Progress Notes: Week 09

This week I attempted to find more sociology videos on TikTok and was mostly thwarted in this effort. While I found a lot of videos about social justice movements (BLM, climate justice, feminism) there was not a lot of sociology. I have concluded that sociology tiktok doesn’t exist except occasionally tangentially to academic tiktok (which I found some of last week). 

 

After concluding this, I started watching Sociology videos on other platforms. Crash Course Sociology had more of the most comprehensive overviews of sociology. They start with Compt, define society, an explanation of how society influences what listening to music in your bedroom is like (this is a great example for illustrating social influence), what is social science and how is soc different from other social sciences, sociological perspective, social location and how that affects your options, social capital. Follow up videos cover research methods, theorists (Durkheim and suicide, Marx and conflict theory, DuBois and race conflict, Martineau and gender conflict, etc) also symbols, performance, socialization, deviance, crime, social stratification and mobility, sexuality, gender, age, race, education systems, health, religion. This is to say that there is a lot of content on this channel and it’s all very well done. Their videos are all around 10 minutes in length. What I take away from this is that there’s a lot of material that can be distilled and that getting this information down in 1-minute TikTok videos is going to take some serious simplifying and limiting of what we cover. 

 

Comparing TikToks with youtube channels which have content similar to what we want to cover, I find that the aesthetic and stylistic choices are vastly different. Youtube videos are more scripted with cleaner aesthetics whereas TikToks I’ve watched lean more towards “authentic and unscripted” (though this too is a type of performance). 

 

The next steps are going to be meeting with Katie to pick the concepts we want to try to cover and start brainstorming how we can distill them. Also possibly starting to look at what the creation process looks like for tiktok videos.

 

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