Jorn Barger

Jorn Barger

Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is an American blogger, best known today as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger coined the term weblog to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed. Some of his writings have been a source of controversy, provoking accusations of anti-Semitism. He has also written extensively on James Joyce and artificial intelligence, among other subjects; his writing is almost entirely self-published.


Biography

Barger's first computer in 1964 was one of the first programmable digital computers available, a Minivac 601 designed by Claude Shannon and advertised in Scientific American.
In high school Barger specialized in math and science, but also read Freud and James Joyce.
Even before graduating (a year early, as valedictorian), he had decided to devote his life to solving "the riddles of the human psyche". Rejecting conventional psychology entirely, he found inspiration instead in the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

In the late 1970s, Barger developed a theoretical methodology that demanded hypotheses be expressed as computer simulations, and that the simulations be refined by analyzing literary descriptions of human behavior. He called this method "cybernetic psychology", or "Robot Wisdom." Around 1978 he lived for a time at The Farm, Stephen Gaskin's intentional community in Tennessee.

During the first half of the 1980s he programmed games and educational software for the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800.

Barger is an independent scholar of artificial intelligence (AI) and has written a great deal about James Joyce. He has referred to Joyce as an early pioneer of artificial intelligence and as the master of descriptive psychology. At one time Barger worked at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the leading AI researcher Roger Schank, eventually departing over "philosophical differences".

An active participant in Usenet during the 1990s, he wrote early FAQs on ASCII art, Kate Bush, Thomas Pynchon, and James Joyce. In 1994 he formulated an "Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa."



Weblog

On December 17, 1997, Barger began posting short comments and links on his own Robot Wisdom website, thus pioneering the "weblog" as it is known today. His site soon included interlinked weblog sections titled "Fun," "Art," "Issues," "Net," "Tech," "Science," "History," "Search," and "Shop."

By 2000 he felt he had exhausted the formal possibilities of weblogs, and began instead to explore the timeline format, annotating each timeline entry with a link to a relevant resource. Meanwhile Robot Wisdom was evolving to include information and essays on James Joyce, AI, history, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends, among the topics Barger covered. Announcements of plans for a future "hardcopy edition" of Robot Wisdom for purchase began appearing at the foot of some of the site's pages.

He occasionally posted comments about trying to find types of employment that did not conflict with his philosophical ideals. The maxim "You can't serve God and Mammon" appeared at the top of his "issues.literate" weblog section. By December 2001, he was experiencing financial difficulties that he announced would cause an interruption in keeping Robot Wisdom online. Before taking the weblog offline a couple of months, he posted comments mentioning an interest in employment by telecommute but noting his philosophical concerns: "I have a gigantic psychological block against Mammon-in-general, and no longterm ideas how to overcome it. Alternative currency? Retreat to a cave?" Barger has, however, experimented with Robot Wisdom as a revenue-generator, soliciting advertisements in 2000, and, in 2005, donations via PayPal.

Previously a longtime resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico as of late 2003. Several bloggers initiated an outpouring of concern and speculation in December 2003 when Barger had not been seen online for some months. However, Barger had been known to take unexplained absences from the Internet before, and his departure turned out again to be temporary; Robot Wisdom returned in February 2005.
In a July 2005 Wired magazine item, writer Paul Boutin reported encountering a "homeless and broke" Barger walking with a mutual friend in San Francisco, California. The article said that Barger, "living on less than a dollar a day"[1] had allowed his weblog's domain registration to lapse, but that Boutin found Robot Wisdom back online a few weeks later. Boutin claimed in the story that upon subsequently meeting him at a pub, Barger told him that the previous time they had met he had been carrying a panhandling sign he had not shown him. Barger reportedly told him the sign had read, "Coined the term 'weblog', never made a dime." Barger has since said that the Boutin article was mostly "fiction." For his part, Boutin published a clarification in his own weblog, saying the headline Wired had chosen might have misled readers into thinking Barger was "living on the street," rather than staying with friends.

