Prompt: SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOANALYSIS

Claim: The best way to understand the character of a society is to examine the character of the men and women that the society chooses as its heroes or its role models.

Reason: Heroes and role models reveal a society's highest ideals.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.

Most societies have heroes or role models.  For the purpose of this essay, “heroes” and “role models” will be defined as equivalent terms denoting the same thing: “the person or group of people towards which a large portion of society devotes attention”.  Individually and collectively, people choose how to idolize or give attention to their heroes.  For the purpose of this essay, the scope of idolization will be narrowed to include only representations of and attending to heroes in mass media such as books, television, movies, and music.  The claim that will be endorsed in this essay is that examining the character represented by heroes and the form in which people attend to their heroes is an excellent way to reveal a societies highest ideals.

All four categories of mass media involve creators and participants—authors, producers, directors, cast, creative staff, composers, or performers, and readers, viewers, goers, or listeners, among other titles.  This division of labor between creators and participants is not strict.  For instance, as a child growing up, I was exposed to the “create-your-own-narrative” genre of literature.  The essence of these books was the presentation of a multiplicity of options for the reader to choose from at each transition point in the narrative.  In this way, the reader was enabled to create alternate stories and endings, some of which might not have been imagined by the original creators of the story.  Therefore, there is a sense in which this genre blurred the line between creator and participant, author and reader.  And it is not just books that have this element of ambiguity.  Almost all mass media deals in ambiguity.  It is this dealing in ambiguity that financiers of such creations bank on the most since if the characters are more widely relatable, then a larger portion of society will find them appealing and therefore spend more money on acquiring access to them.  Consequently, the best creators from almost every perspective but especially the financiers perspective have taken over from large groups of participants their highest ideals and transferred these onto ambiguous representations. 

So, without the commonsense division of labor between creators and participants, we are free to imagine that the heroes of mass media are in fact the productions and projections of the people that attend to them.  If this is valid, and the heroes of society are in fact projections of the people that attend to them, then examining these characters is surely an excellent way in which interested parties can come to understand something about the ideals and aspirations of the participants in society. 

End…let’s hope I don’t get that essay.

It’s almost like what I’m saying here is that the representations are ambiguous, but they can reveal something about the people that engage with them…