Image from Windows/Unsplash

Usually, I will try not to write articles from a position of authority, but I will have to make an exception in this case, because this article will be meaningless if I don’t show I have knowledge in the field. Besides, this article still fulfills my mantra of helping the public prepare to be active, empowered, knowledgeable participants in society without the interference of power interests. So, I did receive a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology. You can verify this by going to the website YuVerify, clicking on “Begin Your Search,” making sure you’re on the page “Search by Name,” and then typing in my name Kevin Zuccherato.

Please be aware that this list is not exhaustive and will be continuously updated.

· Academic sociology papers use lots of technical and unfamiliar terminology, but that shouldn’t scare you off. Set yourself apart from academics by writing in terms that the public can understand. Sociology isn’t complicated enough that it needs to be conveyed through specialized vocabulary, but universities do that anyway, keeping laypeople’s voices out of the knowledge-creation process and preventing the masses from contributing to social change. For your study to connect with the public, you can’t write it like an academic journal.

· When planning your study, make sure you explicitly state what falls within the scope of your study and what doesn’t. For example, if you’re studying employment, you must decide whether you want to study all employment, if you want to focus only on full-time employment, or if you want to research other employment arrangements. If you’re studying violence, make sure you have an idea of what forms of violence you will be studying. Even if you’re studying all forms of violence, list all the forms of violence you can think of, just so the reader can feel reassurance that your study is well-structured.

· Do some research on sampling techniques and choose the one that’s best suited for your study. This page is a fantastic resource for learning about sampling techniques.

· Your introductory section should contain your research question, your scope (as mentioned earlier in this article), and an argument stating why your project is worth carrying out.

· If you’re not a member of an academic or corporate institution, ethics boards won’t be interested in reviewing your plans. Because of this, let your readers know that you are not a professional or trained researcher and that this precludes you from submitting your paper to an ethics board.

· When describing your methodology, note where you will be collecting your data, how much data you will be collecting, and the data’s time span.

· Also in your methodology section, be sure to constantly refer to the scope you’ve set in your introduction and show that you are consistently applying that scope to your data.

· Assess the ethical quality of your study.

· Near the end of your paper, discuss the weaknesses of your study and speculate on how it could have been better. This will open up new topics for other researchers to explore.

· If you used questionnaires or an interview guide in your study, place them in the appendix, located at the very end of your article.

Hopefully this will inspire you to collect meaningful data that could help guide people to develop strategies for a better future!

Article also available at https://medium.com/illumination/checklist-for-an-amateur-sociology-research-paper-2165ddc99919.

#List #Sociology #Research #Advocy #Empowerment

Discuss...

This article is also visible at https://medium.com/non-monetized-together/dear-2088-im-sorry-that-you-re-society-is-doomed-due-to-2023-internet-misusage-9909d150161c.

Mimi Thian/Unsplash

Hello 2088, I’m from 2023. I’m here to apologize for the irresponsible ways my society has used the Internet and how it resulted in social disaster for your society. Anybody from the 2020s who agrees can write their name in a comment on this article. This way, they can let the future know where they stand.

I fail to understand how people can be given a platform that contains almost all the relevant information in the world and that allows them to communicate to almost anybody instantly, and then still manage to screw it up this badly. They’re given the world at a low cost and then waste it on trolling, blocking people, spreading misinformation, and making negative generalizations about groups of people.

I study online social interaction with the same inventive attitude as people who study technology and medicine in 2023. It pains me to say that the vast majority of problems caused by Internet interactions are easily avoidable. Depending on the situation, it can be a matter of just asking people before making assumptions, being willing to be proven wrong, trying to understand someone’s perspective before shutting it down, or not expecting the opposing political side to immediately understand the subtext of your political views without telling them.

Just because I’m from 2023 doesn’t mean I wish to be associated with this online culture. I’m very concerned with how it will affect your lives. And the issue cannot be solved by university researchers because the people who’ll benefit from these changes will not be reading academic publications. It will actually be solved by people who post about the situation on the Internet. This way, they can work from within to cure the affliction.

