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Misrepresentation by Stereotype and Habit
by
Charles Lamson
There is nothing wrong with learning about distant times, places, and people from television. But we should be mindful that television offers us knowledge in the form of representations that are usually designed more to entertain than to inform. This means that someone or some group of people, has selected for us a "part of the picture" - a subset of all that could be known about something else - and presented it to us as if it were the whole picture. What we thus get is a crafted, partial re-presentation of a reality, to which we might have no direct access.
To be sociologically mindful of how representations are corrected does not mean presuming that all presentations are designed to fool us. Some are designed to fool us, of course. if a mining corporation, for example, is represented (by its public-relations firm) as a champion of environmental preservation, the fakery is easy to see. But it can also happen that misleading representations are created as a matter of cultural habit by people with no intent to deceive.
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Suppose you heard a 30-second news story (a typical length for radio or television) about a 6-year-old boy who was charged by school administrators with sexual harassment for kissing a girl on the cheek. You might think, "This has gone too far, a legitimate concern about harassment has turned into hysteria! Its crazy to charge a 6-year-old with sexual harassment!" Your reaction would be understandable. Many people would react the same way. But here is another possible reaction: "Could there be more to the story?"
It might turn out that knowing more of the story would make a difference. Suppose you knew that the boy had been bothering several of his classmates for a long time; that the boy had resisted gentler efforts to discipline him; that the school administrators had been sued previously for failing to take action against a slightly older boy, who engaged in the same kind of misbehavior; and that the administrators were reluctant to invoke the sexual harassment charge, but felt they had no choice, since the boy's parents refused to cooperate in disciplining him. If you knew all this, you mighty feel differently about the situation.
The point of this example is not just that more information can lead to a more intelligent response, but that complex situations are often represented in stereotypical ways. In this example, a story that was too complex to fit into 30 seconds, was reduced to a cliche: "Overzealous administrators go to absurd lengths to be politically correct." This sort of reporting is common, though not because of a conspiracy to deny the seriousness of sexual harassment. It happens because stereotypes are helpful for quickly creating easy-to-grasp representations of complex distant realities.
All representations are incomplete and simplified. There is no avoiding that. What we can avoid, if we are sociologically mindful, is being caught in the illusion that representations are direct views to distant realities. What we see, in other words, is the constructedness of representations. Again, this does not mean dismissing all representations as fantasies, contrived to mislead us. It means paying attention to how representations are constructed, by whom, and to serve what purpose.
In some cases, it might be clear why some person or group would like us to accept a particular representation. We might see, for example, that if we accept one group's representation of history, then this will make them seem like victims of injustice, who, deserving of our sympathy and support. To recognize that people have an interest in portraying history in a particular way, does not make their representation of history correct or incorrect. It simply alerts us to look for bias, and to seek more information.
Perhaps most simply, to be sociologically mindful about representations is to ask, What else is there to know about these people or events? How is the version I am being offered shaped consciously or unconsciously by the values and interests of its source? Has this representation been constructed through careful investigation, or is it just hearsay? Who might represent things differently? If such questions habitually come to mind, we are less likely to be taken by stereotypes, or duped by malicious fabricators.
*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, PGS. 142-144*
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