Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Daily norms

Dahrendorf discusses norms as a form of “power that can be negatively or positively enforced” (Allen, 2007). Can you name a couple of norms enforced negatively that exists in our society? Positively? And how are they enforced either way?

4 comments:

  1. One thing that could be considered a norm is video gaming. It has been introduced to teenagers around the world and, i believe, it is condidered a new social interface. It exists positively in THEIR, youth and gamers, minds because it gives them skills and takes them away from real world anxieties. On the other hand, many older people in the world might believe that playing vedio games currupt the mind by displaying violence and sex. A game for the Playstation called Grand Theft Auto had recent negative influence in the video gaming world. People thought of it as a provocative sexual and violent game which most parents wouldnt buy for their kids. In all, it is only a game and a norm in most American teenagers lives.

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  2. Text messaging. Personally, I think text messaging is annoying. It can be convenient at times but for the most part a person can spend 10 minutes text messaging someone and in reality they could have said everything in two minutes if they just spoke on the phone. Cell phones in general have made it so that people can have tabs on each other at all times. Because technology is advancing so quickly, that people are forced to rely on a phone to contact one another. It is kind of weird to think how people used to communicate before cell phones. It must have been hard to get a hold of someone quickly.

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  3. how about facebook or myspace, social sites, they are totally replacing face to face social interactions. People cannot go on their regular days without checking these websites constantly and communicating through them.
    It does on the other hand make it able for people to connect from all over the world, or family, relatives or friends that live far away to be able to interact with each other through these sites. So these social sites have both negative and positive

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  4. I think we have become accustomed to using up our water without a care in the world, we leave the light on without thinking, and computers stay on most of the time. We do these things without thinking. Becuase it has been so prominent throughout our lives, it has become very normal and almost "autopilot like". We unconsciously think that there is no harm becuase we were never taught on the harm. However, research has proved to us that our "Normal" lifestyle is becoming to be a problem for our palnet. The positive to the lifestyle is convinience, comfort, accebility, etc., and the negatives would be the environmental problem escalating. The way i see it and try to tell myself is that we CAN live without the positives (convinience and comfort) but we CANNOT live without the negatives (our destroyed planet).

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