Eight (And Community Service)

Deviance is when one departs from the norms and customs set by society. The idea of breaking away from social construction, with a stretch, can be viewed as an illusion because the social construction never explicitly existed in the first place. It exists, however, as an implicit force. Deviance is relative to the social class that one has been placed in, and once in that social class, there is more relativity within that social class. At my high school, social class is played out, but not nearly to the extend portrayed in the Saints and Roughnecks reading. At Stevenson, we are conditioned to behave like Saints, to better prepare ourselves for the real world. There are occasional Roughnecks that are indeed being deviant from society, but their numbers are so low it is hard to consider them a major group of similar caliber to Saints. I am blessed to be part of such a wealthy community, where I have the privilege to be able to examine social classes from very high up on the scale. My parents consider us "middle class", but after this unit I see that we aren't really the "middle" of any scale.

For my first community service project, I worked as a freshman mentor in the FMP here at my high school. I will use part of my 35 second semester senior hours for sociology, and part for NHS, to prevent double-dipping. 10 hours of service were recorded via NHS, and 25 were recorded here via sociology. My experience was here at Anonymous High School in Town, IL. I participated in this service for half a class period every Monday through Thursday. My faculty advisor was Ms. King, my counselor Ms. Kulla. (e-mail probably just jking@dxxx.org) I will answer all of the questions via bullet points as follows:

• Before my experience as an FM, I viewed the service as just helping freshmen not have a mental breakdown as they enter this gigantic and complicated (and anonymous) high school. My expectations were more handling a lot of problem students and less of handling students who had average levels of conformity into high school. I was nervous about not being able to make them all perfect kids.
• Let's just say hypothetically it took place in a random room number in this anonymous high school, let's say... 2900? My freshmen were all unique people and all had their own thing going for them. I came to realize my job was not to turn them all into the same, perfect student heading down the same, perfect path, but to help each and every one of them recognize themselves and guide them to their own paths throughout anonymous high school.
• It surprised me how much of an influence I could make on these kids, despite them all being so different from myself. Age is a social construction, and as an 18-year-old, I assumed my role as Advisory Leader efficiently because they were only 14-year-olds.
• After advisory each day, as long as at least just one freshman said they enjoyed advisory or they felt like it really helped their lives every so often, that means something to me. It tells me that what I'm doing is worthwhile, and that there's a reason that I do what I do.

I apologize for the tardiness of me posting the community service hours, Sal. You're a good teacher and I feel as if I let you down by turning these all in late. I continue to strive for a better work ethic every day, which is both tedious and painfully simple for me.

King's 6B Advisory, enjoying precious 72 degree weather in Chicago.

Six

Post 6 is due tuesday, April 8.  We have been learning about the socialization process.  This includes the distinction between nature and nurture and the importance of nurture.  We also saw that certain agents of socialization play a strong role in the nurture process.  

Please remember to

1.  write properly and post on time.

2. explain at least one source such as a reading (What is human nature? or Agents of Socialization), or a video (Danielle, Consuming Kids).

3. explain two or more topics we have learned (such as those above in bold) and give unique examples of how they might apply to your own life, or something unique from your perspective.

The socialization process is the method in which people adjust to the customs and norms around them. There are two main ways in which one is socialized, nature and nurture:

• Nature is what is deemed as the innate, inevitable, and permanent traits that were predestined to last with one the day he or she was born.
• Nurture, on the other hand, is marked by learned, trained, and conditioned traits brought to a person by outside factors. These factors do not come with childbirth.

Many people, including myself, believe that nurture is by far the more important factor in the socialization process. In our psychology class, we read many examples of identical twins separated at birth in which the two twins, who were genetically identical in almost every measurable way, went on to live very different lives and develop very different mindsets towards various topics. I am being intentionally vague because there were so many unique instances in which the same result occurred. Very neat stuff!

An agent of socialization is a gateway in which ideas are transferred to people. These agents could be social, such as with friends or family. These agents could also be institutional, such as with school, religion, workplace, government, or, most explicitly, mass media.

A powerful documentary we watched in my sociology class called "Consuming Kids" puts attention on the social agent of media when it comes to consumer products and ideologies for children in America. This is a brief summary from imdb.com (sorry Sal, I just couldn't have paraphrased it any better):

• Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world.

This goes to show how powerful social agents are in socializing people. This also demonstrates the large power of nurture on the socialization of a person, as this "relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine" does not come to us as we're born.

Seven

For this post, we have explored how something like gender can be so taken-for-granted.  In our culture there is a polarization of what it means to be female and male and heterosexual and lesbian or gay.  Our culture pushes individuals to opposite ends of a spectrum.  For this post, use examples from your own experience to show how our society socializes men and women into narrow boxes.  How do the agents of socialization play a role in your experiences?  To demonstrate literacy, feel free to comment on the movies Killing Us Softly4, Tough Guise2, the reading from Kimmel and Mahler about masculinity or the myriad other sources on my blog posts over the last 2 weeks.

