Blogging Social Difference in L.A: Week 2

Ready for Santa Monica Beach

This Sunday I visited Santa Monica Beach for the first time where it has a typical reputation of a place full of fun in the sun. With its ferris wheel, carousel, volleyball courts, relaxing cafes, and a clean walk and bike path, this place really does seem to be a place of happiness with families and friends spending quality time and interacting with one other. From my observation, this beach really does live up to this thought. Couples were riding their bikes, people playing volleyball, tanning, surfing and simply enjoying themselves. However, there are people who are not very happy on the beach as well and who do not follow this perception of “fun in the sun”. These people are the homeless, the community service workers and the maintenance employees.

I observe that these types of people rarely or do not communicate and associate themselves with each other.
While lingering around the public restrooms, I noticed that surfers, wearing expensive wet suits and holding their fancy patterned surf boards only spoke to their friends or strangers who were also surfers while washing up. They would completely ignore the homeless that passed by. In this way, this community at the beach supports the claim that "societies are formed by a certain number of segments of unequal size that overlap" (Durkheim, The Causes, pg 204). Here at the beach, I see people of many statuses such as a higher class surfer to the working class janitor to the lower class homeless and these classes can represent Durkheim's segments that overlap. In another sense, Robert E. Park’s statement: “The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate” is supported at the beach because there are so many people that come from different backgrounds. Even when people are next to each other, they do not communicate and mingle with one another. They stick to their same group and do not associate themselves with other groups which means they do not interpenetrate, but because these different groups are present in one beach, one place, it means their worlds do touch.

Diversity of the Beach, top left: maintenance employee, top right and bottom left: recreation, bottom left: homeless. 

While I was walking around the beach, I approached a man who looked homeless and asked him why he was giving away clothes. I began to get to know him more and I learned from our conversation, that even he separates types of people and puts a subgroup to the group of homeless people. From what I understood, he identified himself as a certain type of homeless and thus, there are different kinds of homeless. Here is a link to the video of our conversation. He states “I don’t go to Venice… you got a bunch of gang members down there, bunch of drug addicts…” I feel like these gangs and addicts can also be living without a home, therefore, the homeless group branches out to even more groups.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3611113168439

Another observation I see is that this beach follows what Emile Durkheim says about differentiation. Differentiation is born from stratification, which is the physical separation and status separation. This beach shows differentiation because at first everyone belongs to a different group, then they become physically closer to each other as they approach the beach and this forms moral density which is many people crowding in one place. Then these different groups of people do different things, and have different interests when they are at the beach. These different goals complement each other to make the beach a mostly compatible place, where different groups can still be around each other and not cause problems. For instance, the maintenance employees clean the restrooms and clear the bike path to earn money. This money comes from the city of Santa Monica and the city gets the money from tourists and the community that spend money. For example, tourists and residents pay for parking at the beach which goes to the city and pays for the employees. The employees are useful because they keep the beach clean to attract consumers to play there and spend their money on parking and food places around the beach. It’s basically all a cycle and everyone needs each other to perform different task in order to keep this cycle successfully spinning. This can be an example of organic solidarity which means that different people do different things in a community and it is because this system works this way that makes a successful community or city. Also, in this economic cycle of passing money around, it can be a counterexample of Park’s statement of “worlds touching but not interpenetrating” because even if tourists are not directly paying and giving thanks to the employees for making the beach a nice place to have fun, that money tourist spend does go to employees, thus, the people are exchanging money for services, but it’s indirect.   

I think that the effect of the difference and diversity of people at the beach is that it makes the beach a great place and it gives this geographic landscape a positive meaning and reputation because this difference in people’s tasks build the economic cycle to keep the beach clean and fresh. In summary, I think even if people do not realize that they do connect with everyone in the beach, that connection is still there and it is what keeps the beach running and working, so it keeps society going.