Social Constructs of Reality

Communication has been termed as the most practical activity of the academic disciplines. With communication, people have a lifetime experience of doing things. This experiential knowledge offers a functional basis and a beginning point. An individual can build the knowledge and implement the skills needed to become a more ethical and competent communicator. All these activities take place through language. All human languages serve as a symbolic system that uses symbols to pass meanings. Through language, we can create meaningful messages and disseminate them. However, the coding of a message during communication does not determine its reception mode since, in effective communication, a four-stage theory must be formed. Stuart Hall’s influential essay names the stages as production, distribution, circulation, consumption, and reproduction.

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Thesis statement: The paper looks into the factors that comprise social construction and its connection to knowledge, communication, and social interactions that enhance mutual understandings of the world that lead to shared assumptions concerning reality.

 In saying that the transmission-reception and exchange of ideas comprise a series of stages in a reality-making process means that a message can have a complex structure of dominance since institutional power associations imprint it at every step. This topic sentence links with the thesis statement as it discusses how the reception of a message can occur at a given stage. However, there is an opportunity for a message to be comprehended somewhat contrary to the grain. This implies that power relations will loosely match those at the end of consumption at the point of message production. Other scholars also argue that it is possible to perceive this procedure in the form of a structure issued and sustained via the articulation of connected but distinctive moments adhering to production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction (Orwell, 46). Under this argument, we will be forced to imagine that the process is like a complex structure in dominance maintained by articulating linked ideas, which is believed to uphold its uniqueness and carries its own extraordinary modality, forms, and existence condition.

According to Orwell, following the experimental process of articulation and understanding of messages via the necessary stages makes an individual discern doublespeak’s presence (49). The topic sentence coincides with the essay objective explaining the four forms of doublespeak that surround effective social interactions and constructs. The first is the euphemism which is a positive phrase or word to prevent unpleasant, harsh, or distasteful reality. An alternative argument can be that a euphemism is a tactful phrase or word that enables one to avoid mentioning a painful fact. The second form of doublespeak is jargon – a specialized language of a profession, trade, or a similar group like the one used by car mechanics, doctors, educators, or engineers. Jargon plays a significant role in creating the reality of events. Like euphemism, jargon can be esoteric, pretentious, and obscure terminology people use to give the room of authority, prestige, and profundity to the speakers and their subjects. Therefore, jargon is a phrase that makes the simple appear complicated, the ordinary profound, and the obvious to be insightful. This means that jargon creates the sense of impressing, not expressing reality. Bureaucratese is another form of doublespeak which is basically pilling on words or phrases to overwhelm listeners. With bureaucratese, the longer the sentences, the better and meaningful they become. The fourth type of doublespeak is an inflated language designed to ordinary statements look extraordinary. They make daily things appear impressive and give a sense of importance reality to people.

 In a reality-making process, language is increasingly becoming a concern of scholars because, in contemporary communication settings, people have realized that it is necessary to examine the nature of a language being used and its relationship to the world (Morfetas and Ceolin 67). In this topic sentence, there is a correlation with the thesis statement because it delineates the two theories that guide the relationship between language and the world. The first theory is the mimetic, also known as reflective. Under this theory, it is argued that a language is simply a tool for describing the world that it is an approach used in delineating and naming what already is found in this world. As per this theory, all human beings perceive the world differently and share similar fundamental concepts. Therefore, the argument here is that language is defined as a tool for expressing such concepts and the world that lives independently. The second theory that creates a relationship between the world and the language is the constructionist. This infers that language does not discuss a pre-existing world. Instead, language constructs its own world via naming it, and it constructs concepts and ideas which human beings apply in understanding the world and general life. Different languages will be represented in different ways, and consumers of a foreign language will experience and understand the world in strange approaches to that language. It will also be different from how the speakers of other languages understand it. However, this is not disputing the reality that is found in the material world, or that is found in pre-existing language, but it is to say that it is only understood, apprehended; once it is named or constructed, it creates its own world. Every knowledge of reality is mediated by language. This implies that the experiences people make of the world take the form of language presentations.

Lutz argues that our understanding of the world grows as the capacity of our language expands (351). Here the topic sentence supports the thesis statement as it shows how speaking given language changes into the language that speaks to us equally hence boosting our interactions. It is believed that language constructs people’s identity that human beings are a cog in the machine of language. Consequentially, this can be understood in two ways: our language influences our thinking, and two that our language basically affects our thinking. The second interpretation of language offers us some degree of autonomy. It is prudent to understand that if we experience new feelings or discover new things, we have to discover new words to describe them, which effectively provides us with added autonomy. According to Heidegger and Ward Beecher that the constructionist position has received a more comprehensive acceptance, unlike the mimetic position, and present that language is a vehicle that enables us to think and understand (76). Language gives shape to our feelings and perceptions by labeling them.

No doubt English is among the most used languages in the world. The mentioning of English as a language used in communication seals the thesis statement’s requirements. It explains why the decline of a language can lead to flawed social constructs in our interactions.  Many elite groups have acknowledged that the English language is in lousy form but generally infer nothing we can do. We need to know that any language’s decline must have a political inclination but not any potential writer’s influence. Economic causes also can lead to the decline of a language. Most societies are built on the foundation of politics and economics. The fact that societies are formed based on the social constructs of reality, the idea reality is a social construct relies on language matters so much because the sociological perception is that we need to use language to make strange things look right. During posits, sociologists assess reality’s social constructions related to religion, gender, ethnicity and race, economic class, race, and other components that comprise our social location (59). We all subscribe to different roles in our entire lives. Our social interactions lie in the hands of the duties we assume, who assumes them and the location where these interactions occur, and the language used in enabling them.

In summary, the world and culture around us form the social construction of reality based on the languages we communicate. Sociologists understand that any reality must be socially constructed, implying that people determine their experiences via social interaction. In all these practices, language is at the center-stage of building a framework of the sociology of knowledge. Language enables people to form their own distinct roles used in social interactions.

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