Robot Wisdom went offline again in late January 2007. On 10 February, Barger placed a note on his "auxiliary" free hosted weblog soliciting $10 (US) donations, payable to his web host, to help "save robotwisdom.com". By 12 February, robotwisdom.com was online again.

As of April 2007, Barger is in El Dorado, Arkansas, and most days can be found hanging out at the Barton library.


Allegations of anti-Semitism

One of the first weblog controversies revolved around his political comments and the wording of his weblog's headlines linking to articles concerning the history of Judaism, policies of Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some of the participants in a 1997 Web forum discussion Barger moderated on these issues accused him of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. The same accusations arose again in 2000, when Barger linked to an external article by means of the headline, "Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?" (Barger has since reused the headline at least once.) In an ensuing discussion (titled "What is Racism?", Barger suggested that the "Jewish ideology" of being God's chosen people was analogous to Hitler's ideology of an Aryan "master race". Shortly thereafter, the September 11 attacks on the United States prompted Barger to make several posts to Usenet suggesting that there was a Jewish conspiracy behind them.

Barger's positions on Judaism and Israel remain controversial. For a brief period in October 2005, Barger placed the sentence "Judaism worships fraud" atop his weblog.[2] Almost one year later, in September 2006, the phrase "judaism is racism" replaced "the road to hell is paved with hasbara" at the top of robotwisdom.com. The text was quickly amended to read "judaism is racism is incompatible with democracy".

In December 2005, a poll entitled, "Are You a Holocaust Skeptic?" was initiated. Barger's "Judaism timeline" makes only oblique reference to the Holocaust, identifying it merely as a catalyst for Jewish immigration to the United States. In a post to his weblog on 2nd July 2006, Barger linked to an external article entitled "Racial hatred as the real essence of Israel", with his own headline: "The real nazis show their true colors". [3]
Barger has also linked to articles [1] critical of Judaism published in The Occidental Quarterly, which has been described as a white nationalist journal. [2]

In 2007, after nine firefighters died when a roof collapsed at a Charleston, South Carolina furniture store, Barger complained [3] in his weblog how few news outlets had printed the store owner's (apparently Jewish) name.


Joyce research

At least one of Barger's essays on Joyce has been published in the James Joyce Quarterly. Barger has studied Joyce's own notebooks and manuscripts (for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) for insight into the author's own statements about his work; he has also prepared an online "shorter" annotated version of Finnegans Wake. Barger's website offers hundreds of pages of documentation for this research, although critics have noted that none of his Joyce research (except that published in the James Joyce Quarterly) has passed academic peer review. As a result it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is agreed upon by Joyce scholars, and what is Barger's conjecture. (Barger seemed to acknowledge this in 2005 when he published on USENET his list of "50 Joycean Conjectures".)


Notable postings

• Barger, Jorn (July 31, 1998). "Issues.literate weblog section." Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn (March 2002). "Judaism timeline." Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn (March 2005). "Logarithmic timeline of the universe." Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn (December 17–December 29, 1997). "Robot Wisdom WebLog for December 1997." Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn. "The saga of Jorn." Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn (May 2001). "Timeline of James Joyce's life." Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn, ed. (December 27, 2000–December 19, 2002). "What is 'Racism'?" Robot Wisdom forum discussion at Greenspun.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn. (December 2000). "What Will Your Harddrive Hold in Ten Years?" Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.
  

• Barger, Jorn. (December 13, 2001). "Yet another financial crisis." Robotwisdom.com. Retrieved Jul. 12, 2005.

External links

Robot Wisdom homepage

Robot Wisdom Weblog, since October 2006 continued as part of the Robot Wisdom auxiliary

Sheridan Road

Sheridan Road

Sheridan Road is a major north-south thoroughfare that leads from Diversey Parkway[1] in Chicago, Illinois, north to the Illinois-Wisconsin border and beyond. Throughout most of its run, it is the easternmost north-south through street, closest to Lake Michigan. From Chicago, it passes through the cities of Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Highwood, Fort Sheridan, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff, North Chicago, Waukegan and Zion, until it reaches the Illinois-Wisconsin state line in Winthrop Harbor. In Wisconsin, the road leads north through Pleasant Prairie and Kenosha, until it ends near Racine.



