Saturday, January 24, 2015

Chapter 4 & 5: The Power of Context

This chapter talked mainly about how small, seemingly insignificant events relating to an even bigger event can actually affect the larger event more than trying to make a big change. He used the crime rate in New York in the 90s as an example of this. Rather than trying to go around and dramatically change the criminals, they did small things to the community. They would paint over graffiti and go after train hoppers. These small acts allowed the community itself to be safer and cleaner. This way, the atmosphere in which crime was being committed would slowly become less and less of an “ugly” place and crime rates would decrease. I found this chapter to be very intriguing. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to people as to why they wouldn’t want to attack a problem head on. It confuses them to work around the issue because our human minds think that when something is broken, you have to fix it. With physical objects that may be true, however, in situations like community and relationships, a lot of the time it’s little things that are lacking that disallow the larger things to exist. In relationships, there are often issues in having the same interests. One or both party members might get upset about this constantly and think that the solution is to try and like the same things. While this might work, it is also possible that other shortcomings in the relationship. Lack of effective communication could be an example of this or lack of diversity it the activities that are done with each other. The solution to most problems isn’t always the obvious. Often times it takes perspective, looking at the bigger picture, and realizing that there is more than what was initially thought. When one realizes this, it becomes much easier to fix the problem.     

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