I've never really thought about how my tendency to over-write may have affected my teachers over the last twelve years... Saying more with less is something I need to work on in my writing, and I'm planning on following through with that while making some practice works for upcoming limited-size writing competitions.
Also, my week of writing about a model United Nations is, at long last, over! I have to, like, write stuff again, now. It was a nice break, but back to the something-or-other now. Hope you've enjoyed it, or are going to enjoy a return to the norm!
Have yourself a lovely day, and see you tomorrow at eight AM for more!
Socialization by Mackinley Clevinger, May 11, 2016
There is no doubt that, as a whole, humans are an incredibly social species; both the development of the technological and social aspects of ourselves leading to our modern world where survival from day-to-day is not at the forefront of our minds. Instead, the primary focus for many people is one of social matters once an allotted period of work has been done to allow for the great work of machinery that is a complementary human society to carry on.
In the societies and cultures we find ourselves in, an outsider would be stymied by how so many people are able to act the ‘right’ way and fit in with the social norms of that time. The way in which thousands are capable of following a trend at the same time, changing minutely how they act, speak, and look to fit in with what society calls acceptable at that time is a behavior at the core of human society.
However, this process of socialization goes further than knowing what’s popular in fashion. It’s also how people of any age learn how to be human; i.e. how to talk, react to something, think, what opinions and views to hold, etc., and what people learn from socialization changes between different cultures, even within the same society as a whole.
The idea of socialization takes the side of nurture in the old nurture vs. nature debate, and states that it is through observed and experienced external human behavior that a person, whether child or adult, will learn how to act in a given society and be socialized. Seeing actions that are approved of, remarks that are met negatively, what kind of attitude is met positively; these kinds of things serve as lessons in building the personality and mind of a person that, ideally, better fits into a society, or at the very least fits into the general idea of being human.
If a child, in an incredibly rare instance, misses this stage of socialization well into their early years, they will lack the base learned traits that are essential to current ideas of humanity and be incapable of fully developing into the self-aware, intelligent, and social adult. Cases where children have stunted social/mental growth due to lacking socialization from birth have occurred, such children referred to as a ‘Wild Child’ to whom much scientific interest is given in terms of understanding the phenomenon and in trying to rehabilitate them into someone able to be integrated into society.
In two such occasions, one in France some time ago and another more recently in the United States, researchers were never capable of properly socializing these children to be similar to their ‘peers.’ This suggests that the process of socialization is more than a purely social one, but part of human biology in some way that requires the proper social elements to be present at early, key points in the development of children for them to be capable of interacting socially.
As a child develops in a more expected and classical manner, more sources of socialization become apparent in their lives than just that of their immediate families; the society and culture around them will begin to intrude upon their mental and social growth as they begin to go out into an environment uncontrolled by their parents, the mere image of the people they meet or striking advertisements capable of having an impact on how they view the world and those around them.
An advertisement that portrays someone of a cultural ethnicity as being a certain way, reinforced by a continuation of that stereotype in other forms of media, followed by other people attesting to the truth suggested by those sources can, on its own, be enough for such a prejudice to form in a person, especially an impressionable youth, despite their not having personal experience to tell them whether or not that belief is valid or not.
Similarly, people are taught that certain personality traits are matched with certain behaviors or cultural traits. A southern drawl would immediately bring to mind the idea that they were a rough-and-tumble kind of person, while a clean-shaven face and fancy suit would make one think a person were financially successful. Neither of these things are necessarily true.
Through socialization in our lives, we have obtained a certain viewpoint on the world, complete with its own biases, beliefs, and assumptions based on circumstantial evidence. We’ve been taught to look for symbols in our lives, and then understand them as representing one thing or another; a flag is just a strip of cloth, but once we know it represents a country it becomes a symbol of nationalistic pride.
While socialization is essential to teaching children how to act, and teaching people of any age about a new society or culture, the socialization process isn’t perfect. There is no one group’s way of acting/thinking that is perfect, and there are so many sources of influence that it is night impossible to teach only one such culture to someone as they’re developing.
Such flaws in the socialization process are subjective; quite often, the result of a family’s raising a child that is seen to not really fit in to a certain society isn’t due to malicious intent, but instead because society’s idea of what is acceptable behavior changed while that family did not. Society has changed immensely in the last century alone, let alone the last millennia, and ideas of what is acceptable in ‘modern’ society will change, too.