Chicago Path

It runs at 400 west from 2800 north to 3181 north.
It runs at 3900 north from 600 west to 956 west.
It runs at 1000 west from 3900 north to 1400 west at 7734 north. It runs at 6400 north from 970 west to 1158 west.[2]



History

Sheridan Road was original approved by Congress (circa 1832) as a military road from Fort Dearborn in Chicago to Fort Howard in Green Bay, Wisconsin.[3]
The road was named for Philip Henry Sheridan, a general in the Civil War. [4]



Places of Interest

There are several landmarks and places of interest along Sheridan Road. In order from southernmost to northernmost:

Commonwealth Plaza Condos

Loyola University, Lakeshore Campus

Emil Bach House

Calvary Cemetery

Northwestern University

Grosse Point Light

Baha'i Temple

Plaza Del Lago Shopping Mall

North Shore Congregation Israel

Ravinia Festival

Willits House

Fort Sheridan

Barat College

Lake Forest College

Great Lakes Naval Training Center

Adam Langer

Adam Langer

Adam Langer (born 1967) is an American author best known for his novel Crossing California, which was published in 2004.


Biography

Langer grew up in the West Rogers Park neighborhood on Chicago, where he attended Boone Elementary School. He attended Evanston Township High School from 1980-1984 and graduated from Vassar College in 1988. Returning to Chicago, he worked for a little over a decade as an editor, nonfiction author, playwright, theater director, and film producer. In 2000 he won a fellowship to Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and remained in New York as a senior editor of Book Magazine until it folded in 2003. He is now a full-time writer with a weekly column in The Book Standard.

He is married to Beate Sissenich, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University-Bloomington. Their daughter Nora Langer Sissenich was born on June 9, 2005.


Works

Novels

Crossing California (2004)

The Washington Story (2005)

Ellington Boulevard (2008)


As contributor

The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2000 (2000)

The Best Men's Stage Monologues 2000 (2000)

The Encyclopedia of Exes (2005)

Chicago Noir (2005)

Before: The Big Book of Pregnancy and Parenting (2006)



Plays

What I Need Is A Good Bonk On The Head (1989)

Backstage Pass (1990)

In The Shadow of A Smile (1991)

Under The Gods (1992)

The Blank Page (1995)

Dark Matter (1996)

Crime in The City (1997)

Solo Album, Volume #1: Rock ‘n’ Roll Women (1997)

Film Flam (1997)

Three Glasses of Sherry (1998)

The Critics (1999)

Coaster (2000)

What Remains Forgotten (2001)

214 Minutes (2002)

Suramo (2002)



Other

The Madness of Art (1996)



External links

Adam Langer's Home Page

Adam Langer Biography at Literary Agency

Anti Gravity Surprise

Anti Gravity Surprise

Anti Gravity Surprise (AGS) is an American public art collective founded in 2001 and based in Chicago.


History

AGS was co-founded by Kathleen Duffy and Jennifer Karmin; the two started collaborating in 1995. Past AGS collaborators have included Kelly Jackson, Liza Travis, Kathleen McLaughlin, Catherine Tryzbinski, Jeff Greenspan, Chris Jones, Meredith Mohr, Dan Mejia, Carlos Cortez, Mary Ali, Ronn Pitts, Bryan Saner, and Josh McPhee.


