Popular Culture

Popular Culture: Pop culture is a collective activity. It is marketed to the masses because of trends in sales and profitability. It is in the entertainment market where these products are created and sold. The meaning of popular culture is relative and is not inherently there.

Interpretive Communities: People who give meaning and value to popular culture in relation to their socioeconomic status, age, gender, etc. are called interpretive communities.

Emotional Energy: The strong feeling of emotional energy that one feels when they are doing something in a large group is also known as "collective effervescence" by Emile Durkheim. This shows the benefit of group membership.

Taste: Taste is your preference to styles of clothing, movies, music, etc. You can see here that even at a young age individuals start developing these tastes because of the way they are socialized and there socioeconomic status, gender, age, etc. 

Conspicuous Consumption: Often considered wasteful, conspicuous consumption of goods and services is an excessive display of wealth. 

Life at Home

Family: A family is any group that is bound by biological, legal or emotional ties. This can be diverse in the eyes of sociologists.

Nuclear Family: The nuclear family is your typical 1950's representation of two heterosexual white parents with one or more children. This is a stereotype and does not reflect the diversity of families living across the globe.

Endogamy: This is a marriage between two people from the same group in life. It is mostly a religious thing. This shows a picture of two cats marrying each other. Endogamy stems from the beliefs that other groups, religions, or races are not equal to the other persons so therefore you must marry within your own social group.

Monogamy: This is a type of marriage where there is one husband and one wife. They are in a legal bond with each other to be committed to each other only. Monogamy is the only form recognized legally in western culture.

Homogamy and Propinquity: These ways that we find our mates state that "like marries like" referring to the same race, education, social status, even attractivenesses, etc. Also that we tend to pick those in relatively close proximity to ourselves. 

Gender and Sexuality

Sex and Gender: Sex refers to the biological name for male or female as a biological category. Gender refers to the roles associated with male and female and has to do with the traits and accepted norms for the two categories.

Intersexed: The tern intersex has to do with an abnormal chromosomal make-up where the individual is a mix of male and female. Since gender roles are learned it can be confusing which way to go. Since we are born into the expectations of the category, the intersexed person has to learn how to act manly or womanly but instead of having it predetermined they are left with an internal feeling of which sex they most closely identify with...or both.

Gender Inequalities: This sign says "Gee!! I wish i were a man... Id join the Navy. Be a man and do it" Gender inequalities are found in the past and are still present today. Since women historically stayed home to rear the children and men went out to get the resources and engage in warfare, these gender roles were passed down.

Gender Role Socialization: Agents of socialization like family media and peers help the lifelong process of learning to be masculine a;nd feminine and learning the roles and expectations that go along with them. Starting a baby boy off by wearing a baseball outfit plays into men being athletes.

Feminization of Poverty: Women are more likely than men to live in poverty. Things such as being a single parent and collecting unequal wages for the same amount of work are factors that lead to this. Also, the increasing cost of childcare on these single mother's wages create this. 

Race and Ethnicity

Minority Group: A minority group is a group of people who fundamentally have less advantages in a society. They are denied equal access to advantages in life that others are born with.

Race: Race is a social construction and does not have biological roots. Race is a reification and exists only through interactions and is based on the difference between people.

Representation: A common disadvantage to races is the lack of representation in media forms. In the invisible knapsack, one of the advantages is "opening the paper and seeing people pf your race widely represented".  It seems like large cooperations try to make up for this by randomly using stock footage of a different race person to meet with demands and appear to be diverse. Even though racism is in our institutions. It seems like they do this in shows and movies as well, having an all white cast with the single African-American cast member.

Life Chances: The life chances of someone who does not speak English or is "of color" is grimmer than those with advantages. It is a chain of events that starts off behind, leads to lack of education and then lack of high levels of education, then leads to lower paying jobs and therefore repeats the cycle.

Invisible Knapsack: The invisible knapsack is a figure of speech that refers to things such as white privilege. The knapsack contains unlearned things you are born with that give you advantages. The knapsack is a metaphor for the invisible privileges.

Social Class and Inequality

The Upper Class: The upper class make up the top 1 percent in the US. They are the richest people in the country. Max Weber says that it is a combination of wealth, power and prestige that gives someone a high social class.

Lower Class: The lower class makes up about 20 percent of the population in the US and may have lower levels of literacy than the other social classes. They are usually comprised of unskilled labor workers. 

Middle Class: Makes up about 30 percent of the population in the US.  Most people think they are in the middle class. The middle class works mainly "white collar" jobs. The upper middle class makes up about 14 percent and are usually professionals and managers.

Working Class: The working class, also known as the lower middle class makes up about 30 percent of the US population and are usually in the service industry or work "blue collar" jobs. They are less likely to have college degrees.

