'The Common Sense Sociology'

Internet is infested with social media experts who apply "the common sense sociology" to explain and consult on social behavior. There are dangers of the common sense wisdoms that lead to blurring the reality and taking the wrong decisions based on the wrong assumptions.

"The common senImage by Compound Eye via Flickrse sociology" 3 mistakes:

1. Presumption that we know the social reality because we live in it, and on the basis of our experience we take for granted certain social relations and social behavior. There is an internal limitation stopping us from making the right judgments - many of our social experiences aren't recorded by our awareness thus they are not included when making judgments. Besides our experience is in most cases limited to a single group of society. We take those limited experiences and create oversimplified theories for the whole society.

2. We believe that the research or study we are working on is always linked directly with practical objectives and we measure the reality in relation to the norms that we use to describe what is desirable or undesirable.

3. Assumption that each group of social facts may be considered theoretically and practically in isolation from the rest of the life of society. Despite it is our mantra, we forget about it when talking about social behavior or social relations - Everything is connected!

As a result we can lots of bullshit said around. Lots of so called experts who mess in the heads of uncritical sheeps.

The good example of such an ignorance and the usage of the common sense science was the discussion on Twitter authority where Loic Le Meur and Michael Arrington demonstrated the lack of understanding for basic terms like authority and social relations linked to those. Authority for those gentlemen is the measure of the number of followers. What a misjudgment and oversimplification of social interactions based on the power of authority. There is a huge difference between authority and popularity (I think the whole discussion about the number of followers is referring to the latter one). Applying the number of followers equals authority logic would mean Britney Spears is a heck of an authority! (BTW she has almost 13.000 followers, gee it must be some pearls of wisdom on her profile).
Majority the social media experts are just popular through self-promotion. There are only a few who are credible experts. The difference comes from professionalism, truthfulness, trustworthiness and impartiality.
We need to be more careful and fight for professionalizing in the field to avoid being drifted away by "the common sense science" and tempted with the easy solutions based on vague theories build solely on one person experience: 'I did it this way, it worked, so it must be true for everyone and everything else.' This way of thinking is just the reproduction of the existing stats quo of the cultural structures driven by a great army consisting of the people who do not get it, but have the right to vote.
If we are here to make change we need to keep on being clever and avoid those 3 mistakes of the applying common sense thinking into any social science.

Drawing by gapingvoid