Week Six Blog Entry: Changing Social Connections?

I think Americans today are more isolated due to technology. Technology allows us to be more transient; we can work remotely and live anywhere. And with that, we see the physical distances increase between friends and loved ones. Although we can communicate across the distance with technology (email, facebook, text message, twitter, skype, digital photos, youtube, etc), it cannot ever compare to the closeness we feel with face-to face relationships. Emailing someone far away is not the same thing as them bringing you chicken soup. And having many casual relationships will never bring the same meaning as having a handful of deep friendships in which you can share things that are important to you.

Furthermore, we are seeing people being replaced in favor of automated processes/machines – banks use ATM’s for as many transactions as possible, do-it-yourself check out stations at the grocery store are beginning to outnumber the clerks, voice recordings answer the phone for utility services, and you can even choose an electronic machine over a movie theater attendant to dispense tickets. This is problematic because we are losing human contact and are therefore becoming starved to make connections wherever possible. This sense of desperation makes us vulnerable to all sorts of people and circumstances, something which we are already seeing and should be concerned with.

Week Five Blog Entry: Community Policing in Dealing with Crime

I believe community policing, is a fantastic solution to help the police forces in preventing crime. I think this serves as a form of target hardening, making it more difficult for crimes to occur in the first place. It gets the citizens involved, and furthermore, helps the police become more in touch with the communities, fostering stronger relationships and open lines of communication. Who better to protect the communities than the people who live in the communities? Also, by community members taking better care of their communities, they may be able to prevent “broken windows”, a theory which shows how signs of neglect leads to social decay. By showing that a community is involved and that it “repairs their broken windows”, communities can discourage further crimes from being committed.

Community policing may also serve as a form of stigmatizing shaming, a method which has proven successful in Japan. For instance, people may be deterred from perpetrating crimes against people and property in their own communities if these people are involved members of the community and they would have to see them and be labeled as outcasts by them every day if they got caught committing a crime.

Week Four Blog Entry: Nature vs. Nurture

My view on the nature versus nurture debate is that the learning of gender roles, or gender socialization, can be attributed to a combination of nature and nurture.

I attribute nature/biology as being responsible for our underlying motives. The way men and women’s bodies are built – anatomical structure, hormones, brain function, etc – must predispose us towards certain temperaments and roles in society, i.e. women as caregivers and men as providers.

These biological factors likely set into motion values, norms, and social practices that then continued through time (social reproduction). These social practices are now so entrenched in society that they’ve also become the behaviors, and roles perpetuated through nurturing. In the course textbook, sociologist George Herbert Meade’s work showed us that children develop their sense of self by coming to see themselves as others see them. Therefore, if “others”, or agents of socialization, see that child as a cute little girl, the child will pick up on those cues – for instance the child will learn that pink colors, toy dolls, helping mom in the kitchen, floral scents, books with female characters, and television programming emphasizing female attributes, are attributed to themselves. Even in the case the parents choose to raise the child in a nonsexist environment, the nonsexist child rearing study showed us that outside influences are virtually impossible to avoid. The child will still pick up biased cues as to who they are, or how others see them.

Week Three Blog Entry: Understanding how American Culture Looks to Outsiders

After watching the BBC comedy sketch where Hugh Laurie sang the “America” song, I gathered the British audience seemed to feel American culture looks self-centered and arrogant. Hugh Laurie belted out, in a perfect American accent, lyrics consisting only of “America” and “The States” as the British audience roared with laughter all the way to the end where another famous British actor came and punched Laurie (playing the American singer) in the gut. I confirmed my interpretation of the skit by reading the YouTube comments below. Comments like “all these pretentious patriotic songs from the US sound like that to me,” were rampant, and it seemed the consensus was Americans were a bunch of self-righteous jerks.

Although the sketch may have pointed out a truth – yes, we Americans do have many patriotic songs, all sounding similar enough – I feel there is a strong reason for those patriotic songs, and it has nothing to do with being self-centered or pretentious. The sketch did a good job of poking fun, just as Americans poke fun at the British from time to time, however, the YouTube comments took the suggestion of American culture one step further and exposed a larger truth of how America is perceived unfavorably by outsiders.