The article “Coyote and Raven put the ‘Digital’ in Technology – Hands Up and Down to Earth” by Peter Cole and Pat O’Riley sent me on many cyber-journeys. One of them was to discover the meaning of “anomie” – a new word for me.

but Coyote we desire things because we lack as my old friend Jacques Lacan (2007) used to say the stuff is filler because we are empty we have a lack of being if you’re lonely or sad or suffering from anomie you buy you consume (Cole & O’Riley, 2012)

According to the OED Online it means:

“Absence of accepted social standards or values; the state or condition of an individual or society lacking such standards.”

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica Online it means:

in societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.

The Encyclopedia continues to describe the term:

The term was introduced by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his study of suicide. He believed that one type of suicide (anomic) resulted from the breakdown of the social standards necessary for regulating behaviour. When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and common meanings are no longer understood or accepted, and new values and meanings have not developed. According to Durkheim, such a society produces, in many of its members, psychological states characterized by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, and emotional emptiness and despair. Striving is considered useless, because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable.

Of course, this made me think of the high suicide rates among indigenous people in Canada.  (See Suicide Among Aboriginal People in Canada). So I began to look for more information about Durkheim, who is also new to me (having never studied sociology).

Summaries of Durkheim’s four major treatises are available on the website The Durkheim Pages http://durkheim.uchicago.edu/ where I read about Durkheim’s belief in the importance of society as something that regulates and constrains human behaviour, and…

 “… when society is disturbed by some crisis, its “scale” is altered and its members are “reclassified” accordingly; in the ensuing period of dis-equilibrium, society is temporarily incapable of exercising its regulative function, and the lack of constraints imposed on human aspirations makes happiness impossible. This explains why periods of economic disaster, like those of sudden prosperity, are accompanied by an increase the number of suicides, and also why countries long immersed in poverty have enjoyed a relative immunity to self-inflicted death. Durkheim used the term anomie to describe this temporary condition of social deregulation, and anomic suicide to describe the resulting type of self-inflicted death.”

[From The Durkheim Pages/Suicide which is itself an excerpt from Robert Alun Jones. Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1986. pp. 82-114.]

Looking for a modern interpretation of Durkheim, I found a chapter in a 2008 book by Diane Harriford and Becky Thompson: “Emile Durkheim and embodiment in the age of the Internet” (in When the Center is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times, available as a full text ebook from UBC Library). In this chapter the authors take a new look at the sociologist’s ideas about social norms and social order in the context of the Columbine high school shootings. Although they reject many of his ideas (about women, about primitive societies) they are compelled to take a fresh look about his ideas about social integration and social order, and how the Internet may be contributing to social dis-integration and social dis-order:

The Internet is virtual fantasy and virtual freedom, a space with virtually no rules. After the Columbine murders, however, we found ourselves asking, might this be a new form of anomie—a lack of social control and a condition of normlessness where there is little or no sense of authority or moral guidance. (Harriford & Thompson, 2008, p. 173)

Cole, P., & O’Riley, P. (2012). Coyote and Raven put the “ Digital ” in Technology – Hands Up and Down to Earth. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 9(2).

Harriford, D., & Thompson, B. (2008). Emile Durkheim and embodiment in the age of the Internet. In When the Center Is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times (pp. 155–177). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.