So I am gone on Tuesday.  So we are going to blog on the article(s) from my blog with the TRASH articles.  250 words

So I am gone today, Monday February 3rd.  I want you to read the article on my blog below from January 7th.  It is titled X-box plus unleaded gas etc.  Read the article and blog a reaction to it.  Your reaction should be at least 300 words.  And you need to comment on my blog about the article when you are done.

So here is a cult classic from the 1980's that has a lot of sociological topics.  Socialization, culture, stereotypes, education, family, deviance, socio-economic status, cliques are some of the main sociological topics studied.  Consider the sociological value of the film and connect the film to your own life.  Consider the writing assignment given to the students in detention by Mr. Vernon.  What sociological implications are present in this writing assignment?

I want you to create a 4-5 minute podcast reviewing the movie "The Breakfast Club."  Your review may take the form of an interview (at least 10 questions), a character analysis study or any other form you may think of.  You will create the podcast by using the program audacity.  A tutorial below is available.  You will then need to export it in a wav. file, change the format to mp3 through iTunes, and then create a free account on podomatic to feed your podcast.  You will then be able to link your podcast to your blog for all to hear. 

Creating a Basic Podcast Using Audacity

  To download the above video just right click on the movie reel to the left and select save target as or save link as

To read and/or print a tutorial that shows how to add music and sound effects using Audacity click the icon on the left

Audacity Tutorial for Podcasters (click the movie reel icon to the left) This link will take you to an external website that contains a free podcasting tutorial series using Audacity

Add Music and Sound Effects to Your Podcast: Optional 

You can also include music and sound effects on your podcast? However, there are some restrictions. You can only legally use the first 30 seconds of a song free or include music that has no copyright restrictions on it. There are several websites that provide this. However, the quality ranges from excellent to poor. Findsounds.com is a good website to use. For Jazz music try the Internet Archive.

How to Explain Deviance

-        Cultural- Transmission Theory-Deviance is a learned behavior.  Can be learned by interacting with others who commit deviant acts.  We all conform-just a matter of what we conform to.

-          Structural-Strain Theory-Deviance is a natural outgrowth of values and norms within a society.

                   o   Anomie
                             §  Lack of sufficient guidelines for behavior, causing confusion to society

o   React in one of five ways to achieve goals and means

1.       Conformity-Individuals accept goals and approved means of achievement

                              2.       Innovation-Devise new way to achieve goals – business men and criminals
                                 3.       Ritualism-Find it impossible to meet goals by acceptable so                                          a person chooses to give up the goal but still follow rules of behavior
                              4.       Retreatism-Reject both cultural goals and acceptable means-                                         drug addicts, hermits (retreat from norms of society)
                              5.       Rebellion-substitute your own set of goals and means of achieving.

-          Control Theory-close communities have less crime, weak ties to a community lead to the likelihood of becoming deviant

-          Conflict Theory-Competition and Social Inequality lead to deviance

                   Struggle between people with power and people without power
                        §  People with power want to keep the power
                        §  People without want to gain the power

o   People in power usually define deviant behavior

                            §  Usually works against lower class
          o   Lower class are more likely to be detected and punished
                            §  Don’t necessarily commit more crimes

-          Labeling Theory-Everybody commits deviant acts sometime in their lives

o   Two types of deviants

1.       Primary Deviant

                                           a.       Nonconformity that goes undetected by authority
                                           b.      People not considered deviants

2.       Secondary Deviant

                                          a.       Person labeled as deviant and accepts the label as true
                                      b.      a secondary deviant will deal with label the rest of their lives
                                      c.       becomes the master status

Xbox + unleaded gas=less violent crime?  Say what!

So over break I read an article more or less titled above.  So it's my attempt to bring math into sociology.  But the article poses some serious sociological thinking.  Such as how gas and video games (even violent games) can (arguably) contribute to lower violent crime rates in large cities.
Here is a link to the article.  Read the article and tell me what you think.

By the way the  above is from "Doom" and I don't mean my class.  I mean the video game.

 

 

The United States has one percent of its adult population locked up behind bars. One out of four prisoners IN THE WORLD is behind bars in the US. Over 50 percent of those incarcerated in a federal prison is convicted of a crime related to drugs. Here is a visual representation of the prison population. Approximately 16 percent of those incarcerated in America suffer from a mental illness. Here is an article from the International Herald last week detailing the shocking size of the US penal population. Are these statistics surprising? How does this affect our society? How should we begin working to change this dynamic, or is the system fine the way it is? Do you see how the relativity of deviance affects this? As attitudes change, laws change, and that affects who is incarcerated and how society deals with it.

Another relation of drugs and deviance is the stigma associated with drugs. Chicago Magazine published a story about the rapidly growing heroine problem in St. Charles claiming the lives of dozens of teens but the community was afraid to acknowledge this because of the stigma of drug use. This stigma lead to three teens dumping the body of their friend who had overdosed back into the poor Chicago neighborhood where they had bought the drugs.

