The number one emailed article over at the New York Times these days is a story about positive psychology and how popular the field has become on college campuses. There’s a link in the article to Authentic Happiness, the website for the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania where they have umpteen questionnaires that gauge your character strengths (maybe this is the engine behind the Which Superhero are you? Quiz), level of happiness, optimism, life satisfaction and a bunch of other stuff. (WARNING: Huge procrastination potential!)
Well, I also noticed they have a “Positive Psychology Anthem” in the Resources & Links section on the right side of the page. I briefly wondered if that was pop-psychology code for “mission statement,” but lo, the link leads to an mp3 file called “On the Road to Narrow Victory” by David R. Walker. Would there be lyrics? Unfortunately, no. But synth strings abound!
Now, besides puzzling over the title (was it inspired by recent midterm elections?), I wonder how an academic field goes about adopting an anthem and why sociology shouldn’t be next in line to have one.
I have no grand designs, and even fewer suggestions…but perhaps Chris Uggen, Jeremy Freese, and Dan Myers could form an exploratory committee, with future acoustic visualization considerations provided by Eszter Hargittai?
Let me know if I should dust off my trombone.
6 comments ↓
I can only imagine the battle over an official sociology anthem. I’m sure whatever the discipline picked would be something I didn’t like, perhaps deliberately to spite me.
Funny, Jeremy, I was just thinking what visualization would be especially annoying to you. Just kidding! Interesting idea, Jim.
On a different note, I like the footer Jim, works better than the previous focus on procrastination. Also, I’ll have to contact you for the code regarding the email follow-up notification as well as the preview (although I thought that put a lot of burden on the system).
Hi Eszter. Thanks for the comment on the footer.
As for the codes you mention, I’m using two WordPress plugins to add live previews and comment notification. So far they’ve worked without a hitch. Here are the links:
Live Comment Preview: http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/LiveCommentPreview
Subscribe to Comments 2.0: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress.....-comments/
ok, i’m a bubbly, happy pro-sociology sort, but in those rare darker moments, i catch myself singing world party’s ship of fools.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxn4jPFszPI
all aboard, my friends.
Thanks, Jim, I’ll have to try out those plug-ins one of these days when I emerge from under the pile of deadlines covering me right now.
That’s cool, Chris. I was thinking even a bit darker-er and more anthemic, maybe Social Distortion’s Ball & Chain?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh67nklWHfM
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