Social Selves, Ch. 2

From chapter 2 of the Burkitt text, I learned that there are many ideas as to what forms our own identities as “social selves.” Most people believe that although each of us is unique as individuals, we are to some extent products of the environment we live and interact in. One of the schools of thoughts that Burkitt discusses here is the pragmatists. He says that Pragmatism was born as a way for people to “cope in an increasingly modernizing capitalist society where older customs and communities were disappearing” (32). I thought it was interesting to think of a school of thought developing as a coping mechanism in a changing world, which at first sounded pretty depressing to me. But once Burkitt explained that Pragmatism also teaches people to actively change the world as they want it to be, that ideas are “tools” for us to use and produce that change, then that sounded better. In the context of social media, I can see a lot of ways people interact that tie in with Pragmatism thinking. Social media has increasingly been a way for people to reach out to others, and many people use outlets such as Facebook and Twitter as a way to call for action. These needs can be anything from drawing attention to an important social cause such as raising money for underprivileged kids, or to marketing and hyping up a new product for consumers to buy.