Christmas Essay: frameworks for social observation in universities and amongst Internet comedians

Many people make observations contrasting societies or parts of a single society or what a single society has been like over time. A caricature of an old person, such as a grandfather, is that his conversation often involves telling us how things were in his youth compared to now: “In my day…” Social scientists also make such contrasts: in some cases it is their job even to do so. But they do so in highly restricted ways. For social anthropologists, some themes are much more prominent than others, as if they were in a game with more points for writing on one of those themes, such as kinship and gift exchange. For economists, it is as if there were more points for devising a rational actor model. This raises an important but neglected question in philosophy of social science: whether it is better to submit to some such framework, to play such a narrow-minded game, than simply observe? In this paper, I draw attention to how comedians on the Internet, specifically on Instagram, also use restrictive frameworks for social observation. I focus on three who make a set of contrasts between “how we talk with how they talk”: to suggest differences of character or skepticism about certain concepts used in another society. A question arises of whether this is better for getting viewings or likes.