Tim Marshall/Unsplash

Yet the problem is too widespread for any one person to make any large-scale changes, so I took the initiative to carve a small corner of the Internet where people have no incentive to display such careless behaviour to the masses. The final result is Nonmonetized Together, a social hub where anybody is free to suggest, develop, and receive feedback on ideas for making the Internet a better place. Well, not just the Internet, I mean the physical world as well, but the solution to a lot of physical world problems starts with considering how Internet communication plays a role in the problem. Accessible through Medium and the Fediverse, Nonmonetized Together takes advantage of the idea that people’s decisions and beliefs can be influenced by what they read on the Internet, and that we have the power of making a positive or negative influence.

How can I be certain that people on Nonmonetized Together will not benefit from deliberately causing trouble? Well, every word I write and every decision I make for this community is made with the intention for avoiding side effects that generally come with social media. Maybe founders of some other online communities do the same, but what’s unique about Nonmonetized Together is that this is its main purpose. It’s not to share memes, discuss a fandom, repost articles, or anything else.

This means that Nonmonetized Together will also attract people who want to see positive change on Internet communities. These people will focus on being compassionate, articulate, inspirational, and patient.

I believe that even if anyone tries to provoke outrage within the community, they will be unsuccessful because their approach will stand in opposition to the motivations of the community members and their contagious positivity. Many other communities let their emotions get the best of them and try to “defeat” the troll, giving into their toxicity and the rest of the Internet’s negative atmosphere. Instead, I’m counting on the community to provide peaceful and logical responses that will instead frustrate their attempts at rage bait instead of getting sucked into them. Perhaps this could be done by focusing on their unnecessary nature of the junk comments, not their shortcomings.

Brooke Cagle/Unsplash

On the other hand, people who flat-out ignore small-scale trolls are just as toxic as the trolls themselves. I get that large-scale attacks can go out of control and needs to be shut down in those cases, but I’m talking about small-scale trolling.

It’s frustrating to see so many people fall for the advice to “ignore the trolls” without making the link between that and the social unrest in 2023. People keep saying they wish society wasn’t so paranoid and hostile, yet it seems like they want to do everything BUT directly respond to the causes. Websites in 2023 either remove inflammatory comments or encourage them. Nonmonetized Together is the only online space I can think of that aims to hold people responsible, turn these incidents into positive learning opportunities, and provide a better world for our children and grandchildren.

In 2023, people really seem to think that ignoring Internet trolls takes away their power, but ignoring them would likely mean the troll would just move on to someone who would give them exactly what they want anyway. So, ignoring them does nothing at all.

To make authentic social progress, people must react in a way that will not satisfy the disruptors, and that is what I am hoping to do here. As Bishop Robert Barron wrote, “[t]o turn the other cheek is to prevent [one] from hitting you the same way again. It is not to run or to acquiesce, but rather to signal to the aggressor that you refuse to accept the set of assumptions that have made his aggression possible” (50).

Another feature about Nonmonetized Together is that it aims to have a level playing field. Now, competition over resources, power, and influence is great from a social justice standpoint, but I hope people will be discouraged from it on Nonmonetized Together (I’ve never seen anybody attempt it on here before). I just feel that there should be at least one online community where people can share knowledge without worrying about running into those who care more about attacking them than anything they have to say. Imagine coming up with a great idea on Nonmonetized Together, being able to run it through a noncompetitive community, test it out in an environment with a level playing field, and only then taking it out into the wider world and using it as an ideological weapon. The opposition’s ideas wouldn’t stand a chance because they wouldn’t have the same screening process.

This requires the users and me to have an awareness of the inequalities present in the outside world, be careful that they do not take over Nonmonetized Together, and be willing to learn about the existence of inequalities they were previously unaware of. If people do attempt domination tactics on this community, hopefully they will be devalued by the wisdom in other members’ ideas and responses.

