Sociology Reaction Post: Culture and Sociology

1. What’s something from the lectures this week that surprised you?
2. What’s something from the lectures this week that you learned?
3. What’s something from the lectures this week that you knew already, and where did you learn it?
Watch these two videos and answer the questions above, then write a short response (around two lines) for the reaction post below.
https://youtu(dot)be/xAYffsYQVhI
https://youtu(dot)be/FdUrT3x2w7U
1. What’s something from the lectures this week that surprised you?
- As we were focusing on the "Inclusiveness of Social Media" and its factors , I was actually somewhat surprised to see that in terms of race, most people are equal in their use of social media. Now, I understand social media has been highly popularized in recent years, however, this trend in racial patterns of social media use was depicted to be happening since the development of social media. Additionally, I find it surprising that there are no racial gaps in social media use while wealthier individuals seem to use social media more. In this case, I personally feel we should acknowledge the races that are historically positioned to be wealthy and therefore are, or at least recognize that certain races tend to be the wealthiest which affects their social media usage.
2. What’s something from the lectures this week that you learned?
- This week I learned about the Public Sphere; more specifically, how it is successful as well as its correlational impact on mass communication and social media usage. According to lecture, the Public Sphere, as developed by German sociologist Habermas, is a social space where private citizens can come together as a public body to discuss ideas of general interest. In addition, Mass Communication was defined as communication that occurs at a large-scale level, rather than between individuals. Furthermore, the idealized Public Sphere's success depends on the presence of equality, access, and effective deliberation and discussion. This being said, I learned that social media was seen to be a platform which would approximate this idealized Public Sphere however, mass disagreements on online social forums such as Twitter implicate the faults of mass communication and contrast the notion of an effective Public Sphere.
3. What’s something from the lectures this week that you knew already, and where did you learn it?
- Something I already knew, although I didn't exactly term it in the same fashion--is Ann Swidler's concept of "Culture in Action" or Culture As a ToolKit. All my life I have been trained, in a sense, to illicit certain behaviors in context of the situation I find myself in. For example, when having dinner with Dean Jarrett of CAS, I made sure to behave in way that differs from the way I would normally interact at the dinner parties I have with my close friends. In this way, I used my cultural knowledge of formality to situate myself within the presence of my institution's Dean. In all honestly I learned this from my mother and through practiced experience (although it would've been cool to see this discussed in high school).