Educational Sociology has equipped me with the words to express issues that may seem like “common sense,” yet are vital for understanding learners and educational technology. One such lesson is the process of socialization.
Socialization
Before, the process of learning a society’s culture seemed abstract. Yet it is present at every step of a person’s life. Children learn table manners from their parents; teenagers seek validation from the in-group; employees are onboarded into a new company; religious converts adopt their new faith and lifestyle.
This Educational Sociology course taught me that this process has a name: socialization. It has recognizable types:
Primary socialization is the intimate, immediate learning that happens inside one's own close group;
Secondary socialization handles the norms of narrower circles later in life;
Anticipatory socialization is the rehearsal of a role one aspires to but does not yet hold;
Developmental socialization is the deliberate acquisition of a skill;
Resocialization is the harder work of shedding old patterns for new ones;
Organizational socialization is the process of adjusting to a new or changing institutional role.
Going through them reminded me of my experiences: relocating from town to town in the province during my late childhood, navigating my teenage years, shifting from Psychology to IT, and changing companies and tech roles. Now, I have the language for these transitions. Every time I onboarded to an unfamiliar stack or stepped into a new professional role, I was undergoing organizational socialization, learning the norms of a practice well enough to be counted as someone who belongs. This reframes technical onboarding as a social event, not merely a cognitive one.
Socialization vs. individualization
Growing up, I heard people criticize the education system for raising “factory workers” who easily conform, yet also blame teachers for the misconduct of students who deviate from social expectations. It turns out that education is a tug-of-war between socialization and individualization. Socialization molds a person to fit a group through culture, norms, and a shared script. Individualization, meanwhile, pushes the making of a self distinct from everyone else in that same society.
Education is expected to serve both: to settle students neatly into the community while sharpening whatever makes them unique. But there is a complication. The tug-of-war is no longer conducted only by teachers, parents, and peers. A new agent has entered it, promising individualization yet quietly delivering the opposite.
The potentially greatest socialization agent of the 21st century
As the presentation listed the agents of socialization—family, religion, education, peers, mass media, and the workplace—I realized that there is a seventh agent, and it might shape socialization for the rest of the 21st century: AI.
For years now, recommender systems and language models have been silently shaping how people speak, what they treat as normal, and what “correct” is allowed to look like. These algorithms have personalized the social media feeds on billions of screens, influencing entire generations’ attire, lingo, and zeitgeist. The obvious move is to put this in the mass media basket, but I argue otherwise.
Mass media, as defined by Britannica (2026), refers to “systems, technologies, and organizations that communicate information, ideas, entertainment, advertising, and cultural expression to large audiences” (emphasis mine). AI does something closer to family: it is intimate, constant, and responsive. For Generation Alpha (those born between 2010 and 2025), AI and its predecessors arrived early. It bears a semblance of consciousness, never tires, responds to virtually any question, and adjusts itself to satisfy users.
AI presents itself as the ultimate individualizing agent: a feed for you, an answer for you, a tutor for you. Yet personalization at scale, like recommendation systems before it, has produced a generation that looks remarkably alike. The individualization is real at the interface and absent in the outcome. AI performs the work of primary socialization without belonging to any close group. But on whose terms, and toward what?
Primary socialization has always required accountability. A parent who teaches a child something can be asked by a spouse, a church, or a community. Teachers answer to a school, a community, and a curriculum, for example. However, a recommender system is aligned only to an engagement metric. An AI agent can take on the closeness of a family or a friend without inheriting their societal obligations. Instead, it only adheres to company guardrails and guidelines that could be bypassed.
As AI becomes more deeply ingrained in search engines, social media, and workplaces, how much more can it shape us, especially the youth, as a socialization agent?
That is worth researching while it’s still early.