Sumblog #8 Mead

I liked our discussion this week about George Herbert Mead. We talked a lot about the self, along with the generalized other and the concept of the I and Me. When we talk about the generalized other, we're talking about the general attitude of a community. It's the sense that we are indeed concerned or at least aware of what others think, others being the groups we interact with and that are often around us. So this refers to the other people around us, whereas the self is our own identity. The self is our mental process and our thoughts, while we also note that the body is simply our physical characteristics.

The idea of the self leads us to think of ourselves in a couple of different ways that we call the I and the Me. We talked about the I being our true self and thoughts that are unfiltered. It's our initial thoughts and reactions to the generalized others. I is subjective; it's our own thoughts about ourselves or a situation we find one's self to be in. I liked the way we talked about it being our raw unfiltered instinct. I feel that's the best and most accurate way to describe the I part of us. When a filter is put in, though, we see the Me. I think thoughts get filtered through socialization and what we have learned to be norms in our culture. We may alter our raw intitial thoughts and even act upon them differently after we filter them because of different influences on us.

It was brought up in class whether or not we think it's a good thing that we have this cultural filter that affects the I and leads to the Me. Shouldn't we just be our raw unfiltered self in order to live a completely free and creative life? In a way I think this does sound ideal, but I also decided that our world needs this filter. I think things would be corrupt throught negative emotions that sometimes are our intitial instinct without us being able to help it. It would be a negative and hurtful lifestyle if you commented on things you don't like about someone, or to point out that a talent someone has really isn't as great as they think. I think it would result in hurt feelings a good amount of the time. What if people acted on every time they felt jealousy or a sense of revenge? I think our world would be a more violent place, and that the filter between the I and Me saves people from a lot of negativity.


The image below gives a visual of the concept of the I and Me. It shows how the Me may be more the performing part of what you actually do and how you behave based on different social roles and the public.