Sociological perception of AIDS - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages The purpose of this essay will be to make careful note of the ways in which sociological constructs have helped to define and ms-represent the issue of AIDs to the global community over the past 30 years. Furthermore, the analysis will consider the key means that will be necessary to reverse the seemingly intractable inference that such sociological perceptions have affected on the population. Firstly, in order to under sociological perception, one must seek to broadly quantify the levels of inference that society as a whole has attributed to the AIDs virus. Naturally, when AIDs first came to prominence, it was understandable that many individuals would have an incomplete and rather parochial definition of how the virus affected people (Howard-Paynea et al 2009, p. 593). However, the most negative aspect of sociological perception is the fact that oftentimes, regardless of the revelation of new and important information, these sociological concepts remained seemingly unchanged; moreover, they are willfully recalcitrant to broaden any prior understanding as they have seemingly been accepted as summarily true by the many individuals who have already incorporated such an understanding into their worldview. This can of course especially be seen as a function of how many people originally identified AIDs with the homosexual male communities in which it was most prevalent. Due to the fact that the news and media greeted their respective populations with such imagery, the information shareholders accepted this wholesale as being the solitary determinant of the spread of AIDs (Barrett et al 2010, p. 35). Most obviously, such a narrow-minded understanding of the virus contributed to a very shallow and incomplete understanding of both the means of transfer as well as the possible demographic groups that would be affected by it. By identifying AIDs with the homosexual male community, the extent to which the virus could be exhibited among other individual in different sexual orientations and demographics was successfully warped. It is important to note that although such an incorrect sociological interpretation and/or perception is inherently flawed, it is unlikely that such a perception was molded by any inherent attempt to misrepresent the information in the first place; rather, it is merely the result of the fact that human beings attempt to classify and categorize any and all information that they might come in contact with in convenient, simplistic, and understandable terms that are not always amenable to adequately explaining the full scope of a given issue. This topic in and of itself bears further analysis as the oversimplification of information oftentimes leads to individuals being led to believe a certain way even if no clear informational linkages can be made to solidify and/or compound such a view. However, this is not the result of the means by which mass media or culture has an effect on the human’s ability to reason, draw inference, and create a sense of logic from a situation; rather, it is the fundamental nature of humankind to reduce all information into easily recalled and simplistic data patterns that ...Download file to see next pagesRead More