Have you ever stopped to think how, in a world with so many things surrounding us, you are able to organize it and make sense of it? Or even on a much smaller scale, how when walking into a movie rental place (e.g. Blockbuster) you immediately know which section of the store to look at for the movie you wish to view? When I was in Blockbuster the other day, I caught myself almost mindless walking to the comedy section and finding the movie I wanted. Although I may want to believe that it was my own creative mental thinking that created this category of comedy and placed this movie under it, it is actually “society that underlies the way we generate meaningful mental entities” (Zerubavel, 25). It is society that has come up with the categories of comedy, drama, family, action, romance etc… Thus, when a movie has the primary intent of making the audience laugh, we immediately place it under comedy.
This societal categorization is how we make sense of the world; we organize it into schemas or “mental maps.” So that even though “reality is not made up of insular chunks…but rather, of vague, blurred-edge essences that often ‘spill over' into one another” we are still able to have a fairly well defined map to follow in order to organize our world (Zerubavel, 25). A movie may include both comedy and action, but despite this “blurred-edge” we are still able to limit our range of searching for this movie by lumping it into just two categories. We know that if we cannot find it in the comedy section, it will be in the action section. By creating these schemas we are able to eliminate searching for a single movie among thousands; likewise, we are able to organize our entire world into much smaller, more specified chunks.
