Week 7 - Comment

Hey everyone, this week I commented on Alexandra's blog.

http://alexandrasoc250.blogspot.com.au/

Week 6 - Group Presentation

Hey everyone, heres a link to my group's powerpoint presentation for Week 11 on Online Interactions

http://www.scribd.com/doc/109175278/SOC250-Group-Presentation

Week 6 - Goffman Online

Hope everyone's week off was amazing! Before I begin about the boring stuff.. heres a YouTube clip of some ridiculously cool and relevant slam poetry for your enjoyment!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAx845QaOck

 

This week we took what we’ve learned from Goffman and applied it to contemporary online interactions. I’ve attached an interesting article by Forte and Hewitt outlining a study done on the relationships between faculty members and students and how that is affected by Facebook.

Facebook could be considered a paralleled backstage to the student’s academic frontstage. Like in Ross’ reading this week, CabbieCall was seen as an important venue for The KB/KG to critique and criticise their training frontstage. No doubt we all poke fun and criticise classes, professors and exams… would that change if it became possible that someone of University authority was reading? This was the case in the reading which is why CabbieCall was made by learners for learners without any evaluators or instructors involved. The article notes that, “Because social networking communities are built to support presentation of self, identity management is likely to be a significant issue for participants in communities whose membership crosses perceived social boundaries and organizational power relationships” (pg. 1). In this case, adding professors as ‘friends’ on Facebook crosses both perceived social boundaries and organizational power relationships. With that being said, the study measured student’s rated perceptions of their professor from two groups: those who had seen his/her Facebook profile and those who hadn’t. Based on the findings, the rating was 4.7 for both groups of students. I was really surprised by this. Personally, I don’t think it is a good idea for teachers to be adding students as friends on Facebook or vice versa. It breaches the purely professional relationship that faculty and students have with one another and allows them intimate access to each others social lives. Can teachers and students really be ‘friends’?

Reference:
Forte, A, Hewitt, A 2006, 'Crossing boundaries: Identity management and student/faculty relationships on the Facebook', 04/10/2012,
http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?
q=cache:r95RrMgJZNYJ:scholar.google.com/+facebook+goffman&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

Week 5 - Profanity

Morning everyone, how the hell are you today?

This week’s topic was profanity. We discussed the social markers and appropriateness of swearing in everyday interactions. I found this very interesting, but being from a psych background I became increasingly curious as to the personal, psychological implications of swearing. So I did a little research and found an article called The Psychology of Profanity (link attached below).

The article describes profanity as an emotional outburst typically of anger, frustration or pain in a helpless situation. Profanity offers a mental outlet for this stress. Psychologically, the most significant effect of using profanity “is that of a pleasant feeling of relief from a painful stress” (Pg. 117). Apparently, “passionate outbursts are generally succeeded by periods of good behaviour” (Pg. 118). It also notes that periods of shouting or gesticulation that often accompany swearing may be beneficial to your physiological health by relieving nerve tension.

These explanations seem quite logical except in the situation of swearing for no apparent reason. Nowadays, it seems that people use swear words as their own functioning part of a sentence. For example, the F word can be a verb, noun, adjective, adverb etc. and not simply an exclamatory remark on its own in a time of pain or anger.

Another thing I noticed right away about this paper was that it only focused on the reasons why MEN swear. Is this implying that there is a significant difference between the frequency and/or reasoning for swearing between men and women? Or does this study use men as the control and simply generalize the results to both genders like ignorant writers used to? What do you think?

Reference:
Patrick, G 1901, 'The psychology of profanity', Psychological Review, 8, 2, 113-127, 02/10/2012,
http://ey9ff7jb6l.scholar.serialssolutions.com/?sid=google&auinit=GTW&aulast=Patrick&atitle=The+psychology+of+profanity.&id=doi:10.1037/h0074772&title=Psychological+review&volume=8&issue=2&date=1901&spage=113&issn=0033-295X