The Pleasures of Flipping Through

One of the great losses of our digital age, as others have noted, is that our new technologies have changed how we browse. We no longer move through the books; the books move through us. With so much research material readily dropped into our laps, it is not necessary anymore to stand up, walk to the library, and wander through the stacks. We still browse, of course (using “browsers” to do so, no less), but our paths to serendipity are now different. It is easy to worry, perhaps without warrant, that our unanticipated discoveries are now more bounded and our surprises more incremental. Are we reinforcing the walls of our intellectual silos as we focus our searches around the cites (and sites) that are most immediately useful to us? Are we becoming specialists with less spirit?

A related, though less discussed, loss is tied to the benefits gained from flipping through hard copies of books and, especially, journals. Online tables of contents not only deprive us of a distinctive and imprinting tactile experience, but they also make it much more difficult to poke around. The three mouse actions—previous page, scroll, select—one is required to repeat over and over and over again to look through an online issue cannot replace the appeal of actively leafing through an issue, letting your eyes fall where they may.

You would be hard pressed to convince me that any sociology journal loses more in this electronic transition than Contemporary Sociology. This is a journal made to flip through. Short but substantial pieces in a format that encourages the discovery of books and arguments that you would never otherwise encounter; topics that are suddenly interesting when discussed in a broad context; and distinct authorial voices that are not allowed to shine through in standard empirical articles. Flipping through a volume provides a small but telling window into how sociology is practiced and what sociology is at a particular point in time. You see the subjects that most occupy the field’s attention, the theories that organize the field’s thoughts, the bases of evaluation, and even the intellectual fads. These are not insights that can be gained by clicking on one or two discrete reviews; they are a product of the journal as a whole, the culmination of phrasings, comparisons, timbres of critique, and commentary on the state of the discipline.

This window is especially valuable when it affords perspective on the sociological past. Flipping through the first volume of Contemporary Sociology, for example, produces an experience something like stepping into the stylized world of Mad Men. It is 1972, and there is a business-like tone to most of the reviews. They are more buttoned-down, often coarser ¹ , and feel like they were typewritten by men in single-breasted suits. The opening sections of these issues include a symposium on Parsons’s The System of Modern Societies (dense with detailed discussions of the AGIL-scheme and the Cybernetic Hierarchy ² ), two extended reviews—one complimentary, one critical—of B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and Cold War debates about whether or not some authors are too sympathetic to the Soviet Union. And while there are countercultural undercurrents here as well—a “scientist’s eyewitness report” on group sex, for instance, only merits a shrug from a blasé reviewer: “A book of this sort is no longer daring”—they are overshadowed by “serious” discussions of theory, psychology, and urbanism. Reading these issues is enjoyable because of the nuggets you stumble across and because the material is simultaneously familiar and jarring.

So in the spirit of flipping through, and as a product of my own flipping through, Contemporary Sociology will look back at these old volumes and dedicate a small section of each issue (called “In Retrospect”) to reproducing two or three reviews from years past. These reviews might be selected for any of a variety of reasons—relevance, quality, oddness, standpoint—but the overarching goal is to provide a glimpse into how sociologists interacted both with each other and with ideas at a moment in time. The reviews, though brief, are representations of a moment. They are practical interchanges that can provide a perspective on how sociology saw itself, a perspective that is not captured in the few theoretical and empirical classics that we still read from that time.

These few selections, as I have just argued, will not in themselves provide a holistic sense of the time period. At best they might provide encouragement to close the laptop and visit the stacks or the crazy hoarder of old journals down the hall (by sociological decree, every department is required to have one). Then it is just a matter of picking up an old issue, turning to a random page, and experiencing the pleasures of flipping through.