Social Reproduction: Social reproduction is the tendency for social class to be passed down generation through generation. Cultural capital is passed down and gives people a staggered start in life. Somebody whose parents live in a motor home are pretty likely to remain on that path. Where as those born with wealth and prestige have advantages and habitus for the finer things in life.

Culture of Poverty: We as a society blame the poor for being poor. They are cast with stigmas of being lazy and using our tax dollars to fund their life. In poor communities they can learn attitudes that teach them to accept their fate and see trying to improve their situation as being hopeless. 

Deviance and Conformity

 Deviance: Deviance is an act that violates a norm. It is relative. In our society it is a norm that women use the women's restroom and men use the men's restroom, so this act of a female going into the males restroom is seen as deviant and would get a negative reaction. Just because something is deviant, does not make it wrong or unique.

 Stigma: Is a term coined by Erving Goffman that accounts for any physical or social impairment that causes a person to be devalued or left out of the normal social interactions with people. The physical type includes physical or mental impairments.

 Criminal Justice System: A system that creates and enforces the laws. Police are a main factor and mainly enforce the laws. They are considered a social institution.

 Deterrence: tries to discourage people from committing crimes by deterring them away. A good exaple would be using a security system, or placing signs like this in prominant areas for the criminal to see. It also serves as a reminder of what they are doing and that they run a chance of getting caught.  

Crime: Crimes are considered against the law because a law was made against the act. It is a violation of a norm that is so important to the law makers that the law was created in the first place.

Life in Groups

 Aggregate: An aggregate is a crowd or gathering of people who share a common physical location, where as they might not have anything else in common other than that. They do not recognise that they are in a group.

 Primary Group: The primary group is people who you are closely related to like your family or close friends. It involves face to face contact and deep feelings of belonging.

Secondary Group: The secondary group is larger and less personalized. They are designed to fulfill a task or get something dones. A good example would be a football team.

   

                                    
 Bureaucracy: Is a type of secondary group that is specifically designed to perform tasks eficiently. they are characterized by Weber's 6 charactaristics of a bureaucracy. They can be a machine with human components that is rational and dehumanized. George Ritzer coined "Mcdonaldization" to describe the efficiency and dehumanization.

 Triad: Is a small group made up of three people. There are three people to have conflict with and the group can be mediated. The groups stability increases because if one person leaves the group can still exist but each time you increase a member, it is at the expense of intimacy.

Diad: A diad is the smallest possible group, consisting of only two members. They are the most intense intimately, but they are also the most unstable because if one person leaves the group it is over. They share everything in what is called Dyadic withdrawal.

The Self and Social Interaction

 m

 Dramaturgy: Erving Goffman suggests that meaning is constructed through interaction. He coined Dramaturgy that made an analogy to social interaction and the theater, where people take on roles to create favorable impressions of themselves.

 Family: There are different agents of socialization that are social groups, institutions and individuals who create structured situations. The Family is the most significant and teaches us values in the basic form and shows us norms that help to shape our identity.

 Schools and Churches: Give us education and hidden curriculum in the latent functions. They teach aspects such as neatness, discipline, punctuality. These things are important late in life.

 Peers: Our peers give us a different set of social skills that are more immediately important than those given by the family. Since adolescents are attending school longer, peer group socialization is increasing because it segregates adolescents.

 Mass Media: The mass media that includes television, computers, internet and reading materials, often override family. Mass media installs values and norms like buying and consuming.

Roles: Our position in society comes with a set of behaviors that are expected. For example a student would be expectedton study, read, and listen.

Culture

 Material Culture: These material objects are associated with a cultural group. As American's we are constantly "on the go" and our material culture really reflects that.

 Symbolic Culture: symbols are loaded in our culture. While brands become symbols, also thoughts, ideas, and beliefs do as well. Gestures that we make with our bodies also have meaning. Like extending your middle finger alone carries a very strong meaning in our culture, whereas it can mean something totally different in another.

 Language: Humans use language which includes words, gestures, sounds, and written symbols to convey meaning and communicate. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that language structures thought and shapes how we see things.

 Folkway: Societies are made up of different strictness' of norms. A loosely enforced norm is known as a folkway, and makes interactions awkward or not. They insure smooth social interaction, like holding a door for a person.

 Taboo: Is an extreme form where even thinking about violating these things create disgust. These rules are ingrained so deeply that most people are completely repulsed by these actions, such as cannibalism. We value human life so much that the thought of a person eating another human creates horror.

 Sanctions: Sanctions are used to establish social control. They also increase social cohesion. They come in positive and negative. The negative is like a punishment... people in line often use negative sanctions like grunting and "toe-tapping" in order to insure that the person holding up the line knows that they are doing something wrong.

Subculture: A subculture is differentiated by it's distinct values, norms, and lifestyles. It can include ways or talking and ways of dress. Here we have a subculture of skateboarders who dress alike and have a special lingo for what they do.