The Sociological Imagination:
My day started at around 7a.m. when I got up, ate breakfast,
brushed my teeth, and headed to the gym to weight lift. When I finished weight
lifting I showered came home and then walked to my first class of the day. After
class I walked over to the admin building to pick up my parking permit for the
upcoming school year then headed home to do homework. Around 6, I rounded up my
brother and housemates to see what they wanted to do for dinner and we decided
to make a meal and then sat down as a group to eat. I finished my day by
watching some football and working on the homework I had left before now
heading to bed.
One of the first things I did during the day was head to the gym
to work out and improve my health, so that this year while snowboarding I don’t
dislocate my shoulder again. Going to the gym, running, and being active are
things that society promotes and declares are good things that people should be
participating in. This makes a lot of sense in a world where we understand that
exercise improves health and is beneficial to us. It also would follow that in
a world where self image and how others view you that the use of weight lifting
and exercise to improve oneself is also encouraged. This also relates to the problem of self image
and how society presents a certain view of how one should look which can cause
problems for people that prioritize image over anything else.
While lifting one thing I never really thought about or took
notice of is the fact that I wipe down machines after I am done with them. This
is something society has shaped and promotes because cleanliness and health are
highly valued. This is something I had accepted as an everyday thing when in
reality society has shaped this activity making it somewhat unacceptable not to
follow this practice.
After lifting I showered which is something society tells me I
need to do every day or I will become unattractive due to the fact that I am
filthy and smell. Once again society shapes this activity telling us cleanliness
is the way to go and the way to be socially acceptable.
During my day I picked up my parking permit for my car so that I
can drive to class on days where the weather is bad or I need to get to campus
quickly. How parking is structured is something that is shaped heavily by
society. Without parking lots and parking passes, we might park our cars where
ever is closest causing problems for the handicapped or those who need to park
on campus to run an errand. With the parking structured and shaped by society
we have handicap spots, visitor parking, metered parking, lots for faculty,
students, and commuters. All of these were created because society created a
hierarchy of parking priority so that parking has become convenient and easy to
do.
Towards the end of my day my brother, my housemates, and I made
dinner and then sat down and ate together. Why do we do this? What is the
point? As long as I can remember I have sat down at the dinner table with my
family and ate a meal as a unit. This is something that I have always done and
never questioned but is something most people I know do and is a widely
acceptable practice. The reasoning I have and most people have for doing this
is to sit down to not only eat but also to spend time with family or friends.
Ultimately I see this practice as something that would be almost inevitable as
society developed because it provides a break from work to stop and communicate
and spend time with others.
The things I talked about in this post are all pretty routine and
boring but it got me thinking about how society has shaped me and the way I
conduct myself every day. Things like cleanliness and structure are important
to our society and seen as good, so after looking at my day from a sociological
standpoint it is pretty clear. Health and image are also something that after I
think about them sociologically are shaped by society. They shape it in ways
that are both good and bad, certain aspects of fitness where people do it to
become healthy are good but when people place all emphasis on image it can
cause problems and have a negative effect. When you look at TV and other media
the bar is set pretty high for image and there is quite a bit of emphasis
placed on it. This definitely seems to cause problems within society and more than likely has other
sociological impacts which I hope to look into later when I know a bit more
about sociology and this particular topic.
The reason that all of this matters is that unemployment is a problem for not just the unemployed but everyone. The social implications of having all kinds of unemployed people can be wide ranging and possibly lead to higher crime rates or an increase in poverty rates. To see whether or not this was true for poverty, I looked up the poverty rates for children in Michigan during the same period as the other two graphs. This information didn't really show what I expected, it showed that poverty rates stayed the same and then began to increase as the unemployment rates got better. This illustrates that there isn't correlation based on factors and things we would generally hypothesize to be related. This was talked about in the text book, You May Ask Yourself, which explains that correlation is fairly tough to prove and isn't always obvious. However there could be some causality here but it isn't obvious and I would like to see more data before I made too many presumptions about the effects of unemployment on society.