Nghia Le/Unsplash

For a couple reasons, I feel like I’m a great candidate for making sure Nonmonetized Together doesn’t fail. First, because I’m extremely honest but try to be sensitive to other people’s feelings at the same time. I’m motivated to be honest because it is socially rewarding, because I struggle to lie convincingly, and because I don’t like feeling guilty.

The second reason is because I have realized I don’t need any more political power than I already am given. Because of this, I trained my brain to stop affiliating with any political sides. This way, I could leave it up to the readers to take ownership of their own political activity on Nonmonetized Together, instead of being under my political control and influence. I also chose to seek meaning from Catholicism instead of politics, and the result is that I’m more willing to inspire others than bring down people I disagree with.

Inspiring others is what Nonmonetized Together is all about. I’m that sure the left, centre, and right all have their own ways of being inspired by what they read on here, but all that matters is that they are inspired positively and productively. If you feel that this does a better job at supporting future generations than the current state of the Internet in 2023, sign your name in the comments section, but be honest! Historians may look back at this post and trace your name to your online activity.

References

Barron, Robert. Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith. Image, 2011.

#Future #Power #Internet #Sociology #Activism

Discuss...

Photo courtesy of geralt/Pixabay

I listen to lots of electronic music but haven’t been to a nightclub. I just don’t see the purpose of them in today’s society and am surprised they are not viewed as obsolete. I can’t think of a single purpose they would serve that the Internet doesn’t do better, even without the pandemic.

If you want to find new music, you can get a streaming service and discover new music with the algorithm feature. Or you could search through music review websites (such as Spin, Consequence, or Pitchfork) or music databases (like Discogs, RateYourMusic, and last. FM) to find something that interests you.

If you want to socialize with friends, you could hang around at someone’s house and play music there. This seems much better than clubbing to me. You can play whatever you want, bring whatever you want, it’s free, and it’s safer.

If you want to meet new people that have similar tastes in music, you could just hop onto social media and look them up there.

I’d love to hear what anybody else thinks of this.

Also, don’t you think it’s kind of inconvenient that they are only open late at night? Nightclubs are probably missing huge economic opportunities by not being open during the day and the evening.

This article was originally posted to Medium on May 16, 2022 (https://medium.com/illumination/how-have-nightclubs-managed-to-survive-the-internet-3ee9d2cf0f55?source=friends_link&sk=ffc5e9f53047dca859594a9e6d9363e6).

#Technology #Recreation #Music #Culture #Sociology

Discuss...

Elnaz Asadi/Unsplash

This post was originally published on March 1, 2022 on Medium (https://medium.com/@non-monetized_together/heres-a-new-genre-have-fun-9da99905b762?source=friends_link&sk=89edf929eeeb24039dc20d45881bb7dc)

#PostsecondaryEducation #Politics #BachelorsDegree #Sociology

I have an idea for a new approach to creative works. Not just writing but all forms of art. My idea here is to forget about established characteristics of quality and instead to focus solely on the entertainment factor.

Medium editors, this means that grammatical or spelling errors are left in there by design, so please do not fix them!

So here is my attempt at this creative form:

AMSTERONGpbj_5MILLYUN died from an Uzi knifle and is now a ghost. Trapped in a balloon. But where did the balloon came from?  After which he forgot how to live. Cause he dead.

Trapped in a balloon. One day the ghost saw his sister skiing and rolled over to see her. “Hi,” he said. But it came out like “quack.”

The sister did n ot notice. She packed her stuff and left.

Tomorrow, she receives a call from her niece. “talks in Polish.” The two finish talking and leave. The call was to ask the sister about plans for seeing each other. The sister said she was too busy with work and her dead brother.

Winter rolls around. The sister was huddling under the blanket to keep warm. Suddenly, she heard a voice. It was her phone talking to her.

“Hi”

“Hi,” the sister said nervously.

“I’m lonely,” said the phone.

“You shouldn’t have feelings,” exclaimed the sister.

The phone then read out a recipe for chilli stew.

THE END

Discuss...

