Sociology is known as the study of human behavior, culture, and social systems. Parker alumnus and author Eric Klinenberg has explored how different events have changed and shaped how young people act and interact with each other. Klinenberg specializes in urban sociology, which, according to Science Direct, is something that is used to look for and describe normal day to day connections between people and how cities are the way they are. But there has been a sudden change in human behaviors, so what are the attributes that are causing these changes?
There are many factors that can shape how a young person acts. “For instance, some people want to know why young people feel relatively high levels of anxiety about the present and insecurity about their future,” Klinenberg said. Klinenberg also noted that there were many reasons why this phenomenon is happening but some of the key ones were climate change, AI, persistent inequality, gun violence, and political tumult. Thinking about the idea of climate change affecting behavioral phenomena, Klinenberg remarked on a documentary about the heat wave that hit Chicago in 1995, “Cooked.”
“We talk about this in my class as well as watch it in my environmental Civic Lab. The documentary shows how different social classes and different towns get affected. For example, lower class people get more affected than upper class people,” Upper School history teacher Susan Elliott said. Elliott teaches both the documentary and Klinenberg’s book in her class.
Other factors that Klinenberg gave that may be affecting how a young person acts are “issues that affect how we spend time…talking about the problem of screen time eclipsing the time we spend interacting with other people, in real life, and parents worry that social media has a corrosive effect on education and mental health.” Although there are many opinions on the matter, there is no actual evidence that social media “rots your brain.”
“It’s still early to tell how social media is changing young people. We have a lot of opinions, of course, but not nearly as much careful scientific research as we need,” Klinenberg said.
Klinenberg’s book “2020: One city, Seven people, and the Year Everything Changed,”examines how COVID-19, revealed deep social interactions. “Since 2020, we’ve grown more distrustful, more polarized, more disdainful of our political adversaries,” Klinenberg said. His work on urban sociology expands how “normal” day to day interactions are deeply complex.
