Sociology

• Self


  The conception person holds of himself/herself in his/her mind that emerges from social interaction with others
• Self


  • Not initially there at birth nor necessarily at the beginning of a social interaction, but is constructed and re-constructed in the process of social experience and activity
• "I"


  The response to the "me", or the person's individuality, the essence of agency in human action
• "Me"

  The expectations and attitudes of others (the "generalized other") organized into a social self, the mechanism by which the community exercises control over the conduct of its individual members
• The "I"


  Is the response of an individual to the attitudes of others
• The "me"


  Is the organized set of attitudes of others which an individual assumes
• The "me" is the accumulated understanding of the "generalized other," i.e. how one thinks one's group perceives oneself
• The "I" is the individual's impulses
• Mind/Thinking process


  The self-reflective movements of the interaction between the "I" and the "me"
• For Mead, existence in a community comes before individual consciousness
• First one must participate in the different social positions within society and only subsequently can one use that experience to take the perspective of others and become self-conscious
• The self is noticeably entwined within a sociological existence
• The self is a product of modern society but this is complicated by the socio-cultural sensibilities of postmodernity, new information technologies and globalization, reconfiguring ourselves as to gender, sex, ethnicity, and creating one's own style, signature
• The quest or search for self-identity is a product of modern society
• The self constantly lives in a paradox: to pursue self creation within pre-given, not willfully chosen social circumstances
• Self creation is necessarily grounded on collective solidarities
• We create ourselves by struggling with cultural hassles then owning the created self
• We hide the ugly part of our cultural nature and learn to adjust
• Memories (photographs, videos) play a significant role in creating the self and identity
• Memory and forgetting are most important powers in recreating a person's identity
• Selves obtain their nature from cultural traditions, embodied in various social institutions
• These cultural traditions are preserved in a collective narrative which becomes the reservoir for the project of self-creation
• Self creation along cultural lines must be done in maximum cultural recognition of differences among and between individuals and cultural groups
• Self creation is a challenge amidst recognition of racial and ethnic identities
• Self is not discovered, it is made through the socialization process
• Individuals are not just hapless victims of socialization, they are active, strategizing agents that negotiate for the definition of themselves
• Self is acquired socially through language, like symbols
• We construct ourselves based on our social roles through socialization agents - family, school, community, etc.
• Self is a narrative, a text written and rewritten, a story, dynamic, a product of modern discourse that is historically and socially imprisoned by what is acceptable by norms
• Self in postmodernity is complicated by electronic mediated virtual interaction of cyber self such as change in appearance (in the cyberspace)
• Information technology dislocates the self, thus, self is "digitalized" in cyberspace
• Global migration produces multicultural identities
• Post-modern selves are "pluralized" selves
• Self for Nietzsche, is the sum of individual's action, thoughts and feelings, nothing more than a metaphor, a representation of something abstract, symbolic
• It is possible for us to remember something even if we have not experienced it, self has a continuity even if it is only in memory
• A true given self is not what unites these experiences, but it is presumed unity of these experiences that gave rise to a concept of the self
• Nietzsche states that the unity of the self is not pre-given but accomplished through conscious effort- transform self through beautiful work of art
• Individual must fashion, care and cultivate themselves, we can recreate ourselves to get hold of a present, forgive the past, and plan the future
• Rorty: contingencies of selfhood - conceal the "ugly" by reinterpreting the overall aesthetic contours of the self, redescribing one's self is just a way of reinterpreting and redescribing one's past
• "I"


  The individual's impulses, the self as subject