1.3b Socialization

Socialization

Social structure influences the process of socialization. Socialization is the process by which people learn about their culture (see Chapter 4). Families, schools, religious institutions, and other groups socialize the people who belong to those groups. Parents socialize children, and  teachers provide additional socialization, for example. Parents and teachers are examples of agents of socialization. Agents of socialization do not work in isolation but mediate, reinforce, and contradict each other. Moreover, socialization is active and passive and multidirectional. Therefore, children also socialize parents. How people are socialized depends on factors such as their age, gender, race, and more.  

Photo 1.8

A Teenage Content Creator Recording a Beauty Tutorial Video

Socialization and Social Media

Social media users, for instance, socialize each other into a platform’s norms. On YouTube, videos come to look similar. Teenage content creators tend to talk directly to the camera and film in their bedroom (Balleys et al., 2020). This has become a norm among teenage creators. As a result, aspiring teenage YouTubers follow the norm reinforcing it.

One research team used questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and online observations with teenagers to learn how they use YouTube (Pires et al., 2022). The team studied teenagers across eight countries in Europe, South America, and Oceania. They found that teenagers use YouTube videos to learn. Teenagers use YouTube to learn for school, and activities like video gaming or beauty (Pires et al., 2022). Therefore, these videos socialized their viewers. Viewers actively learn, watch, and imitate what they see in the videos.

Whether social media is harmful or beneficial for users, especially adolescents, is a concern. Stern and Odland (2017) analyzed the news media and found it depicted social media as harmful to teenagers. Therefore, adults often view social media use as a problem for teenagers. However, meta-analyses of the research on the relationship between social media use and well-being find social media may be less harmful than thought (Orben, 2020). A meta-analysis summarizes the findings of the research on a topic to share the overall findings. Orben reports that some studies found positive effects and others adverse effects. However, much of the research is low-quality. Moreover, the impact of social media differs based on factors like gender and age. People in these distinct groups consume different social media content.