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Watch Turkle explain the key themes of her book Alone Together in her TED Talk, “Connected, but Alone?”
Read a Frontline interview in which Turkle elaborates on the social implications of the digital revolution.
Front and Back Stage
Continuing the theatrical analogy, Goffman (1959) argued that in every performance there is a front stage, where the social performance tends to be idealized and designed to define the situation for those who are observing it. When you are in class, as in the previous example, you are typically performing on your front stage. Your audience is the teacher and perhaps other students. As a rule, people feel they must present an idealized sense of themselves when they are front stage (e.g., by giving that seemingly well-thought-out answer). Because this performance is idealized, things that do not fit the image must be hidden (such as the fact that you were partying the night before and are now unprepared to answer questions intelligently).
Also of concern to Goffman is the back stage. In the back stage, people feel free to express themselves in ways that are suppressed in the front (Cahill et al. 1985). Thus, after class you might well confess to your friends in the cafeteria that you had been partying and faked your answer to a question asked in class. If somehow your front-stage audience—the instructor, in this case—sees your back-stage performance, your ability to maintain the impression you are trying to project in the classroom, in the front stage, is likely to become difficult or impossible in the future. The existence of two stages, front and back, causes us all sorts of tensions and problems. We are always afraid that those in the front stage will find out about our back stage or that elements of the back stage will intrude on the front stage.
While the distinction between front and back stage is important, bear in mind that these are not “real” places, nor are they rigidly separated from one another. That is, what is the front stage at one point can become the back stage at another. Nevertheless, in general, people are most likely to perform in an idealized manner on their front stage when they are most concerned about making positive impressions. They are likely to perform more freely back stage, among those who are more accepting of less-than-ideal behavior and attitudes.
Socialization
Socialization is the process by which an individual learns and generally comes to accept the ways of a group or a society of which he or she is a part. During the socialization process, children develop a self as they learn the need, for example, to take on the role of the generalized other. Socialization almost always involves a process of interaction, as those with knowledge and experience teach those with a need to acquire that knowledge or to learn from others’ experiences (Grusee and Hastings 2015).
While socialization occurs throughout an individual’s lifetime, it can generally be divided into two parts. Socialization during childhood sets the course for a lifetime and has been a central focus for researchers. However, researchers have increasingly pointed to a variety of ways in which adults continue to learn how to function within their society.
Childhood Socialization
A central concern in the study of socialization is those who do the socializing, or the agents of socialization. The first and often most effective agents of socialization are the child’s parents, as well as other family members and friends. These are defined as primary agents of socialization. In addition, broader, less personal influences, such as the educational system, the media (Prot et al. 2015), and consumer culture, are important in socialization. These are defined as secondary agents of socialization. All play a part in creating an individual who can effectively operate within and shape culture. Except for education, which is discussed in Chapter 11, we examine each of these various agents of socialization in the following sections.
Family
In a process known as primary socialization, newborns, infants, and young children acquire language, identities, cultural routines, norms, and values as they interact with parents and other family members (Laible, Thompson, and Froimson 2015). This socialization lays the foundation for later personality development. Early socialization performs various functions for society, such as equipping the young to fit better into society and perpetuating the culture from one generation to the next.
In addition to a great deal of primary socialization, parents provide anticipatory socialization—that is, they teach children what will be expected of them in the future. Anticipatory socialization is how parents prepare children for the important developmental changes (puberty, for example) they will experience. Among the many other things that must be anticipated in family socialization are entrance into grade school, high school, college, the work world, and life as an independent adult. Anticipatory socialization is especially important in societies and in time periods undergoing a great deal of change. Children need to be prepared not only for changes within society but also for changes within the family and changes that will affect them more directly.
Many assumptions about primary and anticipatory socialization are changing dramatically as the nature of families and the way in which they are understood culturally undergo major transformations. The socialization process was thought to be rather straightforward when the ideal of the nuclear family, composed of a mother, a father, and two or more children all living in the same home, predominated, as it did throughout much of the twentieth century. The lesson children were required to learn, at least as far as the family was concerned, was that when they became adults, they would go on to reproduce the same kind of nuclear family as the one in which they grew up. However, assumptions about the goodness and inevitability of the nuclear family and the ease of the socialization process now seem impossible to accept (McLanahan 1999). This is the case because of increasing public awareness of the many problems associated with the nuclear family, such as divorce, abuse, and unhappiness (see Chapter 10).
Then there is the expansion of what were at one time called “alternative family forms” (e.g., single-parent households, grandparents as primary caregivers) and the increasing centrality of day care centers and their workers to the socialization process (Patterson, Farr, and Hastings 2015). The agencies doing the socializing today are much more complex and varied than they were in the era of the predominance of the nuclear family. As a result, socialization is not as straightforward as it once was thought to be. In addition, it is no longer possible to think of a seamless relationship between the agencies of socialization and the socialization process. For example, the family may be socializing its children in one way, but the day care center may be doing it very differently.
At one time socialization was seen as one-directional, for example, from parent to child. Current thinking sees such socialization among intimates as two-directional, even multidirectional, with parents socializing children and children socializing parents, other adults, and families (Gentina and Muratore 2012). Children tend to be far more familiar with the latest advances in digital technology than their elders are, and they teach their parents much about both the technology itself and the digital culture. Another example is found in the large number of immigrant families in the United States and elsewhere. Children in these families are more likely than their parents to learn the language and culture of their new country (often in school). As a result, they are frequently the ones to teach, or at least try to teach, that knowledge to their parents (Mather 2009). This is reverse socialization, in which those