Collaborative process

Through discussion, AGS collaborators choose one social issue to explore and develop a fill-in-the-blank statement for the public to respond to. Reacting to the campaign of fear following 9/11, AGS produced stickers bearing the phrase “World peace is important because” (2002), posting them throughout Chicago and New York for people to write on. Exploring the prevalent notion of work as identity, AGS altered the wording on standard name tags to read “HELLO my job is” (2003), having attendees fill them out and wear them during an eight-hour AGS art event. During the recent presidential campaign, AGS designed and distributed 3,000 campaign buttons with the phrase “I WANT A PRESIDENT WHO” (2004), encouraging people to describe the leader they hope for. Each piece was designed with space for viewers to complete the thought.

Each year, AGS collaborators create a variety of multimedia projects around the chosen social issue. Past projects have included photography, sculpture, performance, sound, collage art, and video. AGS projects culminate in community events which feature a display of the art made by the collaborators and the public. They also feature performance, guest speakers who are followed by open audience discussions, and literature from relevant community groups.
AGS community events are not usually held in traditional galleries or commercial art spaces.

The first two AGS projects were presented at the SpareRoom, an artist-run cooperative on the northwest side of Chicago. The third project traveled to five city neighborhoods: Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Links Hall in Lakeview, BuddY in Wicker Park, Polvo in Pilsen, and the SpareRoom in Humboldt Park.


Exhibitions and talks

• 2002: Gathering Motion: Thought Is Action (peace), The Spareroom
  

• 2003: Second Shift: The Art Of Work (work), The Spareroom
  

• 2004: $election: Take Us To Your Leader (leadership), The Spareroom, Mess Hall, Links Hall, Polvo Gallery, Buddy Gallery, and Handlebar Cafe
  

• February 2005: Artist at Work Forums at the Chicago Cultural Center. Panelists, "Art and Activism".
  

• 2004-2006: Participating artists, Chicago Artists' Month
  

• 2004-2005: PAC/Edge Festival, Athananeum Theatre

External links

Anti Gravity Surprise

Version>04 Program Notes

Rhizome.org Review of Version>04

Chicago Artists' Month listing, 2006

Version>05 NFO EXPO Listing

Loyola University Chicago Expansion Plan

Loyola University Chicago Expansion Plan

Introduction

In 2004, Loyola University Chicago compiled a study to research future expansion opportunities for the university. As part of strategic discussions, an expanded and open planning process encompassed more than sixty meetings and interview sessions with campus and community representatives from the neighboring Rogers Park and Edgewater neighborhoods.


Context

The goal of the University is to increase enrollment over all its campuses to approximately 15,000 students or about 1,000 more than the 2004 enrollment. This means there will be a proportional increase in demand on the Lake Shore Campus academic facilities, now serving approximately 9,000 undergraduate students.

The focus of the campus will continue to be the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Graduate School and the undergraduate Nursing program. The curricular and campus life programs will inemphasize the importance of drawing people together in collaborative settings. The proposed Lake Shore Campus Plan has been developed to support and advance the university's aspirations.


Strategic Overview

Based on careful, study, capital improvements will be channeled into four sectors. These are the Central Campus and South Campus sectors, where the University now has the strongest presence and greatest physical resources; the North Campus, where limited development is envisioned; and West Campus, a Tax Increment Financing district, or TIF.


North Campus

North Campus is the University Land north of West Loyola Avenue. The east boundary is Lake Michigan and the western boundary is North Sheridan Road. Notable University-owned structures include Campion Hall at one end of West Loyola Avenue and Santa Clara Hall at the other.

It is expected that any University development in this area will be limited in scope. Any new construction will be in scale with the nearby private residences. Functions will be in keeping with surrounding land uses.

Depending upon funding and approvals, it would be desirable to construct a pedestrian/bike path along the shoreline east of Santa Clara Hall to provide access from Central Campus to Hartigan Park and Beach.


West Campus / TIF

These parcels lie to the west of the CTA right-of-way, along North Broadway Avenue and North Sheridan Road, and will continue to be studied for a variety of tax-yielding community improvement projects. Housing and parking along with new and enhansed university-owned retail space will be developed.


