Where do you notice Social Constructs today?

Bonus assignment: Give 1-2 examples of other social constructs you notice between now and next class.

On Day One of the Spring 09 Semester, I introduced the concept of SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS using a map upside down. How did you learn that north was up? North is not UP in the physical universe, is it? Read a previous post explaining social constructs.

The definition I shared in class was "an idea (time), a concept (masculinity) or an artifact (money) that seems natural or obvious to those who accept it but in fact is an invention of a particular culture or society."

The most well-known example is the "earth is flat". While the earth may appear to be flat to our everyday perceptions, in reality we cannot see the whole earth and its curvature. Thus, the social construct is not the condition of the flatness we see, but rather the view itself that people share. This view affects people's behaviors, thoughts, feelings and actions. It is a context from which people may live their lives.

A more common social construct that seems invisible to us is money. Money is not real in the way we view it. It is worth much more than the material it is printed on but by social agreement in any country we assign it certain values.

"Mathematics is a social construct. Numbers are words and ideas, not physical laws. Math is used to describe the physical universe, so it is shaped into a form that matches the universe as well as possible, giving it a framework. All things we would call math use this same framework. But describing a Law and being a Law are different things. Math measures things that exist, and it does this very well. It can also do things that the universe that it is describing cannot. The truth in numbers is not fundamental. It is built by humans." (http://everything2.com/node/163462).

Here are definitions from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction):

A social construction or social construct any phenomenon "invented" or "constructed" by participants in a particular culture or society, existing because people agree to behave as if it exists or follow certain conventional rules. One example of a social construct is social status. Another example of social construction is the use of fiat money, which is worth more than the paper it is printed on only because society has agreed to treat it as valuable.

Pinker (2002, p. 202) writes that "social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist".

One of the main theses of gender theory is that genders and gender roles are mere social constructs, and that there is nothing natural about being a man or a woman, a heterosexual or a homosexual, or even a transsexual, since genders are mere social appearances and built-in ideas, not unlike men's clothes or women's clothes.

Chapter 6 - Making a Living

Since the beginning of human life on earth there has always been a need for making a living. Until 10,000 years ago man survived by utilizing the adaptive strategy of foraging, where people wandered around the earth searching for provisions of any kind. Because of this dependency upon nature to provide for their needs, it led naturally to the next step of human procurement: cultivation.

Two types of cultivation developed; horticulture and agriculture, both of which still exists today in industrial and non-industrial societies. Horticulture or "shifting cultivation" is the simpler of the two methods and utilizes a "slash and burn" technique for land clearing. The land is used to the point of soil exhaustion at which the family simply moves on to another plot of land. Agriculture, the more complex of the two, involves the use of modern machinery, irrigation, and mass manpower to cultivate a single plot of land continuously. Because of this, families can now have a permanent home and a more stable lifestyle.

As societies began to modernize, a new means of procurement was introduced and today's economic system was born. The purpose of this economic system was to optimize the means of production. In other words, to take into account the land, territory, labor and technology needed in order to produce a product and optimize that process.

Time has changed the way people go about making a living in terms of food production. With the information from chapter six and your own personal knowledge or experience, compare and contrast the means of producing food through cultivation (either horticulture or agriculture) or within our current economic system. Make a choice on which you would personally like to see our society gravitate towards and tell us why you would like to see this change made.

For example would you prefer to be part of an industrialized economic system that utilizes of machinery and technology? This allows for effective mass production but on the other hand this also forces the worker as an individual to live in a more rigid work routine. Due to the concept of specialization a person would have the responsibility of just one simple task which he/she must perform all day.