Norms Essay -- Sociology, Breaking the Norms

It is 900 PM on a Sunday night. Televisions all across the States tune into MTV. Millions of viewers will now spend the next thirty minutes watching a television program titled Jackass. maculation watching this program, the viewers will observe everything from people eating wicked boiled eggs in an attempt to purposely vomit, to a valet testing out various self defense devices on himself. next week viewers will tune into the same program to face the same kinds of stunts performed. The reason that America watches these kinds of programs, and the participants in them perform these stunts, be because norms argon being broken. A norm is something that is generally accepted by a beau monde as the right thing to do, or the way things are supposed to be. For example, a norm would be to usher in an elevator and carry facing the front for the duration of the trip. Breaking that norm would be to enter the elevator and face the back for the duration of the trip. It is not what is expec ted. Different norms pull round in different societies, and when these norms are broken within these societies people break attention, because it is not an occurrence observed on a regular basis. For our signifier project, each student was asked to break a norm that exists in our society and record the reactions of observers and results of the experiment. The norm I chose to break was the idea of driving normally-the notion that cars should be driven by pushing the gas pedal and go in a forward motion, not a...