Soc 250 Blog #5 Response to Blog

This week I responded to Karishma's blog! :)

http://bhandarykarishma.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/bloody-australian-culture.html#comment-form

Soc 250 Data Presentation

Here's the link to my data for data presentation! :)

žhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeuHxZURHls&feature=related 

2009 Video Music Awards, Kanye West and Taylor Swift

Blog #4 Soc 250

This week’s readings focus on “telling the codes” within street and prison interactions.  A code is a set of rules or guidelines that are unwritten and followed by all members of a given social system.  These codes are used as embedded instructions for viewing and describing a particular social order.  These unwritten guidelines are present in every social system.  Nikki Jones analyzes the role of violence with young inner-city girls and how this is impacted by the “girl code.” 

Jones argues that violence is very much a large aspect in the lives of many of these girls, contrary to popular opinion.  In today’s society women are supposed to be submissive and weak, when a girl breaks this norm she is often viewed as a deviant (by contemporary standards.)  Girls are more likely to reach this deviant status if they are from a lower socioeconomic level and a member of a minority group.  Jones conducts interviews with several members from this high violence group and analyzes the “code” in which these girls follow in regards to violence.

The primary code of the street is to prove that they are not someone to be “messed with” via engaging in public fights.  After they achieve this they can begin to put on a “tough front” which allows them to deter future fights without breaking the code.  This ability to defend one’s self greatly strengthens a young girl’s confidence.  These girls can maintain successful interactions within their social system as long as they follow the code of the street’s three “R’s” respect, reputation, and retaliation.  The girls with the highest social statuses are the ones who adhere to the three “R’s.” 

I find that Jones has done some very fascinating and somewhat new research.  It was interesting to see the similarities and differences between men and women in regards to violence.  For men maintaining the code of the street may often lead them to gain a higher masculine status and for women maintaining this code often leads them to have their feminine status revoked.  With both genders in these situations these unwritten rules need to be followed in order to achieve any sort of respect however, the respect a man and a woman may receive for the same act has vastly different implications on their overall rank in regards to power and sexual attractiveness. 

Reference:

Jones, Nikki. Working 'the Code': On Girls, Gender, and Inner-city Violence [online]. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, The, Vol. 41, No. 1, Apr 2008: 63-83.

Soc250 Blog #3

In this week’s readings Garfinkel explores the idea of “Breaching Experiments” which are essentially where one person intentionally disrupts the assumed norms of a given situation, in an attempt to see how the disruption will impact the interaction/social system.  The two primary examples he gives are breaking the rules in games, and asking for elaboration during conversations on simple things.  The subjects whom these experiments were conducted on often responded with hostility due to the broken moral enforcement of trust.  These breaches break the subject’s already preconceived ideal of social roles and break the general thesis of reciprocal perspectives.  Garfinkel enjoyed this conflict, he believed that it was more useful for sociologists to study factors that disrupt a system, rather than simply observe a system functioning properly. 

Mark Seilhamer applies this concept today by analyzing the social dynamic of modern prank phone calls.  Seilhamer argues that the crank callers view the interaction as a play while intentionally breaking accepted norms and the subject who is being called is treating the situation as reality and continually trying to save their “fabricated frame” of their community.  The subject often responds with confusion while trying to rationalize the behavior of the prank caller and then hostility once they discover that their moral enforcement of trust has been broken. 

The author of this article only examines the dynamic within one particular prank phone call, so that could be a potentially dangerous method to assume that this model is true for all prank call breaching experiments.  Although his general conclusions do line up quite similarly to those of Garfinkel, it does make me weary that only one conversation was analyzed for this study.  I think that the author would have been able to draw a more complete set of conclusions if they had widened their data pool.  All in all, I do find it fascinating to apply Garfinkel’s theory to modern prank calls.  It is definitely not an example that I would have thought of on my own. 

Reference:

Seilhamer, M., 2011. “On Doing ‘Being a Prank Caller’ A Look Into the Crank Call Community of Practice”, Journal of Pragamatics, Vol. 43, pp. 677-690.