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A contemporary example of social change happening anywhere in the world right now.

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A contemporary example of social change happening anywhere in the world right now.

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Social change can be seen in regards to sexual identity, same sex marriage, and equality of the LGBTQ+A community. In this chart we can see the change in attitudes and the shift in numbers for the support of this community, in just 8 years time.

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(p.491) A mob is a highly emotional crowd that pursues a violent or destructive goal. A riot is a social eruption that is highly emotional, violent, and undirected. Riots are typically a deep dissatisfaction on the part of people frustrated with the way society is operating. On January 26, 2021 what started as a political protest, Trump spoke and encouraged a large mob to walk down to the capitol, this group of people came together because they believed the election was stolen from Trump by the Democrats. They were encouraged by many Republican leaders to bring their anger with them to the capitol. This group was compiled of Trump supporters, Q'Anon believers, Proud Boys, and other like minded groups. Many people of the group were heard to be saying "Let's take the capitol". The irony of the riot has been lost on every single one of them. These groups are believed to be patriots and believe in law and order supporting the government and police, and this riot was the opposite of that.

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Video: Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol

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A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.

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Structural-Functional Perspective: Modernity as a Mass Society

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Structural-Functional Perspective: Modernity as a Mass Society

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(p 501-506) Money, an abundance of material things, and industrial progress have led to social isolation of many people. Gemeinschaft is Tonnie's concept that people lived out their lives surrounded by kin and guided by a shared heritage. In a society where isolation continues to increase, especially during the pandemic, social media continues to grow. It's created an environment where we're comparing our lives in mass to other's lives and lives of celebrities. It has been proven that social media greatly increased unhappiness.

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Social media has allowed celebrities to directly communicate with fans over the years. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram have given users a closer look at their favorite celebrities, granting them direct access into their world.

Celebrities like Selena Gomez and Chrissy Teigen have used their platforms to speak openly with fans about important issues, while stars like Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Justin Bieber have built their empires on social media. These celebrities have the power to influence millions of people around the world with a single post, and they have mastered just how to do it.

Scroll through the photos below to see some of the most influential celebrities on social media.
Duggar Family Snapchat: The Reality Family On Social Media!

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The Most Influential Celebrities on Social Media

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Social media has allowed celebrities to directly communicate with fans over the years. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram have given users a closer look at their favorite celebrities, granting them direct access into their world.

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Social-Conflict Perspective: Modernity as Class Society

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Social-Conflict Perspective: Modernity as Class Society

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A class society is a capitalist society with pronounced social stratification. (p.503) If you look at the graphic you'll notice many of the nicer more expensive counties in California have a higher rate of poverty. Such as San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Imperial, and Santa Barbara.

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Symbolic Interactionist Perspective: Modernity and the Individual

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Symbolic Interactionist Perspective: Modernity and the Individual

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Before social media, frenemies existed, but you were able to leave them behind at work, school, occasional family dinners. Those moments were hard but you were able to grit your teeth and get thru. If you felt an unease with someone, you could choose to not talk to them about your personal life. But with social media, many people in your circle and outer circle expect to be added, with your frenemies being the most eager to see the inside info of your life. If you're like me and have social anxiety but are an extrovert, it becomes even more complicated because you're friends with everyone but certain people you're unsure if they feel the same way in return. It's one of the ways technology is stressful for an individual. Having a constant audience can be stressful and cause people to try and change their identity based on their viewers. Although modernity has allowed people to express their individual selves (P504) you have to curate your friends list or have two different accounts (as I do) to feel this freedom within the tight community of social media. Social media is a breeding ground for other-directedness (P505) in particular apps like Tiktok where people will redo a video that many other people already did.

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changes in mental health awareness. One of the most googled things in 2021 was positive affirmations. 2020 and 2021 were great indicators that "In important respects, modernity has failed." (P508) Modernity afforded many of us the ability to work from home on our laptops and internet but many jobs were deemed essential and many people couldn't afford the luxury of staying home. The bright light of progress was challenged during these few years, as well as science, cultural debates, and social institutions were forced to change. Schools switching to all online. Bars and restaurants closing. People wearing masks everywhere. All of the things that collectively happened to us 2020 and 2021 were examples of post-modernism. People starting their own businesses, people learning how to bake sourdough bread, families eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner together again, starting gardens, using their new found extra time to get out and protest police violence. So much has changed in these two years because modernism was not sustainable.

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Discover the top Google searches of 2021, including the most searched questions, the most captivating moments, and the most inspiring people.