South Campus

The area is a mix of private and University land uses, bounded by West Sheridan Road to the north. North Broadway Avenue to the west, and North Sheridan Road to the east. The block east of North Sheridan, where the Sullivan building and the Yellow House are located, is also part of the South Campus.

The University expects to continue to use its existing properties for student housing and related activities, adding additional structures when there is opportunity to do so. New University development is anticipated to be compararible with the current community context (a densely built, urban neighborhood). New architecture will establish and reinforce the University's presence and character in the area.


Central Campus

Numerous improvements are planned on Central Campus.
(NOTE: Damen Hall is to be demolished.)

Harvey Molotch

Harvey Molotch

Harvey Luskin Molotch (born January 3, 1940) is a U.S. sociologist and a sociology professor at NYU who is renowned for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He helped create the field of environmental sociology and has advanced qualitative methods in the social sciences. In recent years, Molotch helped develop a new field—the sociology of objects.


Biography

Molotch was born Harvey Luskin in Baltimore, Maryland, where his family was in the retail car business on one side and the home appliance business on the other. His father, Paul Luskin, was among the 19,000 American servicemen who died in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 during the Second World War. His mother remarried Nathan Molotch, who adopted Harvey at age 7.
Prior to entering the army, Harvey’s father went into business with his brothers and founded a chain of discount appliance stores called Luskin’s. The business became quite successful and Harvey worked along with his brother and cousins in the stores as a salesman as he was groomed by his uncles, Jack and Joe, to be a discount king. But by the time he graduated from Milford Mill High School in Baltimore and went off to the University of Michigan (the first in his family to go to college), Molotch says “I was using my mouth as well as my brain to bite some of the hands that fed me.” (Where Stuff Comes From, p.ix). His rebellion against American materialism would lay the groundwork for his left politics and Marxist scholarship and his critique of the Vietnam War. But the biographical tensions manifest in his continued interest in the world of merchandise and material production from the appliance store days would emerge in his later sociological work.

Moloch received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1966 under the direction of Morris Janowitz, and an MA in Sociology from Chicago in 1965. He received a B.A. with highest honors in Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1963, where he wrote a thesis on John Dewey. He served in the U.S. Army, stationed in Maryland and Virginia.

Molotch was on faculty from 1968 to 2003 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also been a visiting professor at the State University of New York, Stonybrook, the University of Essex, and Northwestern University. In 1998-99 he was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. He has also been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Stanford University. He now holds a duel appointment at New York University as professor of Sociology, and Professor of Metropolitan Studies within the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.


Ideas

Racial Segregation: Rethinking “White Flight”

Molotch's early work on "white flight" overturned conventional wisdom by showing that the dynamic of neighborhood change was of a different nature than was commonly assumed. In Managed Integration (1972), Molotch begins with the simple question: is it necessarily true that racial change is accompanied by white flight? To answer his own question, Molotch developed a simple measure: the rate of property turnover. He compared the increasingly black neighborhood of South Shore, Chicago with the North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park, which was similar to South Shore in almost every way except that it had experienced little racial change. Molotch studied the Realty and Building trade journals and divided the number of properties transferred to new owners by the total number of properties located in the community. He discovered that South Shore appeared to be as stable as or more stable than Rogers Park. From this revealing measure and his interviews, he concluded — much against the grain of thinking at the time -- that it is likely that a similar number of persons would have changed their residence no matter what racial conditions existed in the area. The speed of racial change characteristic of South Shore may seem at first glance to be so high as to indicate that only a flight of white residents could make it possible. But when viewed in the context of the high mobility rate of the general urban population, it becomes perfectly reasonable for such a racial change process to occur within the context of a market characterized by normal turnover. Normal mobility makes neighborhood racial change possible, according to Molotch. When blacks constitute the bulk of those who move into the vacancies which result, racial change is made inevitable. The implication of this subtle finding was that it is the reluctance of whites who live elsewhere to move into a changing neighborhood that makes racial integration so difficult to achieve. From a policy perspective, Molotch was not certain that anything could be done. He concluded that while stablizing neighborhoods would not be easy, but the focus needs to be on geting white people to replace the whites who are leaving, rather than talking people who are leaving into staying.

