Deviance

This week we talked a lot about deviance which is where someone goes against the social norm. This norm though, exists within the place and time that the event is occurring though because norms change so frequently and depending on who one talks to or interacts with. For example, someone over a 100 years ago may walk to school because their school was close by and cars weren't as common as they are today. Today though, someone walking to school may be deviant because most people have their own car or can easily get driven to school. We also talked about how their can be such thing as positive deviance and we were given the task of doing some act of positive deviance at some point throughout the week.

This assignment was very different than most assignments I usually do for school. I believe in doing nice things for people in general and going out of my way because I see how it impacts them and makes them feel good. Even if it's something as subtle as holding a door or saying thank you when someone goes out of their way to do something for you, that positivity can go a long way and spread through others. That's why for my assignment I chose to say hi to anyone I saw in the hallways that was in any one of my classes, no matter how much I talked to them during class. People responded surprisingly very positively. I could tell it made people happy that I said hi to them, especially if they were just walking alone. I know if someone did that to me it would make me very happy so I wanted to reciprocate that and make someone else's day a little better too.

Male Gender Roles In Society

This week we talked about gender roles and since last week our main focus was females, thisweek we
focused on males. We talked about how important it is for men in our society to act tough, strong, and the way men "should" according to our society. We watched a few videos about how to break that mold and how men and women can both help change society's feelings towards gender. We also talked a lot about how we feel about boys and men and what their dominant characteristics should be and as it turned out, we all had very similar beliefs and those beliefs were in line with society's as well. It is weird to think about how strongly ingrained these characteristics are in our brain because I have never once sat back and thought about gender roles in the ways we have in class this week.

I have never stopped to realize how strongly we push men into a certain mold especially since I have been in a situation almost my entire life where that goes against that mold. My parents got divorced when I was 4 years old and since then, during the time I have spent with my dad, my dad has taken on both the mom and dad role. Growing up like that for so many years has made me closer to my dad and even when he got married just a few years ago, I still think of him in the way I always have even though he has a wife now. He used to make me my lunches and is the one who coordinates all of the things going on in my life. This isn't the typical role of a father in society but at the same time, this is all I know because this is what he has done my entire life and even though my dad is a man, he can do the same things just as well. Society needs to learn to accept that.

Mass Media and Socialization

This week in Sociology we talked about the mass media as a socializing agent. We started out the week by doing an UNTV assignment where we did all sorts of experiments with turning the TV volume off and staring only at the TV. Then on Tuesday we discussed it and came up with some ineresting realizations. Like the fact that the camera angles switch so frequently but it's not noticable because of how much people watch tv, it has become normal. Also, watching the tv woth the screen off has showed me how much tome I waste spending tv and how little I actually do while watching tv.
Another thing we talked about this week was how the media creates these perceptioms of how girls vs boys should act and the types of things they should like and play with. We looked through a toy catelog and saw that all the girl pages were pink and had toys like kitchens, then went to the boy pages and realized thatthey were all filled with kids being active and getting dirty outside. They were playing with tools and strong machines that associate with masculinity. It was so weird because up until then, I has never noticed the blatently obvious messages that commericals and toy catalogs were sending. We have just grown up in a world accepting those things and paid very little attention to them.
This made me start to reflect on my life, I have lived in 6 different houses and in 5 of my 6 houses my room has always been painted pink (the one other time it was purple). It started out when I was born, my parents knew they were having a girl so of course, they had to paint my room pink because that was the normal thing to do. Then as I got older, although my favorite color wasn't always pink, I felt like my room had to be that color because all of my friend's rooms were pink and I was a girl and that's just what we do. So room after room, they were all painted pink.I don't think I ever conciencely thought about why I painted my room the color I did though, up until now and now I'm realizing I am just as much a product of the media socializing people as any of my other friends with pink rooms are.

Socalization

This week we started our new unit called Socialization. We focused this week on children and using the Growing Man Metaphor we were able to understand how children start out with a certain biology and what comes from nature then grows up and through socialization, grows up into a more aware and conscience person. We learned a lot about how important nurturing children is and we watched a few videos of examples of children who were never nurtured and therefore, they developed at a much slower rate than any other child their age. I was shocked to see how drastically different they were just because of the lack of human interaction they were given. They could not see, speak or move right because they had never been taught how. Simple tasks like chewing and swallowing food that many people probably assume babies are born knowing how to do, is now shown that that is not the case and there are very few things that babies can actually do on their own without learning from someone or imitating someone.

Since my siblings were all born after I was already ten years old I feel like I am one of the few people my age that has seen a baby every day from the time they were born to the oldest one who is now seven. There are so many things that each minute tiny babies need that people may not understand until they spend long amounts of time with a baby. Although I realized all of these things were very important, I didn't understand how crucial the jobs of parents really are. It's so interesting to me to see how strongly just touching a baby's back (out of instinct to many) when they are upset or tired can impact their lives and by doing it frequently enough, the person touching their back is actually making them grow. This unit has already put a whole new perspective on the way I look at parents and the way they raise their children.