Jennifer Chan

June 5, 2015
Week 4
Project 1: Video/DVD Analysis
In her TED talk The Year I was Homeless, Becky Blanton describes her life changing
from being a former successful journalist, to a homeless person. After the devastating death of
her father, she choose to quit her job and take a break, choosing to live in a van with her cat and
dog for a year in hopes of both escaping from the pain of loss and partially also giving up.
During this period of time, she recounts how quickly she changed due to other people's
perception of her. Even though she was physically the same person with the same IQ and same
abilities, she fell from being a talented journalist to being a nobody and a nothing. One day,
during a visit to an office where several other homeless people were, she realized that she wasnt
truly a homeless person because even homeless people didnt view her as homeless because
unlike them, she had hope. At this point in time, she struggled to find where she fit itas a
journalist, as a homeless person, as something else? Eventually, she was able to turn her life
around, finding and hanging on to the hope within her, returning to her prolific writing career.
This video can be understood and analyzed on multiple levels based on certain theories.
First, Comte, the founder of sociology might be interested in seeing the social statics and
social dynamics, or how society is held together and how society changes, respectively. His
coined term sociology refers to the process of companionship, which specifically points to
one-on-one interactions between people. Ultimately this influenced the works of symbolic
interactionists, who focused on how people interact with one another to make sense of the world
around them. Both Comte and later interactionists may have agreed that social dynamics bring
about the maintenance of society because of the meanings people ascribe to certain things. For
example, to be a successful person means that you live in a home. Blanton similarly relates how

her lack this permanent dwelling structure called home quickly caused people to view her as a
homeless person.
Using the perspective of conflict theory, Karl Marx would view Blantons story as story
of conflict between social classes. According to the conflict theory, society is one big mass of
people competing for limited resources. He may have commented on the economic conflict
existing between social classes, such as the upper middle class Blanton belonged to as a well-off
journalist and the lower class she later belonged to as a homeless person. In his work The
Communist Manifesto, Marx described a similar relationship between the bourgeois wealthy
class and the proletariat working class, the later struggling against the former for greater power
voice. However, the upper wealthy class has a way to regulate society and maintain and expand
their power. This is idea is similar to how Blanton describes her journey to homelessness as
something that spiraled out of control rapidly, without her realizing. After quitting her job and
being in a position of no longer having power, she was quickly taken advantage of by others who
did have money and a say over what was legal, punishable, proper, and even human.
Finally, mile Durkheim would analyze this using the functionalist perspective, which
states that societies are held together by people building on the work of others and independent
parts working together to form a dynamic equilibrium. He may argue that homelessness was
just as an important part as was journalism, the media, or even the grocery stores. All these parts
work together, pushing and pulling, to form a balance. Durkheim might also comment on
homelessness as a form of deviance, saying that it is a necessary way for people to challenge the
present norms in society.
The most represented paradigm in this short video clip is symbolic interactionism. As
mentioned above, Blantons homeless experience was shaped by the individuals around her.

These individuals, whether police men, other homeless people, or former colleagues, all defined
and described her in different ways. These interactions helped her to define her situation and
form her identity as a homeless person. Whether viewing her as a person without a roof over her
head, as a miserable failed journalist, or as a filthy pest needing to be removed from the finer
higher class places of town, what Blanton described as was defined by what other people thought
of her. This also relates to Charles Horton Cooley, whose work centered on the development of a
persons identity. According to Cooley, this is develops based on how we imagine that we appear
to others and how we imagine that other people are judging us, ultimately leading to and
cultivating our own image of who we are. But again, all of this depends on personal, individual
interactions with people in society. Interactionists would argue that for Blanton, these labels,
judgments, and definitions also change overtime, based on different conversations and
interactions. Ultimately, this leads to an always morphing, growing, and fluctuating image of
who she is as an individual, whether a journalist or a homeless person.