Molotch also tried to determine whether, during the periods of racial transition which seemed to inevitably lead to black occupancy, the geographic propinquity that did exist led to some degree of racial integration. With painstaking fieldwork, Molotch gained precise measures “which would indicate the frequency of such contacts, the contexts in which they most often appear, and the dynamics of their development.” He visited each of the shopping strips during business hours of shopping days, and racial head-counts were made for all street-level retail establishments (including restaurants and taverns) on both streets. Among his explanations for findings like the tendency toward Saturday night segregation (including a significant increase in the number of blacks relative to whites on the streets) was that “during the hours reserved for intimacy, segregation increases.” He concluded that South Shore residents, when taking outdoor recreation as well as public indoor recreation, do not lead integrated social lives, and that blacks and whites rarely come together as equals. At the same time, Molotch's data led him to this theory: “Transracial solidarity” occurs whenever there were cross-racial communities of a shared or deviant ideology, an equality in occupational status and organizational usefulness and a lack of previously constituted local organizational ties. The questions Molotch addressed in "Managed Integration" were clearly motivated by a political commitment to building and maintaining racially integrated associations, institutions, and community, but the results did not affirm the dominant view that white flight caused racial succession. He found that his white subjects were racist in many ways, but they were not nearly as racist as they were made out to be by the theories that explained their movement.


The Santa Barbara Oil Spill and Environmental Sociology

On January 28, 1969, there was a massive eruption of crude oil from Union Oil's Platform A in the Santa Barbara Channel--an eruption which was to cover the entire city coastline (as well as much of the Ventura coastline as well) with a thick coat of crude. The oil companies paid $603,000,000 for their lease rights, but neither they nor the federal government bore any significant responsibility. Molotch, who had joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, saw in this disaster a significant research opportunity. His article "Oil in Santa Barbara and Power in America" became a founding document of the new field of environmental sociology, and a key contribution to political sociology.

Molotch argued that even though the local community is notorious for the increasing triviality of the decisions which occur within it, accident research at the local level might be capable of revealing what political scientists called the "second face of power." This is a dimension of power ordinarily ignored by traditional community studies which fail to concern themselves with the processes by which bias is mobilized and thus how issues rise and fall.

Molotch's findings highlighted the extraordinary intransigence of national institutions in the face of local dissent, but more importantly, pointed out the processes and tactics which undermine that dissent and frustrate and radicalize the dissenters who in Santa Barbara were literate and leisured -- they had the ability and the time to read, to ponder, and to get upset. He argued that this particular relationship between oil, power, and knowledge industry did not constitute a unique pattern of power in America, that all major sectors of the industrial economy led themselves to the same kind of analysis.

Molotch called for comparable studies of the agriculture industry, the banking industry, and for more accident research at the local level, which might bring to light the larger social arrangements which structure the parameters of such local debate. In this way, research at the local level might serve as an avenue to knowledge about national power. Molotch ended, "Sociologists should be ready when an accident hits in their neighborhood, and then go to work."


The Mass Media and the Social Construction Framework

Molotch helped introduce the "social construction" framework to the study of media representation. Whereas news accounts had been treated, however critically, as "failed" representations of a presumed reality, Molotch and Marilyn Lester turned attention to the idea that every account is a product of the social organization that goes into its production. In founding papers in the sociology of the mass media, Molotch and Lester took the insights of ethnomethodology to look at the Santa Barbara oil spill and the way it was covered.

"Only in an accident like an oil spill, or in a scandal, is routine political work transcended to some significant degree, thereby allowing access to information which is directly hostile to those groups who typically manage public event making."