Post Seven concerns gender as a key issue in the United States. As we observed in the documentary we watched in Sociology, gender equality is NOT a settled issue. In fact, as the woman proclaims in Killing Us Softly 4, if anything, it has gotten worse in the last 30 years or so. In this documentary, the woman presents the audience with dozens of advertisements that range from the subliminal submission of women to the downright objectification into objects, like beer. "Sex sells" is something that marketers will bank on until the day they die, especially since the government is no longer regulating the ethicality of these advertisements.

In Tough Guise 2 (which has now become my favorite documentary of all time), the man (blanking out on names right now, my apologies) makes the argument that violence in the world is considered a universal issue that applies to all, even though that women are responsible for a mere 14% of all violence in the United States. It's a men's issue. The sensation and obsession with being a man and toughening up can only result in either intimidation or fights breaking out. Many school shootings occur because boys feel that they were picked on or weren't manly enough. One boy even declared that he wasn't insane, just mad, and that he was explicitly taking out his frustration on the years of dominance-driven bullying. Men cause pride, pride causes anger, and anger causes fistfights.

Why is this an issue? Why can't we all wake up tomorrow and officially declare equality? I believe the problem is slightly similar to race in a sense that our zeitgeist preaches equality, yet so many violations of this thesis are apparent that it's hard to convince even ourselves that the country we live in is equal. If we can convince ourselves that we don't need to "be a man" to be a good man or a "be a woman" in order to be a good woman, we could level the playing field in gender. This is almost impossible though, because there are so many men in this country who are outright convinced that men are dominant. In my AWOD classroom, all but two freshmen stated that they think men have opportunities in our society that women do not. The two boys, of course, were the toughest two boys in our class.

Five

This post concerns American culture. "American culture" in itself is a fascinating thing because we are ultimately the biproduct of the combination of all other cultures mushed together in a 238-year-old melting pot. Within this culture lies some major differences from the rest of the world as a heavily individualistic society.

Death.

Death is unique in America. We fear of talking about it, despite it being an inevitable fact of life. As Morrie even says in the movie Tuesdays with Morrie, "Death ends a life but not a relationship." We repress the memories and concepts of death and dying, whereas in other cultures they still mourn, but seem to accept it for what it is and not ignore it or repress it. We should take a conscious effort to accept death for what it is, and not keep our heads stuck in our work.

Speaking of which, work.

Work is so imperative in American culture that we identify people by "what they do." Whereas in Australia people ask other people "Where have you been?", here in the United States people are defined by what they do to earn a living. Your level of happiness is not a factor.

Love.

It's quite fascinating that a culture whose music is almost entirely based on love feels so repressed to express love to one another. We value boldness, strength, and control of emotions, and more often than not our feelings of love are suppressed under these traits we try so hard to emulate. People misinterpret love as a primarily romantic phenomenon, but Morrie explains that real love is not expressed with your body, but your heart. If we can find a way to express our love more from our heart and not from our body, it is perhaps possible that we find less of a need to express a control of emotions and more of a need to care about one another.

Dependency.

Amurica! We're all about individualism! We thrive on the opportunity to do everything ourselves, for doing something by ourselves means we're responsible and well-off. This is an ironic way to live by, since humans are one of the most dependent creatures on the face of the earth. We need almost nonstop care in the first few years of our lives. In a TED talk by Brene Brown, Ms. Brown recognizes that in an attempt to block out our vulnerability, we often block out other feelings as well. Morrie explains that in the very early and late parts of our life, we need people to take care of us. It is in the middle where we believe that we should be independent, when in fact it's when we need people the most.

Four

One of the reasons I took sociology was because of the fascination I had over different cultures and how they may blend or contrast from one another.

Culture shock is when one has a first taste of how another country or culture operates. More often than not, the outsider may struggle to fit in with these norms.

Ethnocentrism is observing and opinionating other cultures from the point of view of the outsider's own culture. A few years back, I was fortunate enough to travel to Paris, France, where I had one of the coolest vacations ever. We went and sat down at a restaurant where the head manager and waiter was just sitting there at another table, not serving us. We thought (and my mother still thinks) that the waiter was simply being inconsiderate, but we then realized we failed to understand the culture in the given scenario.

Different cultures have different meanings with their gestures. For example, the hand gesture of thumb and index finger together with the other three fingers sticking up may mean "A-OK", but in Italy... Let's just say it means something very, very different.

Norms are standards of behavior placed in societies, some implicit and some explicit.

Folkways are a type of norm that if not followed, it can still be deemed socially acceptable. For example, if I were to be at a nice restaurant with my family and chewed with my mouth open, people may notice and deem it as rude but it wouldn't be considered tragic in any fashion.

Mores are a more intense type of norm that if not followed, people around will definitely be concerned. For example, if I was in a crowded elevator and I let out a huge fart, while afterwards proclaiming pride in my achievement, people will stare at me with great frustration, as farting in an elevator is very frowned upon in society.

Taboos are very imperative norms that if not followed, you will be disrespected to a great degree. For example, if I, at my fancy shmancy dinner table at my fancy shmancy restaurant, were to say "hey guys hold on I have to take a huge shirt*", people probably wouldn't talk to me very much for the rest of the night.

