Six

Post 6 is due tuesday, April 8.  We have been learning about the socialization process.  This includes the distinction between nature and nurture and the importance of nurture.  We also saw that certain agents of socialization play a strong role in the nurture process.  

Please remember to

1.  write properly and post on time.

2. explain at least one source such as a reading (What is human nature? or Agents of Socialization), or a video (Danielle, Consuming Kids).

3. explain two or more topics we have learned (such as those above in bold) and give unique examples of how they might apply to your own life, or something unique from your perspective.

The socialization process is the method in which people adjust to the customs and norms around them. There are two main ways in which one is socialized, nature and nurture:

• Nature is what is deemed as the innate, inevitable, and permanent traits that were predestined to last with one the day he or she was born.
• Nurture, on the other hand, is marked by learned, trained, and conditioned traits brought to a person by outside factors. These factors do not come with childbirth.

Many people, including myself, believe that nurture is by far the more important factor in the socialization process. In our psychology class, we read many examples of identical twins separated at birth in which the two twins, who were genetically identical in almost every measurable way, went on to live very different lives and develop very different mindsets towards various topics. I am being intentionally vague because there were so many unique instances in which the same result occurred. Very neat stuff!

An agent of socialization is a gateway in which ideas are transferred to people. These agents could be social, such as with friends or family. These agents could also be institutional, such as with school, religion, workplace, government, or, most explicitly, mass media.

A powerful documentary we watched in my sociology class called "Consuming Kids" puts attention on the social agent of media when it comes to consumer products and ideologies for children in America. This is a brief summary from imdb.com (sorry Sal, I just couldn't have paraphrased it any better):

• Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world.

This goes to show how powerful social agents are in socializing people. This also demonstrates the large power of nurture on the socialization of a person, as this "relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine" does not come to us as we're born.