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When watching this video I realized how much of an issue poverty is and how difficult it can be to find solutions to this problem. I picked this video because it shows how Escobares, which is a city in Texas, has struggled to get out of poverty even after becoming a city and having a little more resources available to them. "The twentieth century witnessed unprecedented human achievement. Yet solutions to many problems of human existence - including finding meaning in life, resolving conflicts between nations, and eliminating poverty - have eluded us." (Macionis, p. 509) We have achieved many things and resolved many issues but even then, poverty has been an issue that just doesn't seem to go away but just like those in the city of Esobares, we must remain hopeful.

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Life in the poorest city in the US - BBC News

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Even though the current spike in unemployment is due to COVID-19, I picked this image because in the postmodernity section we learn that one of the themes in postmodernity thinking is how it has failed in solving current issues like poverty. "This fact is evident in today's high rates of unemployment and poverty, as well as the widespread sense of financial insecurity."(Macionis, p. 508) Even before COVID there was lots of financial insecurity and unfortunately the pandemic we are living through only came to make this worse.

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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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I chose this image because when I was reading this section in the textbook, I learned that mass-media is something that has greatly changed, or evolved, and increased overtime. This image represents the evolution of mass-media. "Mass-society theory argues, first, that the scale of modern life has greatly increased... the face-to-face communication of the village was eventually replaced by the impersonal mass-media...the mass-media give rise to a national culture that washes over the traditional differences that used to set off one region from another." (Macionis, p. 501-502) One change in mass-media was its transition from Newspaper to having all the articles that are typically in newspaper on the internet.

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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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This blog post talks about individualism and how even though some have found it exciting to find themselves, others haven't felt quite the same because they aren't at that stage yet, which is why I picked it. "Most people in modern societies have the privacy and freedom to express there individuality." (Macionis, p. 490) Today, we are more free to be who we want to be and this can sometimes be an issue because seeing how others seem to have their life together can make others feel lost and as if they have no identity.

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Individualistic values, such self-expression, individuality, self-development, autonomy, privacy, and choice, have in fact triumphed in the U.S. and in many other places around the world. Brooks is not the only person who finds that frightening. But should it be?

Brooks is interested in the different ways we are creating family and community now that nuclear families account for only about one out of every five households in the United States. Because I wrote about that in How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, the Atlantic interviewed me about their cover story. I didn't get a chance to say as much as I would have liked about the key question about the rise of individualism: Is it an opportunity or a threat?

I wrote about that in How We Live Now. I'll share that section in two parts. In this first part, I will explain more about what individualism means, and how it can be experienced either as exhilarating or threatening. Then in a future blog post, I'll share Part 2, about what I learned from interviewing people all around the country about the choices they made about how to live and how those choices worked out for them. ( Here it is.)
Twenty-First Century Individualism: Opportunity or Threat?

In twenty-first-century America, individuals are freer than they have ever been before. They are no longer tied to predetermined life courses in which marrying, having kids, and staying married are obligatory.

They can, if they wish, cycle in and out of different dwellings, towns, jobs, and relationships. As sociologist Ulrich Beck put it:

"Marriage can be subtracted from sexuality, and that in turn from parenthood; parenthood can be multiplied by divorce; and the whole thing can be divided by living together or apart, and raised to a higher power by the possibility of multiple residences and the ever-present potentiality of taking back decisions."

Individuals, not couples or families or other social groups, are now the fundamental units of society. It is not that building blocks such as couples or families are not still significant. They are. Married couples, for example, can raise children together, and they can take advantages of all of the deals that are cheaper by the couple and the government policies that benefit only them and not people who are single. They can talk as if they are a single entity ("we really like modern art"), and other people can smoosh together their two names as if they are one (DickAndJane).

And yet, today's married couples are not as enmeshed as they once were. A study of couples in 2000 and twenty years earlier showed that the spouses in 2000 were less likely to have their main meal together, work around the house together, go out for fun together, or have as many shared friends as did the couples from 1980.

Contemporary couples often have their own mobile phones, not (just) one shared landline. They have their own laptops, their own online bookmarks tagging their own favorite sites and movies and books and blogs. Marketers know their separate preferences. Ask each person in a couple to name all of the people in his or her life-including the important ones and the not-as-important ones-and the two sets may well overlap significantly, but each person is at the center of his or her own unique social network. This networked individualism is the new social operating system in societies around the world.

Single people who live alone, if they have adequate resources, have even more options for designing the lives they want to live. They can pursue their careers and their passions. They can avail themselves of copious amounts of contemplative solitude. They can create homes that reflect their values and their tastes. They can reimagine love and relationships in the biggest, broadest senses of the words. Friends and nieces, for instance, rather than a spouse and offspring, can be the people who mean the world to them. They can set the priorities for their lives and then live by them.

