she wants to be loved like sunshine;;

23 Aug 2010
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fuck yeah, sociology. thank you for analyzing everything.

thesociologist:

In the article Bathroom Politics: Introducing Students to Sociological Thinking from the Bottom Up, sociology professor Edgar Alan Burns describes some reasons why toilet paper politics is worthy of examination. On the first day of Burns’ introductory course in sociology, he asks his students, “Which way do you think a roll of toilet paper should hang?” In the following fifty minutes, the students examine why they picked their answers, exploring the social construction of “rules and practices which they have never consciously thought about before”. They make connections to larger themes of sociology, including gender roles, the public and private spheres, race and ethnicity, social class, and age. Moreover, Burns argues that there is an additional lesson:

Sociologists are often concerned that their discipline is seen merely as an elaboration of the trivial or the obvious. Therefore, the theoretical point illustrated through the paper-hanging exercise is not that small-scale realities are the opposite of big picture sociology, but rather that the big picture does not exist separately “out there.” Minor details and “taken for granted” rules and beliefs are the built-in meta-narratives of society, and this is what makes them so powerful.

Burns’ activity has been adopted by a social psychology course at the University of Notre Dame, where it is used to illustrate the principles of Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 classic The Social Construction of Reality. Similar everyday topics that have been used to awaken the sociological imagination include games of tic-tac-toe, violations of personal space, the rules of walking, and the etiquette by which men choose urinals in public restrooms.

Christopher Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, classifies the choice of toilet paper orientation under “tastes, preferences, and interests” as opposed to either values or “attitudes, traits, norms, and needs”. Other personal interests include one’s favorite cola or baseball team. Interests are an important part of identity; one expects and prefers that different people have different interests, which serves one’s “sense of uniqueness”. Differences in interests usually lead at most to teasing and gentle chiding. For most people, interests don’t cause the serious divisions caused by conflicts of values; a possible exception is what Peterson calls “the ‘get a life’ folks among us” who elevate interests into moral issues.

(graphic via blameitonthevoices.com - click through for arguments of the great debate; article via wikipedia)