Sociology.Am i in the right place?

Torakx

Hey folks,
I am extremely interested in the human mind/psyche and how we interact with each other and how it effects us on a personal level and also our actions and behaviours.
I had been reading up alot on psychology and NLP which has helped me so much in learning about people and myself too.
But i have been stumbling across topics like advertising techniques in relation to mind control and the media and other areas of interest to me that may or may not relate to sociology.
I was wondering if i am in the right place to discuss human behaviour and the mind and brain itself.Especially in relation to all outside influences on the mind and behaviour.
The psychology part of the forum i have been using a while also but to be honest it doesnt appear to be ready for what i am looking to research and discuss.
So i guess i havent got many direct questions but im hoping someone can let me know if i am in the right place to discuss and learn more about all these things ive mentioned.
I do post alot on the conspiracy theories forum.However alot of the stuff i am posting seems to be going over alot of peoples heads on the technical side of how the mind and brain works.And also most seem unaware of the social consequences of many things i post about.Im hoping to find some experts(or well read persons) on sociology who can help me straighten out all this info i have taken in so far.
Once i found out if im in the right place i can decide which topic to start my first real post here.
Thanks.

ps. an example topic might be the effects of television(alpha beta waves in the brain) and advertising and movies.

Cannibal Ox

Mind control wouldn't be a sociological concept. Quite a lot of social theories deal with how human beings are shaped by external forces, but mind control, or similliar conspiracy theories, aren't really a concept, more a topic of study.

Nonetheless, there is, and has been for a long time in many disciplines, including economics, philosophy, and sociology, a debate that centers around structure and agency. There are many ways this debate takes place, and the terms, and context, change quite a lot but it's probably relevant to what you're talking about.

There are various Marxist theories of control. Marx, first and foremost, identified coercion. Coercion being force and represented in the institutions of the state that deal in force, so the police, the army, etc. Force can be symbolic and prevent you from thinking of acting even though you should.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist writing during Mussolini's reign, developed Marx's argument with the concept of hegemony. Very simply, hegemony tries to account for how the ruling elite control the people through non-coercive measures, such as cultural and social norms.

It's linked with Luckacs idea of class consciousness, the idea that the working class was blind to it's own class, and for a revolution to take place, they would need to be made conscious of their class.

Outside of Marxism there are various ideas as well. Freud's argument about the unconscious is supposed to show how internal forces shape our actions. Norbert Elias tried to account for how societies changed through an ever widening range of norms and values that 'civilize' people.

Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociology writing at the end of the twentieth century, developed a fairly complex solution to the structure vs. agency argument. He argued that individuals are structured by external and internal forces, but they also retain a sort of agency in this process.

Bourdieu had two main ideas here, the field and habitus. Habitus represents your self, it represents aspects like gender, ethnicity, class, cultural capital. Fields are areas of social interaction, as you enter fields, your habitus determines your position on the field and your interaction with other actors.

Poststructuralist theories take a different, and often far more complex, approach. Michel Foucault, writing around the end of the twentieth century, argued that subjectivity, the self, is produced by discursive regimes of power. What this means is that you, or I, are produced by the narratives around us. Our gender, ethnicity, nationality, everything, is produced through language.

You could take any one of those theories and research how individuals interact with media. You could follow someone like Guy Deboard, and argue that we've become a society of passive spectators, or Baudrillard, and argue that all experience is now simulated experience, or Gramsci and argue that it propagates the ideology of the bourgeoisie, or Bourdieu and research why certain people watch certain programmes and whether that reflects their position on a field and their habitus.

You won't (I hope) find mind control in sociology. You will find endless debates about how individuals interact, and are interacted with, with others and with society, culture, politics, and the economy, and how those interactions mould, or structure, individuals, and whether individuals can willingly act on the world around them.

Torakx

Thanks for that post.There is a wealth of information there for me to catch up on.
I was probably a bit loose with the word mind control.
I could narrow my line of thought down to behaviour control i think also.Or whatever advertising does to make people buy products or increase the likelyhood of them doing so.Extreme subliminal suggestion maybe too.

"Bourdieu had two main ideas here, the field and habitus. Habitus represents your self, it represents aspects like gender, ethnicity, class, cultural capital. Fields are areas of social interaction, as you enter fields, your habitus determines your position on the field and your interaction with other actors"

This sounds quite interesting.I think it would indeed be a good line of thought when considering advertising or just the effects of tv programmes on behaviour.
Would i be right in saying then that in sociology(or this forum) the brain itself isnt studied so much?
I think maybe what i need is a sociopsychologymedicalscience forum

Cannibal Ox

There's lots of, largely theoretical, writings on everything from how you move your body to how you think and understand your own self as being culturally or socially structured/constructed/produced, but very rarely, outside of Marxist theory, will you find a sociologist who describes an instigator of any of those processes because the idea that there is "control" over any of these processes would be suspect.

I'd think you'd find some interesting stuff in Baudrillard's idea of Simulacra and Simulation, Debord's idea of The Society of the Spectacle, and Gramsci's idea of hegemony

This is a chapter by Loic Wacquant, one of Bourdieu's students, discussing Bourdieu's ideas. It has some jargon though, so it might be better to look at his wiki page for an overview of his work.

None of it is based on the brain. I think neuroscience might be your best bet for studying the brain. Or, if you're particularly fascinated by media, then I'm sure media studies has a branch somewhere dealing with it. Social psychology probably has some branch that deals with it, but I've never looked into it.