comment

By Karen Sternheimer

Recently my credit card fell out of a zipped lining in my handheld water bottle while running. I don’t usually carry a credit card for a run but planned on stopping for a breakfast burrito as a special treat when I was done. I hadn’t been to the restaurant before and wasn’t sure that they accepted Apple Pay (they did), so I thought best to have the actual card with me just in case.

I retraced my steps to no avail, it was gone. A lost credit card is easy enough to remedy.   I went to the app and clicked that it was lost. It was inactivated and a new one would be mailed in 5-7 days.

This shouldn’t be a major crisis, especially after losing my home and most of my possessions in a wildfire a few months earlier. But it really upset me, and I used my sociological imagination to unpack why. The loss of a central artifact in our consumer culture sheds light on the role of consumption itself.

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High School and the Sports Spirit Complex

On By econnellIn Class and Stratification, Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and MedicineLeave a comment

By Karen Sternheimer

I currently live about a block away from a large public high school. Students walk by sporting their school merch, including hats, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. During track meets, in addition to starter pistols, you can hear a wave of cheering from an apparently large crowd. They seem to have “school spirit.”

This, along with Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens 1903-2024, got me thinking about the concept of “school spirit” and why schools work so hard to cultivate it among students and communities. It harkened back memories of our high school cheerleaders’ ubiquitous chant at football games:

Yes, yes, yes, we do; we’ve got spirit, how about you?

The crowd was supposed to respond in kind. But why?

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Love Letter to the Indie Bookstore: Radical Third Spaces 

On By econnellIn Alyssa Lyons, Behind the Headlines, Popular Culture and Consumption, Race and Ethnicity, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change2 Comments

By Alyssa Lyons

I’ve always loved books. And I mean loved books. As a child, I’d often comb through the trash to recover discarded tomes. Where my neighbors saw old and water-stained trash, I saw glorious treasure. I’d sniff dog-eared yellowed pages as I skipped home with my latest additions. So it’s not surprising that as an adult, I would come to love bookstores.

Bookstores, especially independent ones, are what sociologist Ray Oldenburg  referred to as “third places.” Third places are virtual or physical spaces outside of home and work/school where people gather, organize, and find and build community. In independent bookstores, it’s not uncommon to find people sipping coffee, working, or quietly sharing space with others who have bookish affinities. Madeleine Roberts-Ganim identified third spaces as places that can “affirm our identities and build empathy for identities different from our own.”

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The High School: An Analysis of Yearbooks

On By econnellIn Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption, Race and Ethnicity, Sex and Gender, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and Medicine, Social Problems, Politics, and Social ChangeLeave a comment

By Karen Sternheimer

Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit & Citizens, 1903-2024 is a great example of how artifacts of everyday life can become data for sociological analysis. As a scholar of gender and sports, Messner realized that yearbooks serve as a window to view past constructions of both sports and gender.

His own high school, Salinas High School, seemed like a natural fit, as he had about 30 years of books—not just his own, because his father served as a coach for nearly 30 years and other family members attended, he had decades of books. The book blends the author’s memories (and occasionally his niece’s reflections, who attended more recently) with content analysis of the number of pages spent on boys’ sports compared with girls’ sports.

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How Adolescence Misses the Mark on Incel Culture

On By econnellIn Alyssa Lyons, Popular Culture and Consumption, Sex and Gender1 Comment

By Alyssa Lyons

The praise for the recent U.K. show Adolescence is effusive. Popular publications like Slate called Adolescence the best show of the year while the Guardian said it was “such powerful TV that it could save lives.” In just three weeks, Adolescence became the 9th most watched Netflix series of all time. With all the hype, I was curious. So, I settled down to watch the show that captured the “miserable realism” of modern incel culture.

The term “incel” emerged during 1990s internet discourse. Initially, it was used as a self-identifier among men who were involuntarily celibate. As time went on, the term took on a newer meaning: it described men who felt entitled to have sex with women but weren’t able to.

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Minimalism after Losing “Everything”

On By econnellIn Behind the Headlines, Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption3 Comments

By Karen Sternheimer

Over the years, I’ve written about minimalism a lot on this site. After losing my home and most of my possessions in the Los Angeles fire storm in January 2025, I am now officially a minimalist.

Before having this experience, when I’d see emotional reports of people returning to a burnt home, sifting through wreckage of their former stuff, I couldn’t bear to imagine that happening to me. A quick news search of the terms “lost everything in a fire” yields countless hits. What does it mean to lose “everything,” from an insider’s perspective, and why might we define our possessions as “everything” from a sociological perspective?

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On Being a Temporary Local: Sociological Lessons from Displacement

On By econnellIn Cities and Urbanization, Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption2 Comments

By Karen Sternheimer

As I recently wrote, I lost my home in the Los Angeles firestorm of January 2025. We are staying in a neighborhood about 25 miles away; while still within the city limits, the neighborhood is far different from our own. This is giving me the chance to learn to become a temporary local, something I regularly do when traveling to another country.

Being a temporary local involves learning new local customs, norms, and practices. While I didn’t need to learn a new language or worry about currency conversion, coming to a new neighborhood has brought some of the same opportunities that traveling abroad does.

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