This was originally published on Medium on February 1, 2023 (https://medium.com/@non-monetized_together/im-embarrassed-to-be-a-sociology-major-a5ea683a2f40?source=friends_link&sk=27c2adb611375a6c23b8d2dcb21d4ef2)

#sociology #power #academia #education #cringe

Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

Now that I’m finally about to graduate university, I can look back and say it was a mostly positive experience. Nevertheless, it has led me to lose faith in academic sociology. I am also majoring in sociology, which is an uncomfortable fact for me to accept. Don’t get me wrong, sociology is interesting, and I’m looking forward to finding work somewhere in the field, but I really don’t want to associate with the academic side of it.

I’ve came to the conclusion that it is just another way for the well-to-do to impose their power on everyone else by depicting their social platform as science. Yes, even the so-called radical socialist academics. I’m sure there are many researchers who don’t intend to participate in that, but they are caught in the institutional apparatus. As someone who has no business fighting in either side of the class conflict, I just want to push that to the side and move on with my life.

In my five years of attending university, I’ve read enough papers to know that the people who write them don’t give their readers any room for interpretation or inspiration. The publishers wouldn’t greenlight that. Every article is trying to say, “shut up and listen to me.”

The researchers will sometimes study ordinary people, but will never cite them, even when they are their academic “specialty.” And worse, the academy does not believe citizen experts are credible. Instead, the academics only cite each other. As a result, attending university narrowed my perspective instead of broadening it.

I have asked my sociology professor Nancy Mandell if an academic paper could get published if it cited sources outside the academy. She said no, universities are not interested in publishing that. She also said that they won’t publish articles that encourage the reader to come up with their own interpretations of the research.

Sociology really isn’t all that complicated. Anybody could learn it. What differentiates academic sociologists from everyone else is that they can use specialized terms and can get away with being a smartass about it. It has nothing to do with the value or intelligence one brings to the field.

I’m in a position in my life where politics, social services, and the economy are mostly afterthoughts. But since I sat through a bunch of lectures and read through some papers, I’m considered a better authority on these subjects than somebody who has to directly deal with them daily.

Non-Monetized Together aims to fill in this gap of knowledge formed by academic sociology. By encouraging an active comments section, it is not just a blog, but an online community, a virtual classroom, and an opportunity for readers to volunteer their stories. I wanted to build a space where people of all walks of life can build off each other’s knowledge, create their own theories, and prove that they can be intellectuals too.

Just remember, we are all equals here.

Discuss...

Medium comments:

The publishers wouldn’t greenlight that. Every article is trying to say, “shut up and listen to me.”

Yes. I am an academic. So true.

Brian G (aka 'bumpyjonas') – he/him

---

Mr. Kevin, I can show this essay to a dear friend, a retired professor of Sociology, and can imagine the response. “There's no data to back that up”.

We love her to death, and I have had real exchange over issues in life. Although I may have years of personal experience behind my 'working opinion' on the subject, there's no data to back it up. I believe that means, 'tested data' gained and published.

True. My data is collected personally: seen, felt, repeated over time. Perhaps empirical, and with my own observations as verification.

She is right of course. There are always variables that can alter my personal findings. If my data hasn't been published to be scrutinized by others, then it remains a theory.

So I live my life in question whenever I remember to do so. My impressions are indeed valuable. We ought to all proceed without closed opinions. Life is better.

dick

Yeah, you don't need a sociology degree to collect data.

Kevin the Nonmonetized

#Sociology #Internet #Atheism #Reddit #Acceptance

This article was originally published to Medium on August 14, 2022. (https://medium.com/@non-monetized_together/people-on-the-internet-are-assuming-the-worst-of-one-another-80f52cad14f3?source=friends_link&sk=dfec150cec99e26c246633942eca4235)

Back in 2013, Reddit user Aalewis posted this to the atheism subreddit, going viral, prompting ridicule, and becoming a meme:

“Just to be clear, I’m not a professional ‘quote maker’. I’m just an atheist teenager who greatly values his intelligence and scientific fact over any silly fiction book written 3,500 years ago. This being said, I am open to any and all criticism.

