Socialization

Socialization
Socialization, which is the process of people learning the attitudes and behaviors appropriate for members of a particular culturei, plays an important key role in our daily life. An agent of socialization, such as family, school, workplace, peer group, mass media and religion, is an individual or institution tasked with the replication of the social order. It is responsible for transferring the rules, norms, values and folkways of a given social order, and it influences and orientates people’s personality and lifestyle.

The first and most important agent in socialization is the family. Families are those whom guide us to grow up and become individuals since our birth. We learned how to speak and walk with the help of our family, and we adopt the beliefs, values, and attitudes from those who raised us. And usually, these ideas stay with us for the rest of our life. Without these foundations, we could never become part of this civilized society. Just like the experiment from the textbook, the girl who was isolated in the all closed-up dark room from human contacts since her birth did not know how to speak; she acted like a wild animal. People are created of what’s around us. For me as an example, I was raised in a traditional Chinese family, and it had a huge impact on establishing who I am today. I’ve always been working hard, acting conservative, and being respectful to elders even though I live in a country thousands mills away from my hometown because these are what I was taught in my childhood, and I’m already used to acting in this way even without my parents’ whines.

School, workplace and peers are some other big socialization agents too. School and workplace provide the best opportunities for us to meet people and make friends. While a family forms our basic values, peer groups have greater influences in our lifestyle because we most of the time are with our friends. A friend circle determines how we socialize and a healthy peer group is definitely important in the smooth operation of a residential facility and human development. I have couple of best friends through my academic years and all the people I hang out with are a lot like me—we dress similar, we talk in a similar way, and we even have same standards for boys.
My friends have been a crucial factor in my life. Without them, I would have never gone to my first party, met my boyfriend, or had anyone to share my emotional up and downs. They also have a lot of influence on my decisions makings because I want to fit in the group and I want my friends to accept and support my choices.

The last but not least, mass media is another significant agent of socialization in modern culture. Media is the processes that facilitate communication between the sender of a message and the receiver of that message, and it could be either written or spoken. Therefore, it plays an important role in people’s communication. In fact, there are many types of media, including newspapers, radio, television, magazines, Internet and so forth. Among these kinds of media, television is known to be the most remarkable, and it affects people’s behavior (especially children’s) both positively and negatively. There are some programs that are very helpful with lots of information for the children, such as history channels because it helps them to become more knowledgeable. However, there are also some other programs that include violence and sex that are not appropriate for children because they are not mature enough to eliminate these scenes and they sometimes take the role of their “superheroes” into real life, which could be dangerous and insane.

To sum up, each one these agents I talked about above plays an important role in our lives, but we need to be smart enough to pick the positive side of the agent in order to become a better human being.