When talking about ideology I think that there are two concepts that need to be defined for people just wanting to know a little bit more about it. The two concepts that need to be defined are ideology and hegemony. Ideology is defined by Krishna Kandath, one of our guest speakers, as a set of ideas that organize a group's, or society's, understanding of reality; a code of meanings that shapes how a group of people see the world. Hegemony is defined by him as a cultural process where people take ruling class values for granted-even when they don't serve their own interests. But that is just one person's definition of those. Judith Hendry another guest speaker of ours also has her own interpretation's of those words. "An ideology is a set of pattern or set of ideas, assumptions, beliefs, values, or interpretations of the world by which a group operates." "Hegemony is the privileging of one group's thinking over another's and directs us to understand the world in certain ways and to view those who hold alternative views as abnormal, radical, or strange. By knowing these two concepts a person can better understand the following paper as influence of ideology is being talked about.
To begin with my personal experience, I want to start by telling you that I am a student-athlete at the University of New Mexico and I know first hand that the students that attend this university and a lot of the people in the community have an ideology about the sports team that I play on, which is the basketball team. This ideology that all of these people have is that us basketball players get everything handed to us and I don't think that is the case. In addition, I think that because people have this idea about basketball players that everyone wants to be a basketball player nowadays. And I don't think that this is the way that people think about my basketball team but about teams like mine all over the country.
