IDENTITY FORMATION

What Makes Identity?

 Identity is a word that has many definitions that can illustrate a person based on their gender, cultural backgrounds, religion and social class, etc. It also can be defined as how an individual views himself/herself and how others see them. An identity involves a sense of belonging an individual chooses to identify with a group and activity engages in doing so, showing support. Identity shows in groups like family, school and work, in which shows a person’s mannerisms as a part of a whole and not only seeing identity individuality. Furthermore, by developing a person’s identity, socialization plays an important part. It will shape a person’s identity from infancy to adulthood; in the process of shaping a person’s identity there must be some social circumstances such as the globalization, environment, culture and life experience which are the main factors that progressively shapes a person identity.

The person does not born knowing how to socialize, the child will learn thru the years what and how to socialize in life. The socialization is dived in two sectors the primary and the secondary. The “primary socialization is the first socialization an individual undergoes in childhood through which he becomes a member of society. Secondary socialization is any subsequent process that inducts an already socialized individual into new sectors of the objective world in society”(Berger and Luckmann 29). Since the primary socialization is the most important in a human being because is the family, which are the parents are the ones who are in charge of selecting the social life on a child will affect it through his life until he gets the power to control himself. From a low- class child the socialization would be different from a upper-class child, but in the secondary socialization is the age of adulthood that has the choice to identified himself with other people and could be different society.

The globalization is the growth of the world interdependence in which a person is affected all the time because the society is changing in a fast pace. In what introduces the environment of a person. The work environment in a person is one element of a person’s identity, with the little peer-group of the work place will help the person to encounter the “self” at work, but not all the people are in the same situation; for example, a person that lives in towns or urban cities are totally different from the ones that live in a farm. The person that lives in a farm will never have the experience of going to work in a different part or have a different topic to talk about with the co-workers because it would be always about the crops and plants and since he lives in the farm he doesn’t have to go take the bus or any transportation because the job is right in front of his house door. In the other hand the person who lives in the city going to work would be another different experience everyday, taking different types of transportation and talking to different people everyday in which the person will socialize more and would become different from the person who live in the farm because it would not have the same socialization.

A person with a different type of background, culture and language it will be always different from any other. Since we born, the self do not come it rises in the process of social experience and activity, the experiences that the self has is to make us know of who we are, but some of the time the most simple experiences in our lives that it also shape ourselves we don’t remember or we do not put attention to them such as waking up in the morning or how we eat our meals. By this “[we] see [ourselves] thru the eyes of others”(Herbert Mead 26). In  which society is divided in different cultural and language and even background, a person has the power to choose what it wants to be but the society has to approve it. A person from Mexico would be different form a person from America living in the United States. I born in Mexico and my background is different from an American girl but thru the years I have been shaping myself towards the American culture trying to be accepted in the society, and trying to identify myself as an American, but my roots still there in which I share with other Mexicans living in the United States. We change ourselves and we change our relationships with others; we are never the same with people.  “We dived ourselves up in all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances”. We are part of different groups and to be in the group we do what they do, and we are there because we like to be in that type of society, but we never act as who we truly are we just do it to get accepted from their eyes.

Everything in the world is an element of self-identity, we identified ourselves with history, society, social media and our actions. We have the power to choose who we are in the social globalization.