Exploring the Social Imagination

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Social Distance in the Social Imagination...

 


In Sociology, SOCIAL DISTANCE describes the distance between different groups in society, such as social class, race/ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Members of different groups mix less than members of the same group. It is the measure of nearness that an individual or group feels towards another individual or group in a social network or the level of trust one group has for another and the extent of perceived likeness of beliefs... to mask or not to mask, will it drive us deeper into social distancing?

Robert Ezra Park defined social distance as "an attempt to reduce to something like measurable terms the grade and degrees of understanding and intimacy which characterizes personal and social relations generally".

In the sociology, social distance includes:

  1. Effective social distance: One widespread view of social distance is effectivity. Social distance is associated with effective distance, i.e. how much sympathy the members of a group feel for another group. 
  2. Normative social distance: A second approach views social distance as a normative category. Normative social distance refers to the widely accepted and often consciously expressed norms about who should be considered as an "insider" and who an "outsider/foreigner". Such norms, in other words, specify the distinctions between "us" and "them".
  3. Interactive social distance: Focuses on the frequency and intensity of interactions between two groups, claiming that the more the members of two groups interact, the closer they are socially - similar.
  4. Cultural and Habitual Distance: Focuses cultural and habitual which is proposed by Bourdieu (1990). This type of distance is influenced by the "capital" people possess.

Its quite interesting how all these definitions apply to today's crisis wherein social distancing is mandatory.  We may feel that if we practice social distancing we will possess a capital in 'health'. Though we may and even are losing capital in normal social operations and interactive coexistence. 

I don't hear much discussion about this... maybe its because there is another agenda at hand and those that speak out or make observations will be quieted or banned, or worse - ostracized; total social distance on all four counts of the above. 

In our social imagination, we need sympathy, we need a normative, we need interactive connectivity (who am I and who am I not) and cultural/habitual capital. Why? So that we don't lose our social minds. Our social imagination (in every person everywhere on the globe) is at risk and no one is talking about it. Wonder why, don't you?


 

 

 

*Source ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_distance (couldn't find my book by Parks)

3 comments :

  1. The globalists want 'social distance'. Its a way to separate them (their kind) from what they deem as undesirable. Interesting when you understand that it mimics what Jesus will do when he comes back... separate the goats from the sheep. Satan always copies the Creator thinking he will win.

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  2. Cultural capital belongs in the hands of everyone that posses it and that means everyone that belongs to a homogeneous group who in a place over time have accumulated a 'wealth' of local knowledge. Now, this is a problem for the global world order... not that they don't want local knowledge but they want to pick and choose it for themselves. Essentially, steal it and make it their own. So, they first divide and then conquer and then capitalize on what they stole... from you and yours.

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  3. Social distancing... the first divide!

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