Microblogging and Connections

I ran across this blog entry while perusing Twitter and almost immediately made a connection to sociology.  Part of what sociology does is examine how we make impressions and make meaningful relationships with others in this world.  This blog entry examines just how we do that.  While the connections to high school sociology are not explicit, take the symbolic interactionist point of view to most of the "reasons" many of us post mundane updates, "like," "poke" and do other sorts of things on social media.  Another different look into human behavior and I, for one, love it.  In one selection from the blog,

In contrast to earlier authors, the research showed that phatic posts do contain information messages, signals, values of staying up-to-date with micro and macro world of events and news, flirt, chat, public expressions of everyday life and emotions among the participants (affection, hate, anger, and so on). Their contents has some elements of meaning but their main relevance is to denote something: interaction, connected presence and fostering and maintaining connections.

Check the Scientific American Blog here:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/04/13/phatic-posts-even-the-small-talk-can-be-big/


The Teaching High School Sociology web site

Politics and the Creating an Impression of Self

Spring break and I am catching up on my media and ran across this article in the Washington Post about Mitt Romney's attempt to create an impression of himself at different venues as parodied in Saturday Night Live.  When that troupe is at their best, they capture the absurdity of popular culture.  This can also show the power of media as a socialization agent.  This kind of scenario with politicians always takes me back to Goffman's symbolic interactionism and the presentation of self, which is what politicians attempt to do whenever in public.

The article is here.



The Teaching High School Sociology web site