Final Blog

Out of the three mini blogs that I wrote I thought that the one I would most want to expand on would be the first one. My whole project I have focused on the positives and negatives of categories. In the first mini blog I talked about how we often too quickly see a certain scene in life and automatically think that we have the right to put that scene or person into a category. Whether that category is good or bad though doesn't really matter- what matter's is that we are most likely wrong with our assumptions. So why should anyone care about categories? Why am I even writing about something like this? Because everyone does it and since everyone does it, it relates to all of us.

The article I read talked about how categories identify who we are. I agree with this- the reason we categorize everyone is to identify people and ourselves. But my point is that we aren't always put into the right category- sometimes people are wrong, sometimes ever we're wrong about putting ourselves into a certain category. That's why I hate labels; people stick labels on you and don't even know you. Then whenever they see you whatever label they have given you is the category they put you in and you're seen that way to them even if it's not really who you are. So even though categories can identify us doesn't mean that when other people put us into those categories that they are right.

My thoughts are can it be changed? Can we change the way we see someone and the way we automatically put that someone into a possibly false category or is our brain just hardwired to do it? 

Another thing about categories is that everyone has their own assumptions and a lot of the time people differ with what category they might put a person into. Especially if the person making the assumption about someone else is similar to the person. The category they put them into may be better than someone who is not similar. 

I took a picture of a dog more for the scene of it. A man went to the store and left his dog in the car. Some people might say this man is rude and doesn't care about his dog enough. Others may see it that the man loves his dog enough to take the dog in his car for a ride and then stopped to go to the store for a second. The thing is- we don't know if the man really doesn't care about his dog or if he actually does care about the dog or if there's an entirely different reason for why the dog was left in the car. But the people who saw the man leave the dog jumped to conclusions and made assumptions for the man.

I put this picture on here because this was a grumpy woman on the bus. If I hadn't known this was one of the ladies who works in Crown then I probably would have put her into the rude category. But I've met her and I know that she's actually really nice when you talk to her. A random person might have assumed that this was her personality and put her into a rude category not even knowing her. But she probably had a long day of working at Crown and was really cranky and tired because she wanted to go home.

 It's interesting how when you meet someone for the first time you identify them into a category and that's how they are seen to you. I mean if you met a lady who was acting like this:

But was normally like this:

And you didn't know that she was just having a rough day then you might always see her in the category of mad. That's why categorizing people can end up being bad when we don't know someone that well. 

Academic Source: Pachucki, Mark. "Boundary processes: Recent theoretical developments and new contributions" 26 Nov. 2007 Web. 28 Apr. 2013