In the United States, and in many other nations, individualistic values have triumphed. We value self-expression, self-development, autonomy, privacy, individuality, and perhaps most important of all, choice. In a bravura analysis of more than a million books published over two centuries, UCLA scholar Patricia Greenfield found that instances of the word choose climbed over time while uses of the word obliged declined. Between 1800 and 2000, the words individual, self, and unique showed up increasingly more often whereas the words authority, obedience, or belonging became less commonplace.

The rise of individualism has, for many, been exhilarating. People who never did feel comfortable with marrying or parenting or living in the suburbs or handing over their lifelong loyalty to a single employer, for instance, are liberated from soul-crushing strictures and expectations. People who once believed that no one in the world shared their quirks or maladies discover others like them everywhere and can share their lives online and off. Individuals of all stripes can design their own lives, filling them with the people and places and spaces and pursuits that they find most engaging, most authentic, and most meaningful.

For others, though, the new developments are ominous and even terrifying. People who prefer certainty, predictability, and commitments that are bolted in place by powerful institutions and revered traditions feel insecure and adrift in the brave new world of individualism. Skeptics assessing the state of modern life fret that people are using their newfound freedoms to become self-obsessed and self-indulgent, flitting from one relationship, pursuit, or place to another, abdicating their responsibilities to their relatives and their communities and threatening the very foundations of civic and family life. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the term liquid love to describe the fragility of contemporary human bonds and the never-ending efforts we marshal in our fraught and futile attempts to create some permanence.

Contemporary anxieties about our weakening ties and compromised values have many precedents. Each new wave of large-scale social change, such as the rise of urbanization or the introduction of new technologies such as cars, telephones, televisions, and computers, stokes our fears and unleashes a tsunami of scolding screeds.

Is Individualism Wrecking Society?

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"Today we are crawling out from the wreckage of that hyper-individualism." That was David Brooks, in his cover story for the Atlantic on the decline of the nuclear family, pinning the blame for society's woes on the rise of individualism. Individualistic...

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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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This image clearly shows inequality which is why I picked it. "Modernity has gradually worn away some of the rigid categories that set nobles apart from commoners in preindustrial societies. But class-society theory maintains that elites are still with us... In short, a few people are still born to wealth and power." (Macionis, p. 504) The textbook mentions that the working class and others are living a better life when compared to years back but even with that, inequality is still around.

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For collective behavior I picked a video on people protesting the current COVID-19 restrictions because it is something really recent, that were currently still living, and it seems like every weekend there is a COVID-19 related protest going on. "One type of collective behavior is the crowd, which is a temporary gathering of people who share a common focus of attention and who influence one another." (Macionis, p. 490) As you can see in the video, there are tons and tons of people gathered and are all protesting the COVID-19 restrictions, the current stay-at-home order, set by Governor Gavin Newsom because they believe it violates their rights.

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San Diego Protesters Are Angry About COVID 19 Restrictions

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I decided to find a short article in which the topic was COVID-19 because it is something that has come to change everyone's life. COVID-19, also known as Corona-virus has had a significant impact on the way we function as a society. "Social Change occurs when people join together in the pursuit of a common goal..." (Macionis, p. 490) As part of a way to try and stay as healthy as possible while we do essential things, like grocery shopping or going to work, we are now required to wear face masks any time we are out.

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COVID-19 has affected every aspect of life around the globe, from individual relationships to institutional operations to international collaborations. As societies try to defend themselves through severe restrictions on people's movement and interactions, the disease continues to decimate families, upend governments, crush economies, and tear through the social sector. The interconnectedness-and vulnerabilities-of the complex systems that make the modern world run have never been more apparent. The former US ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, described the impact of coronavirus to be potentially " as serious as a world war."

How should the social sector respond to the evolving crisis? How will nonprofits, foundations, philanthropic organizations, and social justice advocates emerge from the pandemic? What unique insight and capabilities can civil society bring to bear on the problems the world now faces? How will organizations manage potentially calamitous challenges to funding their operations? In this series, SSIR will present insight from social change leaders around the globe to help organizations face the systemic, operational, and strategic challenges that will test the limits of their capabilities.

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Good civic health looks like people making meaningful connections with their neighbors, public officials, and contributing to governance decision-making. But what will become of civic life during COVID-19?

How the social sector and Stanford Social Innovation Review are responding now and preparing for what comes next.

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Rethinking Social Change in the Face of Coronavirus (SSIR)

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COVID-19 has affected every aspect of life around the globe, from individual relationships to institutional operations to international collaborations. As societies try to defend themselves through severe restrictions on people's movement and interactions, the disease continues to decimate families, upend governments, crush economies, and tear through the social sector.