Seeing The General In The Particular
It is early in the morning and you begin you commute to work. After driving for a while down the high way you being to see more highly dense and populated areas around you (as in skyscrapers, high rises and commercial offices). Traffic begins to slow down as you come to traffic jam at the out skirts of the city centre. As you look around you see people eating food, using their phones and getting ready for work inside of their cars. It is a seemingly average day as a work commuter.
The ability to “seeing the strange in the familiar” is to notice peculiarities in social norms of society. For example, when you are in a filled library and see everyone reading a textbook or using their computer, as a sociologist you ask yourself are people only here to study? If so why are they studying at the library? Or are some people looking for a quiet place to look at emails or just watching videos on their computer? This idea of “seeing the strange in the familiar can be correlated with my predetermined situation. When looking at my situation, it is normal for people to be doing things in their own car like eating, getting ready or using their phones in traffic.
This begs the question why are so many people eating and getting ready in their cars? Do people intentionally not perform theses task earlier in the day knowing that they will have time during the morning rush hour? Or are people in sleeping later at night leaving less time to wake up early? And are people really that bored or busy that they need to be on their phones? Moreover, when people are using their phones are they really talking to other people or are they just looking for a distraction that can help kill time as they are waiting in traffic? This is strange because there can be a multitude of reasons as to why people are getting ready in their cars instead of doing them as they get out of bed. This leads me on to the topic of “seeing the general in the particular”.
The ability of “seeing the general in the particular” is to find reasons as to why things have become a social norm. As previously discussed there can be a multitude of reasons as to why people decide to do these things in their car instead of focusing on driving. This can be because people decide to stay up late doing other things like watching a TV series at night or simply some people live further away and has to travel a longer journey in order to make it into work on time. Moreover, some may just want to kill time using their phone while they wait for traffic to move. This can tell us that in our society it is normal for us to do other things while driving in traffic. Furthermore, it can tell us that people has become adept at multitasking and not wasting time on doing nothing. As a sociologist it is important to be able to “see the strange in the familiar” because without this we wouldn’t be able to determine human behaviour and actions behind it. Furthermore, without the ability to “see the general in the particular” a sociologist would not be able to determine the possible reasoning behind the formation of societal norms.