This ever-changing process of socialization, of observed acceptance or shaming for certain behaviors, also plays a key-role in developing and maintaining your sense of self; the you that is reading this and judging it based on your own unique set of personal interests, likes, and dislikes that came about from years of being shaped by social experiences and how others reacted to things.
There is a concept called the Looking Glass Theory, which puts forward the idea that our consciousness, the self that actively thinks, is a construct born out of observations of our own behavior through both ourselves and other people. We do something, and we judge it based on our mental state. If we see that someone else saw it, we imagine what they might’ve thought about it as a symbol of how society views and judges us, to which we then form an opinion that might reject the disapproval we assume they felt, or become embarrassed and promise to ourselves not to repeat that action.
Typically, this kind of thinking about what other people think about us and then judging our own reaction to which we assume the other person has noticed, thus judging us again to which we postulate our own further judgements upon, and so on and so forth, occurs numerous times per day and ever so slowly socializes a person while also constructing their sense of self. This process doesn’t ever stop, unless an individual were to abandon society or suffer a malady that renders them incapable of socializing; otherwise, until you die, your entire self is subtly changing every day.
One of the earliest ideas enforced by socialization in a person’s life is that of gender. From a child’s earliest moments, they’re treated differently based on what gender they’re born as: a blue blanket if they’re a boy, and a pink blanket if they’re a girl. Different toys, different clothes, different television shows; very different upbringings based on gender.
These different forms of entertainment, dress, and media impart very different messages to children, socializing them to be the popular idea of what a man or woman is at that time; currently, the idea is that men are tough and rough, while women are pretty and polite, in a greatly generalized sense. Constant images in cartoons of the deep rift between male and female characters set that same divide in the minds of developing children, leading them to hold those views rigidly later in life and, in turn, teach them to their children through the socializing factors they allow their children to experience.
Alongside being told how they should act through this, they also learn how the people around them should act and how to judge them for their behavior. This plays into the Looking Glass Theory, in which behavior that is not of the norm will lead to that individual being ostracized or, at the very least, treated as different from the majority due to their rejection of social norms.
The girl tomboy or the boy who plays with dolls; objectively, both are acceptable behaviors because there is no physical male/female trait attached to actions or objects, but through the lens that society sees through? Everything has a tag attached to it that explains to people who it is for. Girls get pretty dolls, while guys get cool action-figures; and if either were to break from that expectation, reactions would vary from acceptance to punishment. Either way, it will be made clear to the child that they crossed a line drawn by the past several decades of expectations, which will influence them.
Teaching young girls and boys that the world is split between boy-stuff and girl-stuff effectively tells them that each gender is different. Which, technically, they are, but instead of acknowledging a physical difference and leaving it at that, the difference is made out to be of strength, personality, and how each should be treated.
A considerable amount of media portrays women as weak and ineffectual, needing the help of a man to either be saved or to get anything done. Media is a major source of socialization for people who aren’t aware that they’re being manipulated, leading to kids growing up surrounded by stories and morals telling them that if you’re the guy, you’re the hero. If you’re the girl, you get saved.
These ideas don’t just vanish in a flash when they get older, however. Children who are brought up on these stories will take the messages with them in their everyday life, becoming the people who judge and socialize the next generation as well as filling positions of government that give them the chance to make their beliefs on gender, race, or anything else they were taught into solid law.
Socialization is a cyclical event in human society. A person is taught by their society how to act and view the world, after which they become a part of the system teaching a new generation how to be. Obviously, people aren’t clones of clones all acting the exact same way; human behavior is incredibly complex and based off of experiences that are random, but the main trends in behavior are typically passed on in regards to viewing gender, racial, and other matters despite the uniqueness of a person’s upbringing.
Despite this, society evolves and changes constantly; the idea of women we have now is nearing the end of the process of shifting towards gender equality as opposed to earlier views from the beginning of the twentieth century that women were inferior to men, and expected to serve them as wives and servants. Socialization, then, is not an absolute method for teaching people how to fit into a society if such a large shift in behavior can occur across a few generations.
Socialization is much vaguer than being handed a guide-book on how to live and then being graded on your performance by everyone you meet. It’s a subtle, slow process that most people aren’t aware of when it’s happening, but still plays an essential part in making people who they are and adapting them to a society. Whether those teachings are beneficial or harmful, however, is based on the society.