Unlike media critics and other standard approaches to the sociology of the news, he argued that the media did not reflect a world "out there," but the practices of those having power to determine the experiences of others. Molotch and Lester developed methods that could show how ideological hegemony is accomplished by examining the records which are produced. They argued for an approach to the mass media which does not look for reality, but for practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others.

"Sociologists who habitually take their research topics and conceptual constructs as they are made available through mass media and similar sources may wish to extricate their consciousness from the purposive activities of parties whose interests and event needs may differ from their own." ("News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals," American Sociological Review, Vol 39, No. 1 (Feb., 1974), pp. 101-112).

Molotch's work has work has inspired studies of the social construction of news, of the particular ways that the content of presentation is contingent upon the social setting of its production, including the occupational workplace of news professionals as well as the larger societal setting. His own more recent work on the sociology of the mass media has included studies of war protest and the stock market.


The City as a Growth Machine

Of Molotch's diverse contributions, he is probably best known for his book Urban Fortunes (1987, with John Logan), which won sociology's most prestigious prize for scholarship in 1990, the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarly Contribution to Sociology Award, as well as the Robert Ezra Park Award of the Urban and Community Sociology section of the ASA as the best book of 1987. Urban Fortunes emerged from a series of smaller pieces published early in Molotch's career and builds on his 1976 classic paper, "The City as a Growth Machine." In this body of work, Molotch took the dominant convention of studying urban land use and turned it on its head. The field of urban sociology (as well as urban geography, planning, and economics) was dominated by the idea that cities were basically containers for human action, in which actors competed among themselves for the most strategic parcels of land, and the real estate market reflected the state of that competition. Out of this competition were thought to come the shape of the city and the distribution of social types within it (e.g. banks in the center, affluent residents in the suburbs). Long established notions such as central place theory and the sectoral hypothesis were claims that are more or less "natural" spatial geography evolved from competitive market activity.

Molotch helped reverse the course of urban theory by pointing out that land parcels were not empty fields awaiting human action, but were associated with specific interests--commercial, sentimental, and psychological. Especially important in shaping cities were the real estate interests of those whose properties gain value when growth takes place. These actors make up what Molotch termed "the local growth machine -- a term now standard in the urban studies lexicon. From this perspective, cities need to be studied (and compared) in terms of the organization, lobbying, manipulating, and structuring carried out by these actors. The outcome--the shape of cities and the distribution of their peoples--is thus not due to interpersonal market of geographic necessities, but to social actions, including opportunistic dealing. Urban Fortunes has influenced hundreds of national and international studies. A twentieth anniversary edition was issued by the University of California Press in 2007.


Other Work

Molotch has also conducted a series of studies in conversation analysis which focus on how mechanisms such as gaps silences in human conversation reveal the way power operates at the micro-interactional level. This work builds on the work of Harvey Sachs, Gail Jefferson, and Emmanuel Schegeloff. It was among the first to utilize ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in the study of traditional sociological topics, bridging what had been regarded as a highly esoteric and specialized approach to micro-sociology with mainstream, macro-level sociological issues such as hegemony and power.

More recently Moltoch has turned his attention to creating a new field of the sociology of objects. In Where Stuff Comes From, he builds on the work of Howard S. Becker and Bruno Latour, to view objects as the product of the joint work of many people, especially designers. While neo-Marxists and others have treated "commodity fetishism" as a signal of oppression, repression, and delusion, he uses this attribute of goods to understand, in a more comprehensive way, just what makes production happen.


Honors & Awards

• Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association (1988) (Urban Fortunes)
  

• Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of the American Sociological Association (1990) (Urban Fortunes)
  

• Lifetime Career Achievement in Urban and Community Scholarship issued by the American Sociological Association's Urban and Community Studies Section (2003)
  

• 2001 ASA Outstanding Journal Article of the Year in Political Sociology
  Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (2000)
  

• Resident Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center, Como Italy (1999)
  

• Stice Lecturer in the Social Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle (1996)
  

• Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Lund, Sweden (1995)