Sociologost Perception

There are only a few English television shows that are aired in Saudi Arabia and most of them are news broadcasts. I do, however, have a few sitcoms on DVD that I watch. The one that I used for this essay was an animated sitcom called Futurama. This show is about a character, named Fry, who was accidentally cryogenically frozen and thawed out a thousand year in the future. When he is unfrozen, he is slowly introduced to how society behaves and the new rules and regulations that are set in place. As new challenges arrive, he starts to notice how things operate in the future and the similarities and differences of society. The episode I viewed was named Space Pilot 3000. The reason why I chose this episode was because it dealt with the way society behaves in the future. There are a lot of topics brought up that we deal with in society today and it shows how they are dealt with in the future. In this essay, I will write how a sociologist would view this show and I will conceive how a major theorist would explain the shows story.

The reason why I picked Futurama was because I thought this show put a lot of thought on how society will behave in the future. The major theorist that I used was Emile Durkheim. One reason why I used Durkheim was because of what he called anomie. Anomie is how a society feels when social control of individual behavior becomes ineffective. He believed that if people are in this state, they might contemplate suicide. I found this interesting in the episodes because it deals with this very topic. According to the series, there is a problem with people committing suicide in the future because of these feelings. Society realizes the problem and instead of trying to condemn it, they accept it and set up suicide booths. Suicide booths are basically like phone booths that you go into, pay a certain price and it kills you. I never really put much thought into the reason behind it, but it makes much more sense now. I believe a sociologist would view this as society accepting the fact that people are committing suicide. This would be viewed that people in the future feel that they have no purpose and feel worthless. They do not see a reason to live, so they kill themselves. Society has just accepted this fact in the future and made suicide a reasonable and accustomed answer.

I viewed this show through a functionalist's perspective. Emile Durkheim did a lot of studying on the way society acts as a whole rather than how an individual acts. He explained the different parts of society by what their job was in keeping balance. This eventually became known as functionalism. Although Talcott Parsons played a major part in developing it, Emile Durkheim had a lot of influence on it. When Fry is thawed out, he is sent into an examination room to determine what his job was going to be in the future. They determined that the best way he can contribute to society is to become a delivery boy. In order to make the most out of society, they have figured out a way in the future to assign people to what they are best at. Even though this is an animated science fiction show, they have used the idea that in order for society to function properly, they have to make sure that each part of society is working together to create social stability.

Another example of functionalism on this show is the how everyone