Meleah Christensen
Intro to Sociology
Goldinger
April 4, 2015
A Transformation of Thought About a month ago, my older brother’s stepdaughter was camping in his backyard in Arkansas. She pitched a tent and had been sleeping there for the past few nights when one night my brother heard someone snooping around the tent. Figuring that she was trying to sneak one of her friends inside without his permission, he crept around back to catch her in the act. It was then that he realized—in mistake of assuming it was a friend of his daughters’—it really turned out to be a middle-aged man who had no right to be on his property. He then chased the man into the neighbors yard, yelling and screaming and telling him to explain himself, when the man disappeared into the trees and a spotlight was suddenly shining on my brother’s face. “You don't understand”—he said to the police officers—“This man was just snooping around my daughter’s tent and he ran away when I confronted him to get some answers. I had no choice but to chase him over here.” The police officers, however, did not see any other man. They only saw my brother in a place where he was not supposed to be and his dirty record did not help him win this battle nor did they care to hear what he had to say. It was then that he was arrested for trespassing on private property and disturbing the peace. “At least this time I’m going to jail for something that wasn’t really my fault”, my brother stated to me. According to Pollner, a reality disjuncture is when a mutual reality between two people has been broken down. Because this story of what happened that night between my brother and the officers was not in agreement, they both had individual subjective opinions about the way that everything occurred. Pollner claims that the truth of the matter is that there really is no “what happened” in daily life—there really is no reality to anything. All that exists in this world are subjective viewpoints between people that either match or do not match. When these two viewpoints match, harmony resides between the two people and the situation. On the other hand, when there is discrepancy between these viewpoints, there is conflict and the overall final “result” of “what really happened” will be claimed by the person with more power. In this case, my brother’s freedom was instantly taken from him because there was a reality disjuncture between him and two other persons that had complete authority, whose realities did not correlate to my brother’s. Just the same as the fact that a person holds versions of stories that happens in everyday life, a person is always creating different versions of his or her self to influence the perception of a particular image he or she wants to portray. According to Goffman’s discussion of face, presentation of self, and impression management, interaction is viewed as a “performance” shaped by the environment and audience, to provide others of impressions that match the desired goals of the actor—also known as the dramaturgical theory. In this theory, the control (or lack thereof) and communication of information through performance must all smoothly flow together in order for people to trust this “face”. It is when these things are not in alignment that people begin to question whether or not the person is really being his or her true self. There was a young man that was in my apartment complex a couple weeks ago who claimed that he never drinks or does drugs because of difficult family situations that he had experienced through his father’s use. Everyone who listened to him speak was so enlightened by what he was saying and praised him for making the right decision and being smart about his future. People still continued to speak highly of him after he left, talking about how it must be so difficult to be in an environment where such a high number of people spend their time partying and consuming alcohol and other narcotics outside of school. A couple