‘In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.’” — Aalewis (source: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric)

I will admit this quote certainly isn’t perfect. It reads like a teenager trying too hard to sound adult. As well as having punctuation errors, what does Aalewis even mean by “professional quote maker?” Yet they aren’t actually saying anything wrong for an atheist. I’m religious myself, and even I find it hard to interpret this post as meaning anything other than “atheism and human knowledge have been so useful for me that I have achieved a state of fulfillment equivalent to what spirituality promises to offer.” Tell me how you can be an atheist without agreeing with this.

Well, let’s see what others have to say. I’ll start with responses from the original thread, which is now only viewable on the Internet Archive. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20130109064934/http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/15xwij/i_came_up_with_this_quote_just_a_few_minutes_ago/)

Image from Brett Jordan/Unsplash

“Hey, Aalewis.

If I’m right, you’re probably feeling pretty damn awful right now. If I were you then for the next few years you might cringe at night at the thought of having once posted this.

It’s one of the inevitable mistakes of that phase between youth and maturity. Every single person who posted in this thread has them too; I’ve got five I could name right now. There’s that one quote, “If I could do my life over, I would make the same mistakes, only sooner”; to that I say, bollocks to that. These kinds of things just suck like a black hole. But at the very least, we’ve all had them at some point.

I’ll point out the immediate things I want to get across. For a start, atheism doesn’t mean belittling theists or going out of your way to humiliate or disprove them. It means just not believing in divinity of any form. Neither does atheism immediately equal intelligence.

Secondly, it’s all well and good to be a smart bloke but without a healthy does of wisdom and humility you’re not going to be someone anybody could be happy to talk to.” — Priderage

Ridiculous. Priderage started off putting the blame on Aalewis for other people making fun of them, but then started promoting respect and humility, as if Aalewis wasn’t already doing so in the first place! Aalewis didn’t even mention theists in their post, let alone belittle them. Plus, they were humble — they just mentioned they were open to criticism. Also, atheism equals intelligence the same way that theism equals intelligence. Everybody has an intelligence, save for the comatose, the brain-dead, and the newborn.

Priderage’s response continues for a while but basically the entire gist of their comment is contained in the excerpt above (check the link for yourself to see their full comment). So no, their comment really does mean what it looks like it means. But what’s even crazier is that the comments were practically worshipping Priderage for making such a deep and meaningful response.

“But I am an atheist forum, I’m just gushing over a user who called someone out for expressing their atheism in a normal way!” — r/atheism

I really should at least compliment Priderage on the sympathetic nature of their reply, but the way it was paired with a message of mockery makes me question their true intentions.

Priderage may not be aware of the subconscious messages they communicated: making a tribute to atheism is an “inevitable mistake,” openly disagreeing with theism equals mocking it, some atheists lack intelligence, being content with earthly knowledge is not humble, and publicly supporting atheism means “you’re not going to be someone anybody could be happy to talk to.” The popularity of Priderage’s response really speaks to how fragile religious structures were in 2013 as well as how uncomfortable people were towards pro-atheist comments, even among atheists.

Or does it?

ammar sabaa/Unsplash

Could it be possible that I misread their response? Totally. Remember, I created this blog with the intention of writing not from a position of authority, but as an equal to my readers. I’m just one guy.

But if that’s so, then Priderage didn’t bother to consider the possibility that Aalewis’s comment may have just been an innocent shout-out to atheism. This shows that they nonetheless assumed the worst in people. As you will see, this is a pattern that got repeated through many of the other comments. If one of these commenters considered that maybe not everyone online is a jerk, this story could have gone very differently.

This next response is an example of a greater problem with the Internet that is so ubiquitous and unaddressed that I’m surprised that I haven’t written an article about it yet.

“Wow, that is so pretentious, poorly written and self indulgent.