Some other examples of how this applies to life beyond high school are the ways in which our society focuses on street crime as opposed to white collar crime.  Most of the news each night is spent on street crime: murders, burglary, robbery and rape.  The popular media likes reporting on these because they are action-oriented, personalized and fearful.  Each crime is presented like a mini-drama story.  However, white collar crime is far more costly and perhaps more dangerous.  White collar crime includes tax evasion, bribery, embezzling, negligence.  For example, a department store defrauded poor customers of over 100 million dollars;  tire company executives allowed faulty tires to remain on vehicles despite recalling the tires in other countries - 200 people were killed before the tires were removed; an oil company skirted safeguards which resulted in an explosion and environmental disaster killing 12 people and costing billions of dollars.  In each of these cases, there may have been fines imposed on the companies involved, but no one went to prison.  No one received a felony record.  I bet you cannot name an individual person involved in the incident because no one person was labeled as deviant. 
Another example of this is Freaks and Geeks episode 13  Lindsay is experimenting with pot but she does not get caught, but her freek friends get caught. They are expected to be deviant. They may have even accepted the label of being deviant and they now see themselves as deviant and that influences their actions.

 

Deviance both positive and negative

Deviance is the repeated or serious violation of society's expectations. What is expected by society varies depending on where you are and when you are there. For example, cell phones used to be unacceptable at any school function just a matter of years ago. Now, I see students wearing cell phones on their waists and they are not perceived as deviant. It should be noted though that deviance doesn't just have to be negative. Check out this story from NPR:

A Victim Treats His Mugger Right
Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.
But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.
He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.
"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.
As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."
The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"
READ THE WHOLE STORY OR LISTEN TO IT HERE.

What a crazy story. What do you think about that?
Another example of positive deviance is this clip of "Snackman," a guy who broke up a fight on a subway in NY while eating potato chips!

So this brings me to the idea that deviance doesn't have to be negative; you can violate the norms of society by doing something positive, such as paying for the toll of a stranger, giving away money (even just a dollar) to someone who doesn't ask for it, offering to carry a fellow student's books/bag for no reason, etc... For a experiment try to violate a norm in a positive way. Try an act of positive deviance. How does it make it you feel? How hard was it to do? How did others react to your positive deviancy?

Deviance

Deviance is either repeatedly or seriously violating the norms of a society. Deviance is relative to both time and place. In other words, depending on when you are some place or where you are, you might be considered deviant or might not.   We looked at many other examples of deviance from class:
continuously talking to oneself in public
having a tattoo
doing your homework
holding the hand of a significant other in public
listening to your radio loud enough for everyone around you hear.
dropping out of high school
using illegal drugs
growing your hair really long
cutting your hair really short
a man wearing a dress
a business person wearing jeans
balancing your groceries on your head in public
leaving your parent's home after getting married
driving 100 m.p.h. down highway 37
attacking another person with a weapon
two men kissing
women working in a factory or in construction
woman with shaved/unshaved armpits
getting divorced
All of these have instances when or where they would or wouldn't be considered deviant. It depends on where you are and when you are there.

Deviance also needs to be perceived. In the following video, think about who is considered deviant and why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmGRJWxLqiE and the 2nd clip below also depicts deviant behavior.  And what about the 3rd clip?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahLEaVzBMuQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOlGMPE68Bo

It doesn't matter that Jerry didn't actually picked his nose. If he is perceived as deviant (which he is) then he is considered deviant and he will be treated as such.  Same with the second clip where a the man has the broken middle finger but if he waves it around it still violates the norms of society.  And the 3rd clip is another deviant behavior (swimming pool would fit here also) but do we label people for it?

 

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Blue Collar Stereotypes

The movie People Like Us shows blue collar people being glamorized by middle classes. One example was the “Hun Fest” in Baltimore and another example is the Yuppies who go to working class bars in the city and they call them “dive bars.” Both groups claim to be romanticizing and appreciating the blue collar life. However, when it’s finished, they go back to their middle class lifestyle and do not interact with these blue collar people. Do you find this to be condescending? Are they really making fun of these people? Furthermore, one of the speakers in the movie said that although racial and religious stereotypes are no longer accepted publicly, class stereotypes are still acceptable. For example, you could freely use phrases like “You’re so ghetto” or “That’s so white trash” and you would not get into trouble. Why do you think class stereotypes and prejudices are still acceptable in America today?

For more blue collar stereotypes visit the blue collar TV website

Steubenville Football & Rape Culture

Click here for a rundown on this

and from another perspective click here 

and a good article

and remember the Penn State scandal

and another clip

*interesting post from the society pages that goes with the above clip

and so the question is "Who do we point the fingers at?"  All of society or certain sectors of society?  Read the above article and even read the comments at the end.  Are socialization agents to blame?  Who gets the blame and what do you do after you place the blame?