Definition of social context - What it is, Meaning and Concept

The word context , originating in the Latin word contextus , describes the space or environment that can be physical or symbolic that serves as framework to mention or understand an episode.The context is created based on a series of circumstances that help to understand a message.These circumstances can be, as the case may be, concrete or abstract.

Social, by its part, is that which is related to or points to society.This concept (society) encompasses the group of individuals who share a culture and interact with each other to form a community .

These definitions allow us to understand the notion of social context, which encompasses all cultural, economic, historical, etc.factors that are part of the identity and reality of a person .

The human being is a entity of social characteristics , whose development depends on the links that it establishes with its surroundings.This means that people are the ones who build the social context but, at the same time, this context affects its reality.

Take the example of two girls born in Rio de Janeiro .One of them lives in a high class neighborhood, has access to the best health services in the area, attends classes in a private school and is raised by her parents, both professionals.The other girl was abandoned by her father, spends her days in a slum and has to work instead of studying.

All these circumstances (living conditions, the possibility of accessing education, etc.) form the social context in which the girls in the aforementioned case grow.These contexts determine their present and their future: the girl of the favela, since she does not receive the basic academic training, will have great problems to get a job, so it is likely that when she becomes a woman and has children, since she surely does, they will go through similar experiences to those lived by her.

And this leads us to the impact that the social context has on our development and the immense difficulty of relearning certain things that were burned in our brain since childhood.In less extreme situations than those raised in the previous paragraphs, the experiences and ideas that surround us during our upbringing condition in the same way personality and drag us strongly towards attitudes that often go against our own will, even when we are not aware of it.

For example, eating meat is very common in most countries, and no one has the option of feeding exclusively on vegetables during the first years of life.Many people decide to change their diet once they reach a certain age., because they do not feel identified with the necessary decisions to be omnivorous; The question that arises in these cases is: has this individual changed or has he always felt disgust against animal abuse and abuse? Perhaps his upbringing prevented him from analyzing these issues so that he did not go against the principles of his tutors?

The human being tends to think that he is incapable of living discovering at every step his own needs and tastes.He prefers the false security that brings him together, joining other people who believe they have things in common, thus canceling spontaneity of their decisions, even of those apparently altruistic.To cooperate monetarily with a cause that one considers fair, provided there is no corruption involved, can be a positive action; but if it is done so as not to give a bad image, then this does not move away so much from hitting a homeless person so that they label us as cowards.Both cases are the product of not being able, of not wanting to part with the context in which we live, which reduces us to mere document numbers that pass through a city and then are discarded, but that leave nothing, that do not generate any change in society.