I can just imagine how “deep” OP probably thought that was. He probably spent at least a little bit of time crafting that “quote” into what he thought was a concise and introspective nugget of genius. Now he deletes the post running away with his tail between his legs.” — ****ty-analogy

You should keep track of whenever you see someone online complaining that someone else thinks they are so smart. Nine times out of ten, they are talking about someone who never even hinted about such a thing. It’s a cop-out people use whenever they don’t have any actual arguments, yet I don’t see people point this issue out.

This case was no different. That’s ****ty-analogy’s entire comment right there, so you can see that they didn’t actually have anything to support their claim, and it’s at 208 points.

Karim MANJRA/Unsplash

XenoRenseller posted a response that backed up the conclusions I made earlier about what Priderage’s subconscious messages meant to society. It reads, “[Aalewis] has to attack the image of god to help justify his stance; he’s definitely not comfortable.” But when your definition of “attack” is wide enough to apply to Aalewis’s comment, you’re putting huge limitations on how you expect “comfortable” atheists to behave. So, XenoRenseller was strongly opposing freedom of atheist speech.

Same with Zlatanista, who responded with “[i]f someone asked me to provide one quote that summed up r/atheism, this would be it. It literally has everything: arrogance, naivety and bizarrely misplaced egotism.” This is especially ironic because by putting down an entire subreddit, Zlatanista was displaying the same traits that they were baselessly accusing Aalewis of.

Many other users in the thread accused Aalewis of being egotistical or insulting. They include DrSexNugget, shodanx, HarlanEllisonIsGod, DefenestratorOfSouls, HeresWhyYouSuck, and attaxx. And this is just going off the comments that have enough upvotes to be visible in the archived version. None of the points they made were valid.

In the midst of all of this outrage, I’ve found a comment on a different thread, except this one has the potential to guide us to a more positive future (thank you, double-happiness, for sharing it with us) (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/15yjpi/comment/c7ro4en/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). It shows two copy-pasted comments, one of which appears to be an Aalewis comment that appeared in the original thread, but did not receive enough upvotes to appear in the linked archive version. This doesn’t prove that the comment is legit, but if it is (and it likely is), it confirms my suspicions about Aalewis’s intentions.

“[deleted] -232 points 1 day ago

At no point did I say I was “special”. I don’t think myself better than anyone because of my atheism. I did not insult anyone by saying I don’t feel euphoria at a phony blessing.”

Then, if this is real, not only did people make quick negative assumptions about Aalewis, but when Aalewis explained that the mob was wrong, they got downvoted. Not only does this mean Internet atheists were insecure about being open about their lack of faith, but it shows that they were not willing to learn from Aalewis when they challenged everyone else’s insecurities. If this doesn’t point to the authoritarian capabilities of groupthink, I don’t know what does.

But that was almost 10 years ago.

And also 11 months ago. (https://www.reddit.com/r/21stCenturyQuotes/comments/pp8dnm/in_this_moment_i_am_euphoric_not_because_of_any/?sort=confidence)

Johnny Cohen/Unsplash

I’ve been trying to make this obvious, but in case you haven’t noticed, the purpose of this post (and all my posts on Non-Monetized Together) isn’t to unleash frustration or to create drama with others. It’s to look back at an unfortunate incident and ask, “what went wrong?” If we are more honest about our worldviews, which include religion, we can have more substantial discussions and learn from each other more easily. How do we make that our reality?

It would require theists to develop some thicker skin so they avoid mislabelling opposing ideas as attacks. It would require atheists to go into more detail about their beliefs so others can understand their positive intentions. We all must challenge ourselves to work towards a resolution when chatting with strangers online. The future of our humanity lies in these interactions.

Resilience, openness, and solutions — these are also three of the goals that Non-Monetized Together is working to achieve. I know it’s cliché, but the impact of these virtues extend far beyond yourself. By connecting with each other and believing in our goals, we can be a part of something incredibly powerful.

Something more than just an unremarkable quote from an unidentified Redditor.

Discuss...