What I learned in Soc. 101

Three Hundred Forty Second Post: What I learned in Soc. 101

It has been several years now, but I am thinking back to what I learned in Sociology 101. It is just a core credit all freshman had to take. It doesn’t relate to anything dealing with math or technology, does it?

Even though there was nothing to learned that you would see done by Macgyver on his show, (Is there?) I found the class interesting. If you are a freshmen in college you should value all your classes. And even though Magyver’s improvised solutions aren’t taught, the values and ideals behind Macgyver are.

In sociology you learn how people interact. That includes how they work, how they form relationships, and how problems develop in the world. These problems are the very things that Macgyver set out to fix. (Well that is enough about Macgyver for awhile. You get the point.)

Sociology is fun and if you learn its lessons you could learn about things that apply to every job, such as leadership. There is a theory in sociology (I can’t recall the name.) where a person is eventually promoted into a job they are not meant for. There was a study of children making masks with the instructors using a different type of leadership. Each different leadership style lead to different quality and quantities of masks. (Again I can’t recall the studies name.)

My instructor once did a little study with middle eastern students. He gave them a test. The funny thing was that everyone in the classroom was cheating on the test. He didn’t know what do think at first. He was watching them, but they didn’t mind just cheating right in front of him. Here it is part of the culture to work together and help each other in all that they do. Anyway, it lead to an amusing story.

Morals and values are also an important part of sociology. But lets apply it to computers. With the availability of information the Internet has many of its own societies. The illegal activities such as pornography to the sharing of vital information for noble reasons are all things relating to values. And sociology helps us understand it all. And once we understand it then we can make it better.

Now if you were Einstein or Nicola Tesla would you have your own website? Einstein worked up until the end of his life working on a unified theory. With a little help from a message board with thousands of physicists could he have finished it? And what about his theories that weren’t released to the public? Would this information bring the knowledge hundreds of years ahead of its time? Think of the sociologic impact of the “open source” information, how it would influence the world, and what people could learn from each other.

May the Creative Force be with You