Socialization across the Life Course Adult Socialization and the Flexible Self
The development of the self is a lifelong process (Mortimer and Simmons, 1978). When
young adults enter a profession or get married, they must learn new occupational and
family roles. Retirement and old age present an entirely new set of challenges. Giving
up a
job, seeing children leave home and start their own families, and losing a spouse and close
friends are all changes later in life that require
people to think of themselves in new ways
and to redefine who they are. Many new roles
are predictable. To help us learn them, we
often engage in anticipatory socialization,
which involves beginning to take on the
norms and behaviors of the roles to which
we aspire. (Think of 15-year-old fans of Gossip
Girl learning from the TV show what it
might mean to be a young adult.) Other new
roles are unpredictable. You might unexpectedly
fall in love and marry someone from a
different ethnic, racial, or religious group.
You might experience a sudden and difficult
transition from peace to war. If so, you will
have to learn new roles and adopt new cultural
values or at least modify old ones. Even
in adulthood, then, the self remains flexible.
Today, people’s identities change faster, more often, and more completely than they
did just a couple of decades ago. One factor contributing to the growing flexibility of
the self is globalization. As we saw in Chapter 2, people are now less obliged to accept
the culture into which they are born. Because of globalization, they are freer to combine
elements of culture from a wide variety of historical periods and geographical settings.
A second factor increasing our freedom to design our selves is our growing ability
to fashion new bodies from old (see Figure 3.2). People have always defined themselves
partly in terms of their bodies; your self-conception is influenced by whether you’re a
man or a woman, tall or short, healthy or ill, conventionally attractive or plain. But our
bodies used to be fixed by nature. People could do nothing to change the fact that they
were born with certain features and grew older at a certain rate.
Now, however, you can change your body, and therefore
your self-conception, radically and virtually at will—if, that is,
you can afford it. Bodybuilding, aerobic exercise, and weight reduction
regimens are more popular than ever. Plastic surgery
allows people to buy new breasts, noses, lips, eyelids, and hair—
and to remove unwanted fat, skin, and hair from various parts of
their bodies. In 2009, about 1.5 million Americans underwent
cosmetic surgery, down a little from the previous year because
of the recession, but five times more than in 1992. Nearly 11
million Americans underwent collagen, Botox, and other “minimally
invasive” procedures in 2009, 160 times more than in
1992. Other body-altering procedures include sex-change operations
and organ transplants. At any given time, about 50,000
Americans are waiting for a replacement organ. Brisk, illegal
international trade in human hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, and
eyes enables well-to-do people to enhance and extend their lives
(Rothman, 1998). As all of these examples illustrate, many new
opportunities for changing one’s body, and therefore one’s selfconception,
have been introduced in recent decades.
Self-Identity and the Internet
Further complicating identity formation today is the growth
of the Internet. In the 1980s and early 1990s, most observers
believed
that social interaction via computer would involve
only the exchange of information. It turns out they
were wrong. Computer-assisted
social interaction can profoundly
affect how people think of themselves as they form
virtual
communities—
associations
of people, scattered across
town or across the planet, who communicate
via the Internet
about subjects of common interest
(Brym and Lenton, 2001;
Haythornwaite
and Wellman, 2002; see Box 3.2).
Because virtual communities allow people to conceal their
identities, they are free to assume new identities and discover
parts of themselves they were formerly unaware of. In virtual
communities, shy people can become bold, normally assertive
people can become voyeurs, old people can become young, straight people can become
gay, and women can become men (Turkle, 1995). Experience on the Internet reinforces
our main point—that the self has become increasingly flexible in recent decades, and
people are freer than ever to shape their selves as they choose.
However, as you’ll now see, this freedom comes at a cost, particularly for young
people. To appreciate the cost, we first consider what childhood and adolescence looked
like a few centuries ago.
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