Response to Amy

This is in response to Amy’s question, is categorizing important in today’s society.

I think that the world that we live in revolves around and thrives off from the categorization of both things and people. This attribute, whether good or bad, is something that is engrained within us from infancy or earlier. We categorize everything from music and entertainment, and even to people themselves.
I truly feel that the need to categorize is instilled into us from an early age and with the most general of categories as well. Look at any infant, we group them into a group of masculine or feminine (not male or female, that is their physical gender). I feel that by placing more feminine attributes on girls and masculine characteristics on boys engenders the idea that both people and things must be either this or that and to deter from that path is to challenge the status quo. I challenge anyone to find a parent who buys a dress for their newborn son or to find someone who bought a baseball cap for a daughter. From this early age we are teaching people to separate themselves and to categorize.
We also tend to categorize entertainment as well. Anyone who has gone to FYE or Blockbuster knows that the items are separated by genre. Rock albums go with other rock albums and comedy movies go with comedy. In this situation categorizing things makes logical sense, it just makes it easier to find what you are looking for and keeps things neat and orderly, something that many people in our society crave desperately.
Like I mentioned earlier, we also categorize people. Any high school student will be able to give you a laundry list of all of the various clicks that exist in school, and the hierarchy of those clicks, and how desperate most people are to be a member of one. There are so many ways in which our society chooses to categorize people, by race, gender, socio economic standing (who has not heard someone say “oh they are welfare people”). It may not be right, in fact I do not think that it is, but we as a society categorize everything and that’s including people.
I feel that if tomorrow suddenly everything was not categorized, then we would be in a worse situation than many realize. Categories are hardwired into us; they help us make since of the world and help us keep our current world orderly and manageable. Though some categories need to be changed, it is going to have to take time; we are addicted to them after all.

Question: What categories of music do you like/ dislike and why.