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More people than ever before are realizing how much Chinese workers do for the all consuming US. We live in a "rich country" that regulates how we're treated and what the minimum we can be paid for the job we do. And collectively we're starting to realize that the billionaires who don't pay taxes, pay us 14.00$ an hour, (with no bathroom breaks) are making money on our backs. We're learning that this nation's wealth was built on the free labor of slaves. We still have a long way to go when it comes to collectively realizing that the people in other countries who make all of the things we consume, are not being treated even close to as good as we're treated as workers. It benefits our rich for poorer countries to remain poor, but still need to rely somewhat on technology in order to survive. The attitude of colonization is not in the past, it's alive and well. These companies and us as consumers still take advantage of poor nations, taking their valuable resources and exploiting their human labor. (P509)

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There's red on the ceiling and red on the floor, red dripping from the window sills and red globules splattered across the walls. It looks like the artist Anish Kapoor has been let loose with his wax cannon again. But this, in fact, is what the making of Christmas looks like; this is the very heart of the real Santa's workshop - thousands of miles from the North Pole, in the Chinese city of Yiwu.

Our yuletide myth-making might like to imagine that Christmas is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering away in a snow-bound log cabin somewhere in the Arctic Circle. But it's not. The likelihood is that most of those baubles, tinsel and flashing LED lights you've draped liberally around your house came from Yiwu, 300km south of Shanghai - where there's not a (real) pine tree nor (natural) snowflake in sight.

Christened "China's Christmas village", Yiwu is home to 600 factories that collectively churn out over 60% of all the world's Christmas decorations and accessories, from glowing fibre-optic trees to felt Santa hats. The "elves" that staff these factories are mainly migrant labourers, working 12 hours a day for a maximum of £200 to £300 a month - and it turns out they're not entirely sure what Christmas is.

Wei gets through at least 10 face masks each day, trying not to breathe in the cloud of red dust. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex

"Maybe it's like [Chinese] New Year for foreigners," says 19-year-old Wei, a worker who came to Yiwu from rural Guizhou province this year, speaking to Chinese news agency Sina. Together with his father, he works long days in the red-splattered lair, taking polystyrene snowflakes, dipping them in a bath of glue, then putting them in a powder-coating machine until they turn red - and making 5,000 of the things every day.

In the process, the two of them end up dusted from head to toe in fine crimson powder. His dad wears a Santa hat (not for the festive spirit, he says, but to stop his hair from turning red) and they both get through at least 10 face masks a day, trying not to breathe in the dust. It's a tiring job and they probably won't do it again next year: once they've earned enough money for Wei to get married, they plan on returning home to Guizhou and hopefully never seeing a vat of red powder again.

Packaged up in plastic bags, their gleaming red snowflakes hang alongside a wealth of other festive paraphernalia across town in the Yiwu International Trade Market, aka China Commodity City, a 4m sq m wonder-world of plastic tat. It is a pound shop paradise, a sprawling trade show of everything in the world that you don't need and yet may, at some irrational moment, feel compelled to buy. There are whole streets in the labyrinthine complex devoted to artificial flowers and inflatable toys, then come umbrellas and anoraks, plastic buckets and clocks. It is a heaving multistorey monument to global consumption, as if the contents of all the world's landfill sites had been dug-up, re-formed and meticulously catalogued back into 62,000 booths.

The two men produce 5,000 red snowflakes a day, and get paid around £300 a month. Photograph: China Daily/Reuters

The complex was declared by the UN to be the "largest small commodity wholesale market in the world" and the scale of the operation necessitates a kind of urban plan, with this festival of commerce organised into five different districts. District Two is where Christmas can be found.

There are corridors lined with nothing but tinsel, streets throbbing with competing LED light shows, stockings of every size, plastic Christmas trees in blue and yellow and fluorescent pink, plastic pine cones in gold and silver. Some of it seems lost in translation: there are sheep in Santa hats and tartan-embroidered reindeer, and of course lots of that inexplicable Chinese staple, Father Christmas playing the saxophone.

It might look like a wondrous bounty, but the market's glory days seem to have passed: it's now losing out to internet giants like Alibaba and Made In China. On Alibaba alone, you can order 1.4m different Christmas decorations to be delivered to your door at the touch of a button. Yiwu market, by comparison, stocks a mere 400,000 products.

Santa hats galore ... inside one of Yiwu's Christmas showrooms. Photograph: Dan Williams/Unknown Fields

Aiming at the lower end of the market, Yiwu's sales thrived during the recession, as the world shopped for cut-price festive fun, but international sales are down this year. Still, according to Cai Qingliang, vice chairman of the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, domestic appetite is on the rise, as China embraces the annual festival of Mammon. Santa Claus, says the Economist, is now better known to most Chinese people than Jesus.

The beaming sales reps of Yiwu market couldn't sound happier with their life sentence of eternal Christmastime. According to Cheng Yaping, co-founder of the Boyang Craft Factory, who runs a stall decked out like a miniature winter wonderland: "Sitting here every day, being able to look at all these beautiful decorations, is really great for your mood."

It's somehow unlikely that those on the other end of the production line, consigned to dipping snowflakes in red-swamped workshops for us to pick up at the checkout for 99p, feel quite the same way.

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Santa's real workshop: the town in China that makes the world's Christmas decorations

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There's red on the ceiling and red on the floor, red dripping from the window sills and red globules splattered across the walls. It looks like the artist Anish Kapoor has been let loose with his wax cannon again.