Paddling the “Mainstream”

There are different ways of studying culture, different ways of producing culture, and different ways of interpreting culture — isn’t there anything we can all agree on?

In a word, no. But there are some things that come close! There are some very widely shared cultural norms and some very popular cultural products: things that just about everyone likes — or, at least, knows about. These things can be called mainstream culture. In this section, I explain how mainstream culture can be a common point of reference, even for people who disagree with it and are trying to tear it apart. I’ll also bring up the argument that mainstream culture is disappearing, as everyone runs off to join tiny cultural groups and ignoring other groups.

Even if people in a given society have different interpretations of, say, a popular book or television show, certain cultural products, ideas, and values are so widespread across society that they form mainstream culture: culture that has relatively wide agreement and awareness across a society. Parts of mainstream culture include:

Mainstream products:

•Blockbuster movies and popular songs

•Flags and other popular symbols

•Sacred texts

Mainstream ideas and values:

•Widespread religious beliefs

•Ideas about what type of people are most important (men or women? white or black?)

•Ideas about what type of government is best (democracy? communism?)

Mainstream practices:

•National holidays

•Rituals such as saying a prayer or a national pledge, watching a popular sport, or voting

•Dating and marriage practices

You’re not going to surprise or offend many people by setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July, or buying the latest box-office smash on DVD, or wearing jeans tailored to the latest trend. These things may, in fact, seem downright boring, but mainstream culture includes some of a society’s most

publish extremely comprehensive movie guides so that members of the subculture can be aware of which mainstream movies are considered acceptable to that subculture and which are not. Someone who’s not in that subculture, on the other hand, could just walk into any cineplex and buy a ticket to anything that looks good.

Subcultures can even have subcultures of their own — groups of people who abide by some norms and practices of the subculture, but deliberately reject others. An example of this is the “straight edge” movement in punk rock: a group of punks who dress like punks and act like punks but who share a commitment not to use alcohol or drugs like punks do. This makes “straight edge” punks — are you ready for this? — a sub-subculture.

When subcultures reach a certain level of popularity, they may be absorbed into mainstream culture, thus ceasing to be different or shocking. Today you can walk into any London souvenir shop and buy a pair of thong underwear with the British flag printed on the crotch, and no one is likely to think you’re very much of a rebel for doing so.

Microcultures

Subcultures reject mainstream culture, but there can’t be such a thing as a subculture if there’s no mainstream culture to reject!

Developments in communications technology — the invention of the printing press and, later, radio and television — have been responsible for the spread of mainstream culture, and further technological developments may be helping to bring it to an end. The Internet makes it easy for even relatively tiny groups to connect from anywhere around the world, thus making it easier

to spend more and more time associating with people from your preferred subcultures. When there were only a few radio stations on the dial, almost everyone listened to the same music; now, Internet radio allows you to easily listen to any of thousands upon thousands of different radio stations. You can follow sports teams playing anywhere in the world, and you can order or download books published in any country.

Given these dramatic changes, sociologist Jason Kaufman has argued that it makes less and less sense to think of there even being anything like “mainstream culture.” When you might have a completely different lifestyle than the woman living across the street or the guy sitting next to you at work, where is the mainstream? There may not necessarily be one. Kaufman says that we are increasingly living in a world of microcultures, where people can seek out small groups of like-minded people and spend nearly all their time interacting with them — rather than sharing the norms, values, and practices of people in their immediate surroundings. Birds of a feather have always flocked together, but now technology allows much smaller groups of birds to flock together from far-flung corners of the Earth.

If it’s true that we’re moving towards a world of microcultures, it will have important implications for everyone’s lives. Even though mainstream culture sometimes seems dull or bland, it does give everyone in a society a way to connect, something to share despite all their other differences.

Socialization: Where You

Connect in Culture

Despite all the different perspectives on culture, there’s one thing everybody agrees on: Culture is not something you’re born with, it’s something you learn. Socialization refers to the process by which people learn the norms and values of their society as they grow up. Like all learning, socialization happens especially quickly when people are young, but it’s a process that continues throughout life. As long as you’re alive and interacting with other people, you’re being socialized (and helping to socialize others).