*shirt was autocorrected from something else

Three

Define: Social Construction of reality, macrosociology, microsociology, in-groups, and out-groups

The main idea of Social Construction of Reality is that people interacting in society make representations of each other by one or two qualities. These concepts eventually turn into how people identify the individual, as opposed to analyzing them as a whole. A prime example of this would be the Abandon Ship exercise we did, where we identified individuals as "old grandma" or "old grandpa" or "one-armed army guy" as opposed to their other, potentially more important qualities.

Macrosociology views society as an entirety, whereas microsociology views the inner works of a society. A great personal example of this would be everyday life at my high school. From day to day, I experience the same happenstances as everyone else, whether it's friends, grades, sports, fine arts, or assemblies. This would be macrosociology. Microsociology would be more based on what happens within each one of these places, such as how a volleyball team communicates with one another, or how multiple kids in a classroom strongly dislike another student or a teacher. I can acknowledge that the atmosphere in my college prep writing class is entirely different than my AP psychology class.

In-groups and out-groups also play an important role in the world of sociology. People have the propensity to form groups and defend those in that group, even if it means that they disregard or chastise other groups. In-groups are groups that one is in; out-groups vice versa. I view kids who play volleyball as well-educated and well-mannered because I tend to look at the better side of them, since I am a part of the group. I think kids who play other sports only care about their sports and image, and don't do well in school.

Two

This section asks to define two key terms that lay the base for the entire world of sociology.

Sociological Imagination

The way the world around us influences the decisions we make everyday is knows as sociological imagination. A prime example of this concept would be an Odyssey class that was offered that demonstrated the influence of others when it comes to appreciating music. Students were asked to walk to one side of the classroom or the other, depending on whether they liked the piece of music that was playing or not. They found that people's taste in music was dependent on what others thought of the piece of music. The insight of the way the rest of the classroom influenced the individual is an example of sociological imagination. I admit that I fall victim to the influence of others when it comes to a taste in music.

The following is a post from me on another social media website:

This is intimidatingly long, sorry. Hope you read it though!

Tomorrow, February 4th, 2014, will mark the ten year anniversary of the creation of Facebook. In ten years, a website has connected the world in a way that would have been viewed as impossible ten years ago. It's an incredible phenomenon, and we don't necessarily realize the psychological, philosophical, and, most effectively, the sociological changes people have gone through in these last ten years. We are witnessing dramatic change around us, in people, in behavior, in advertising, in just about everything.

We now have more access to information than we have time to read about.
We now have more friends than we have time to hang out with.
We now have more friends than we have time to talk to.
We now have more friends than we have time to know.
If we wanted to know more about a guy who sits at our table in math class, we can look him up on Facebook. We will know his first and last name, what he looks like, who he hangs out with, and everything he likes.
And we find that to be completely acceptable.
Relationships aren't legitimate unless they're on Facebook.
Fights are on Facebook.
Invitations to most events in real life are on Facebook.
There's a good chance that the last social gathering you went to was brought together by Facebook.
Groups can be instantly created to communicate with classmates, clubs, bands, fantasy football leagues, sports teams, people attending the same college in the same year, people who dislike the same Canadian pop singer, Satanist cults, you name it.
You can post your opinion on Facebook, and people will hear you and listen to you. (Hey guys!)
You can start a conversation with any "friend" of yours.
You can communicate at school, but your life happens on Facebook.

There are clear pros and blaring cons about having a Facebook and what it does for one's life. According to the current social norms, we are to the point where not having a Facebook account would be considerably detrimental to one's social life. If the cute boy in your math class doesn't have a Facebook, there's a much better chance we will ignore them and move on to other stalkable people. Facebook isn't the only thing that has effected our society in the last ten years, but my god spank me sideways if it isn't the biggest damn thing that's happened to us yet in our short lifetimes.

This is different from other events and ages in history. This isn't looking at a t.v. and saying, "Wow, I was alive when that happened."

This is personal. This is happening. To us. The boiling frogs.

Cheers to a revolutionary ten years, Facebook.
It truly terrifies me trying to imagine another ten years on here.

"...in a world
where there are voices that are only read
and laughter is never heard
or I'm so desperate to feel
that I hope the Technologic can reverse the universe
so the screen can touch me back
and maybe it will
When our technology is advanced enough...
to make us human again."

~Marshall Davis Jones, "Touchscreen" "

Sociological Mindfulness

As the society has influence on the individual, the individual also has an impact on his or her surroundings. The awareness of affecting the environment around you is called Sociological mindfulness. There was trash all over the ground at the Chicago Bears game a few weeks ago. I don't mean your occasional half-empty (half-full) bag of peanuts, I mean full-out hard-to-see-the-ground trash everywhere. It's sociological imagination to see how people influence me to not pick up the trash, but it is sociological mindfulness to realize that I, too, am influencing others by also not picking up the trash.

In Marshall Davis Jones's poem, the realization that we are all part of the influence on other people with technology is another example of sociological mindfulness.