First Discussion

Papers were collected yesterday and today. Your first graded assignment was on answers to readings 1-3. Because we can get caught up answering the questions line by line, its best to remember to identify the author's main argument. Rather than sacrificing his/ her main argument, we look to the questions to help us to better understand what the argument is. In reading Mills and answering the questions, we found out that the main argument is that the development of the sociological imagination in every modern man is a necessity, whereas it may not have been for men in previous societies. Man's place was once rather fixed. Today, social changes like structural and geographic mobility, which occur in single generations, disrupt the everyday lives of man making the development of this special insight imperative. People fail at this essentially becuause they do not understand social structure, or the overlapping of many milieux. Berger argues that the development of the sociological perspective is a moral issue. Gaines supports the sociological imagination and uses it to understand the four teens' group suicide from a macro perspective rather than a psychological or medial perspective. She argues that using the sociological imagination can help us to better understand trends in social behavior. Blaming individuals will stymie opportunities to address social conditions like suicide at the micro level (i.e. in families), the middle level (i.e. at school), and the macro level (i.e. in the media).

The book recomendation this week is "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis' protagonist has "everything," which we often think of as tons of money, the so-called right friends, is successful at his job, etc., and he is impossibly disconnected.