Some socialization is very deliberate; for example, when companies have diversity training sessions meant to teach employees to value the fact that their coworkers come from different social backgrounds. Most socialization,

however, happens by pure osmosis. Without even realizing it, you come to share the values and norms of the people around you. (See the beginning of this chapter for definitions of “values” and “norms.”) As you grow up, you learn an entire way of life — often without even realizing it — that may be very different from what other people in other situations are learning.

Nature vs. nurture: Social psychology

The way people learn culture is by interacting with those around them. Normally sociologists are interested in large groups of people (that is, how human society works) while psychologists are interested in people as individuals (that is, how the human mind works). But the two disciplines meet in a field called social psychology, which is studied by both psychologists and sociologists. Social psychology is the study of how people as individuals learn from and interact with the people around them.

A perennial question in social psychology is the question of nature vs. nurture. Nature, in this formulation, stands for our genetic inheritance, the “programming” we were born with. Nurture stands for everything that happens to us as we grow and learn through interactions with other people. Our genetic inheritance definitively influences many of our physical characteristics and may have a profound influence on traits like personality, disposition, and sexuality. But even identical twins, who have exactly the same DNA, develop different personalities and interests.

Breaking from the norm

There’s no one right answer to the question of nature vs. nurture: in reality, people develop through an interaction of their genetic programming with the environment around them. Although it’s not an inclusive list, Table 5-1 gives you some examples of how you grow and learn through nature, nurture, and the interaction of the two.

Table 5-1 Nature, Nurture, and Everything in Between

You are who other people think you are

Through interpersonal socialization (see sidebar, “Not-so-secret agents”) people learn the values and norms of the group they’re born into, but they also learn who they are as individuals. This helps explain how even children born into the same family can develop very different personalities.

In An Inconvenient Squirrel, a children’s play by Joseph Scrimshaw, the squirrel of the title is “inconvenient” because he refuses to accept a name like “Really Important Squirrel” or “Master Thespian Squirrel,” a name that defines his identity. At one point, Evil Genius Squirrel explains to the inconvenient squirrel why having a public identity is so important: “You are,” he says slyly, “who other people think you are.”

Evil Genius Squirrel wasn’t the first one to figure this out. A sociologist named Charles Cooley (a member of the Chicago School, described in Chapter 3) coined the term “the looking-glass self” to describe the way that each person develops an idea of himself or herself by noticing how people act towards him or her.

Cooley emphasized the importance of each person’s “primary group” — the group of people with whom you interact most. Your family members, your very best friends, your closest coworkers: these are all members of your primary group. You implicitly learn norms and values from the members of your primary group, but you also notice how you’re different from them.

Chapter 6

Microsociology: If Life Is a Game,

What Are the Rules?

In This Chapter

Examining the paradox of society

Making rational — and irrational — choices

Taking the stage of life: symbolic interactionism

Sociologists study huge historical trends and conflicts among large groups, but many sociologists are also fascinated with the way individu-

als interact in society. This is called microsociology because it’s the study of society at its “smallest” — as small as two people interacting.

The society you live in gives shape and purpose to your life, but it also imposes limits. How do you deal with the social rules that guide you, and how do you use them to your advantage? What do you do when you encounter someone who plays by different rules than you do?

Just as understanding society helps to understand the choices individuals face, so do sociologists need to have some idea of individual psychology to understand how society works. If people’s actions and choices aren’t to some extent predictable, then nothing in society is predictable. In general, sociologists find that people are fairly predictable on average — but that doesn’t mean that their choices always “make sense.” As you may have noticed in your own life, sometimes people are predictably confusing.

In this chapter, I explain how sociologists think about the individual person in society — how and why a person makes the choices he does, and what effect this has on his society. I start by laying out the fundamental problem: How can society be both outside you and inside you? I continue on to discuss the problem of people’s unpredictability, and conclude with an explanation of how people “perform” in society like actors on a stage.

