Identity Construction

    Everyone has their own responsibility in the society and each of them has different identity to help grouping the community. It would be so important and meaningful to see how our identity is formed and how it works, too. I think socialization, sociological imagination and how we consider ‘self’ would be the three most important things to form our “identity”. They are all totally connected to how the identity is formed and the reason the identity is formed.


    First of all, the sociological imagination “enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.” (Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills) It means that people need to consider the historical scene in their own lives. What identity will be affected is that people will start changing their own mind because of the history and, so on, the identity will be formed differently. Moreover, the sociological imagination works between “the personal troubles of milieu and the public issues of social structural” which means that the identity will be formed as between two of them. The identity will be considered as a group of people rather than individual.

    Next the identity is somehow affected by “socialization” and the “life course” (Socialization, the life course and aging E.S.) that we have in our own life. Rather than considering theory like sociological imagination, thinking and talking about some real things such as the experience in our life will have much more reality and meaningful, too. From different stages of development for children, including sensorimotor, preoperational and operational, I found that it is quite important to know how children develop for us to see how the identity is formed. The agents of socialization “occurs in infancy and childhood” and what they do to children will absolutely affect the identity of children. That is because children are building their own minds and identities when they are growing up. Furthermore, the media will change how the identity is formed, too. 

    Last but not least, we may consider “self” when we try to know how identity is formed. “Self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself.” When we form the identity, we may need consciousness and then consider our own experience and situation. Communication provides “a form of behavior” for self to become an object to them and so they can consider themselves and know their identity. 

    To conclude, identity can be perfectly formed by the work of sociological imagination, the effect of “socialization” and “life course” and how we consider “self”. Constructing identity may be difficult, but, it let us see and understand ourselves clearly and sharply.

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Reflection:


    Since it is the first time for me to write in-class essay in this English class, it was quite frightening though. However, I did learn something from the essay. It is very important to know the information that we are analyzing clearly as we need to coorperate it in our essay. If we are not familiar with the information, it is very hard to write an appropriate essay.


    Also, I realized that we have to think broadly and not just focus on ourselves. The key term in this essay "Sociological Imagination" is a very significant concept to state that it is meaningful to think of our society from a little case in our life.