Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

      A Reflection of U.S. Culture

      On his 1957 album, Birth of the Cool, famous jazz musician Miles Davis defined the meaning of “cool” for a generation. To Davis, being cool meant being as calm and steady as cool water. However, long before Davis defined it, being cool meant many different things to many different people. We can be sure that it will come to mean many other things in the future. Whatever it means specifically, being cool will remain important to people, especially young people, long into the future.

      For decades smoking cigarettes was seen as a cool thing to do. Smoking was depicted in this way in the movies, in advertising, and elsewhere. However, with the avalanche of negative health information associated with smoking, many have come to see smoking cigarettes as a decidedly uncool, if not a stupid, thing to do. However, a recent New York Times article, “The Juul Is Too Cool,” makes it clear that a relatively new high-tech form of smoking, Juuling (a form of vaping), has, fueled by social media, grown greatly in popularity. Vaping was introduced in 2004, and now almost 11 million adult Americans vape. It has come to be considered cool among college, high school, and middle school students. One high school class president said, explicitly, that “vaping is cool.” Ironically, Juuling was first developed as a method to help wean people from smoking (cigarettes), although over half of those who now vape also smoke cigarettes. Juuling delivers nicotine (which is not a carcinogen), but not the carcinogens associated with cigarette smoking. However, there is a fear that Juuling could lead to an increase in cigarette smoking and therefore to the health risks associated with it.

      While they do not look like cigarettes, Juuls have replaceable pods with tobacco. Juuls are easy to get in local stores or online. They take many forms, but the most attractive are those that are small, easily concealed, might look like USB drives, and are rechargeable. They produce an aerosol with a variety of flavors and aromas (e.g., of mango). They create little smoke. All of this makes it easy for Juuls to be used by teenagers in their parents’ homes or in class. This is the case even though it is illegal to sell vaping devices to anyone under 21 years of age. Some vaping products are designed to appeal to teenagers by looking like juice boxes and candy with such names as “One Mad Hit Juice Box” and “Vape Heads Sour Smurf Sauce.”

      Efforts are under way to better control the Juuling and vaping industries, especially the distribution of these technologies to those under 21. A major impediment to these control efforts is the positive feeling associated with Juuling: “I took a sharp experimental inhalation and nearly jumped. It felt as if a tiny ghost had rushed out of the vaporizer and slapped me on the back of my throat” (Barshad 2018). Nevertheless, in late 2018 Juul, under great pressure from the government and public opinion, announced that it would suspend the retail sale of most of its flavored e-cigarette pods and cease promoting them on social media.

      In the unlikely event that efforts at controlling Juuling are successful, there will be yet other things and behaviors that teenagers—and others—will come to consider cool.

      Juuling is just the most recent form of smoking, and more generally of being cool, that has played a central role in American culture for a century or more.

      A Definition of Culture

      Culture encompasses the ideas, values, practices, and material objects that allow a group of people, even an entire society, to carry out their collective lives in relative order and harmony. There are innumerable ideas, values, practices, and material objects associated with most cultures. As a result, no one individual can possibly know them all or what they all mean. But people must know at least the most basic and important elements of their culture. Knowledge of a shared culture leads people to behave in similar ways and to adopt a similar way of looking at the world. However, it is important to remember that there are differences within, as well as between, cultures. This point was reflected in the early 2015 murderous attacks in Paris by Islamic radicals on such cultural symbols as a French humor magazine and a kosher supermarket. There are profound differences in France today among French, Muslim, and Jewish cultures.

      Closer to home, consider the cultures of the Bloods and the Crips, two street gangs with origins in Los Angeles in the early 1970s but now existing nationwide (Bichler et al. 2017; Covey 2015; Deutsch 2014). Members of the two gangs distinguish themselves from each other in a variety of ways but most notably by their defining colors—red for Bloods and blue for Crips. These colors and other symbols are very meaningful to gang members, helping them mark territories, easily identify friends and foes, and signify their values. The symbols—and their meanings—have been created by the group itself and passed down from one gang member to another.

      In contrast, for those who are not members of the group, an idea, a value, a practice, or an object may have little meaning, may mean something completely different,