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Knowing these facts about your society, however, tells me nothing about you as an individual. It doesn’t tell me about your personal history or the choices you personally will make in life. Those social facts don’t describe your life — but they do affect it! For better and for worse, those aggregate facts about your society heavily influence your own life, and make it different than it would be if you lived in a different society.

To understand how facts about society in general can affect your own personal life, think about these points:

Marriage: When deciding whether to marry someone, you do so with the understanding that, however you may personally feel about marriage, in your society generally marriage is very often impermanent. That doesn’t mean marriage is taken lightly, but it does mean that if the going gets rough and you or your partner decide to bail, you will be in the company of a large number of your friends and colleagues who have also experienced divorce. Consciously or unconsciously, the fact that divorce

is socially acceptable may influence you to make a riskier marriage decision than you would in a society where divorce is not considered acceptable.

Job: Similarly, when you take a job, you can’t — and shouldn’t — expect that it will be permanent. It may just be, but that would not be the norm. You can expect to have other job opportunities in the future, which would be very unusual for you to never take. This means that you probably won’t look for a job that will last a lifetime — you’ll look for a job that will serve you well over the next few years.

Music: You can listen to whatever music you want, but if you choose to listen to Beethoven or Mozart, you won’t be able to chat about it with most of the people around you — unless you happen to be a member of an orchestra. Everywhere from TV programs to dentists’ offices to nightclubs, you’re much more likely to hear pop, rock, or R&B than classical music. If you listen to mostly classical music, you are unusual, and it may cause people to make certain assumptions about your background and personality. For this reason, you may choose not to listen to classical music, or to listen to it only in private. On the other hand, you may very deliberately and openly choose to listen to classical music if you want to convey a certain impression.

Norms, values, and laws

In Chapter 5, I describe the continuum of social understandings and agreements, running from “structure” to “culture.” All along that continuum there are norms and values that shape your life — the rules and repertoires of your society.

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through several different social circles, each with its own norms. For this reason, life in society can be very confusing, not to mention frustrating — even dangerous.

Sociologist Ann Swidler coined the term cultural toolkit to refer to all the cultural knowledge that you keep in your head. Your cultural knowledge is like a toolkit because you don’t always use all of it — but it’s ready for you when you want or need to use it. Whereas some social norms are so taken for granted that it might never even occur to you to do otherwise, some social norms vary dramatically from one place to the next; if you know the norms and values associated with different social contexts, you can act appropriately in a range of situations. For example:

You might dress in a suit and watch your language at work — but then slip into jeans and a t-shirt for your after-work softball game, where you can freely drink beer and swear.

You might know to accept a business card with one hand in the United States — but with two hands in China.

You might know to clap and cheer after an impressive solo at a jazz show — but not at an orchestral performance.

The term code switching is often used to refer to this process of adapting to different social contexts. Prudence Carter, a sociologist of education, talked to inner-city teens and found that they were able to succeed at school and at home by knowing how to talk and dress in one way to impress their teachers in school, and in another way to impress their peers at home on the block.

Everyone does this kind of code-switching to some extent, but knowing how to do it well, and in many different situations, is a tremendous advantage. The trick is managing all those different roles.

This is part of the paradox of society: You have the freedom to choose how you will behave, but your own social background both determines what behaviors you are familiar with and influences which ones you’ll choose. You’ve probably been advised to “just be yourself” — but who you are comes, in large part, from your society. Futhermore, “being yourself” varies from one social context to the next. If you wear a suit to work and do a job you’re proud of, and then go home and sit on the couch watching TV in your sweats, in which context are you being most “yourself”? Some sociologists have gone so far as to say that the idea of “being yourself” only makes sense in a social context. When you think about “who you are,” what you’re really thinking about is how you’re similar to, and different from, the people around you.

A friend of mine has a son who recently started playing with a team in the National Football League. The man is, of course, very proud of his son. The day his son was scheduled to play in the team’s starting lineup for the first