Summary
Highlights
The social construction of reality is a fundamental sociological concept that explains how people, through continuous actions and interactions, create a shared reality that feels objectively factual and subjectively meaningful. This means the social world is not inherent or natural, but rather made and shaped by human beings. Most of what individuals know is accepted from others, even influencing their perception of reason. This understanding allows for the possibility of altering and reconstructing social reality.
Externalization is the first phase, where individuals create their social worlds by projecting their internal thoughts and actions into social space. Our environment includes both natural facts (like mountains) and cultural facts (created by humans), which can be material (tools) or non-material (beliefs, values, norms). Meanings attached to nature can even transform natural elements into cultural ones, like rivers becoming playgrounds. Facts can be categorized by their dependency on humans, their level of abstraction, and their meaningfulness, leading to an imposed order on reality.
Objectivation is the process where externalized meanings appear as stable, unquestionable realities. This makes precarious human-made meanings seem like hard facts that coerce their creators. This occurs through four mechanisms: institutionalization (routinized behaviors), historicity (thickening of the institutional world across generations), legitimation (providing cognitive or moral bases for meanings, often powerfully influenced by religion), and language (meaning embedded in objective social entities).
Internalization is the final phase, where individuals learn and absorb the legitimations of the institutional order, essentially carrying culture within themselves and letting it define their identity. This completes the cycle of social construction: society is a human product, an objective reality, and humans are social products.
Reification is the apprehension of human activities' products as if they were non-human, leading to a forgetting of human authorship. The video distinguishes three types of realities based on verifiability and dependency on the human mind: natural realities (independent and objective, like physical laws), personal realities (dependent and subjective, uninstitutionalized beliefs), and social realities (dependent and objective, shared and institutionalized culture). Realities independent of the human mind and subjective are unknowable.
All human knowledge is conceptually mediated and socio-culturally influenced, though some aspects of human existence, like basic survival needs, are not solely socially constructed. Humans primarily construct their beliefs about reality, not all of reality itself. The video suggests 'social construction of social reality' for technological, institutional, and normative aspects. It concludes with Francis Bacon's 'Two Books' concept: God's world (general revelation, directly given) and God's word (special revelation, mediated by humans), raising the question of whether God is a mind-independent objective fact or a mind-dependent social construction.