Eating Your Friends is the Hardest

    
    This week our article was Eating Your Friends is the Hardest: The Survivors of the F-227. The article presented the story of how the starvation of the survivors of a plane crash drove them to the point of cannibalism. The story really emphasizes the idea of social construction of reality. It allows the reader to see how the behavior of the survivors went from being what we consider normal to what we consider barbaric.  As Henslin points out, our society gives different objects arbitrary definitions through social construction of reality, but we're very capable of changing these definitions. Usually changes in the circumstance make our society more accepting of changes in the definition of these objects. This is precisely what happened to these survivors. A critical point in the story is when the survivors hear on the radio that the search for them has stopped. Before this point many of the people thought the Canessa's idea of eating the corpses as purely wrong, but as they grew weaker and weaker the meaning of the human body changed from a being a person that deserves respect to being a means of survival and food.
   There are several less extreme examples of this in our day to day lives. This week in class we talked about social construction of reality and we witnessed a few examples of it in Freaks and Geeks. For instance, when Sidney gave Sam his jacket his friends began to construct meanings from him receiving the jacket. They arrived at the conclusion that the jacket must mean she likes him. This was on a much smaller scale than what happened in the Andes, but the three geeks constructed a pretty arbitrary meaning to a simple act. Another example of social construction of reality is demonstrated by the growing number of people in the senior class who ditch class. Though many seniors previously considered skipping class as something only lazy students who care little about their education do, circumstances have changed as we've become seniors. Most members of the senior class are taking several honors or advanced classes, participating in extra-curricular activities, working a job, and trying to finish college applications. For many this has already become too difficult to handle, so they sleep in and skip a class or two. The meaning of skipping class has therefore transformed from a bad thing to a good thing. Skipping is justified because it's viewed more as an important factor in maintaining good health than pure laziness.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMNB2ZuhOxQSuAZ5uImPkfa6xPGiYp4KBgX_s4qMNEO1gkv5DcDki_0Cac2RgrEoK16ikvDdZJUEE0-otbS5aEMU_fn1XcNmEYNOXB0V5HxbFYPDUrVzbfr7T61_AehvrQaiwBQdQzFnU/s1600/121_WaitForSpring_W.jpg