Brian Morris discussed social institutions, which brought tearful memories of my high school. We used to remember the most common types of social institutions and all the functions, pretty useless but somewhat fun. I’m going to try to tell you all the things I remembered. (disclaimer, I took the information from Wikipedia, but trust me I’ve learned this in high school)
Social institution is a system, a compilation of norms, values, culture and beliefs of a community at a limited proximity of an area. A social institution is created to accomplish a certain goal, to fulfill the need of the community in terms of the compilation that I mentioned. For example, school is a social institution created to pass down knowledge, culture, and tradition.
Every social institution has its own function, equipment, symbol, and a set of rules, verbal or literal. These social institutions are the gears community, the structure that keeps us moving and walking, affecting each other both direct and indirect
There are 5 categorizations of institutions, but I’m only going to mention 2. Those are social institution based on its existence (cresive & enacted), and based on its function (operative & regulated). Cresive institution means an institution that rose unexpectedly but accepted by the community, such as family, marriage (debatable), the right of ownership, and religion (debatable). Enacted institution means it’s man-made (duh) such as school, the government, a nation. The second type is self-explanatory, with operative is creating regulation so the community can operate, such as economy and the government, and regulative to keep the operation smooth, such as the law.
Every social institution has it’s own equipment and symbol to represent and differentiate one another. Media as a social institution uses television, satellite, stations, and their symbols are their logo and the type of information the give.
Social institutions have 2 types of function, manifest & latent. Manifest function is the function that you expect and agreed of an institution while latent function manifest in the background. Since I’m learning media, that is what I will be talking about.
The manifest function of the media is:
- entertainment: to use different technical instruments to provide an entertainment to the public
- informative: to given current information and as an alternative source of knowledge.
- communication: the media is connecting people across borders. But the media can also be used by the government to communicate with it’s citizens.
- As a way for people to exercise free speech.
- Aids mobilization, integration , and assimilation/acculturation.
then the most interesting part, the latent function of the media:
- A medium to show prestige/status Showing your Givenchy bag or your BMW is part of it.
- Surveillance: the media shows the current state of a country by it’s news and politics.
- The source of bias and objectification: somehow the media controls how we think, by showing us texts with one point of view.
- westernization: this applies to me (eastern countries). The media has allowed me to fantasize what living in America would be like.
- categorizes audience: attracting audiences that have the same opinion together, and sometimes opposing other audiences, thus making the next function
- disassociating the community.
- A means of distraction. Example: the government of America distracts people about the war in Syria by showing news about aids outbreak.
This is some of my understanding of institutions. If you have anything to add, please let me know.