Sociological Imagination

David Portillo
Mrs. Williams
Sociology 1A
12-07-2010
Sociological Imagination
Sociological imagination is the ability to recognize the relationship between large-scale social forces and the actions of individuals. It includes both the capacity to see relationships between individual biographies and historical change, and the capacity to see how social causation operates in societies. The term “sociological imagination” was coined by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959 to describe the type of insight offered by the discipline of sociology. That being said Sociological Imagination can be applied to a variety of incommensurable social settings, one of them being Television.
Television habitually perpetuates gender stereotypes because it reflects dominant social values. In reflecting them TV also reinforces them, presenting them as natural. As one might expect in a society still dominated by men, men dominate TV production and, influenced by these stereotypes, unconsciously reproduce a traditional masculine perspective, perpetuating dominant gender stereotypes. Many narratives on TV are still implicitly designed to be interpreted from a masculine perspective. Viewers are frequently invited to identify with male characters and to objectify females.
Whatever its limitations as a TV research method, content analysis does at least provide us with basic data about the prevalence of gender images on TV. The number of women shown on TV is far smaller than the number of men shown. According to Daniel Chandler   a teacher at University of Wales (UK), men outnumber women in general TV drama by 3 or 4 to 1. 70-85% of those on children's TV are male, and in children's cartoons, males outnumber females by 10 to 1. Even in soap operas women can be outnumbered 7:3. There are also more men than women in starring roles; the exceptions are notable only as exceptions. In contrast to this dominance of the screen by men, we all know that in the everyday world, women...