The word context, originating from the Latin word contextus, describes the space or environment that can be physical or symbolic that serves as a 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, depending on the case, concrete or abstract.
Social, for 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 who 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 factors, etc. that are part of the identity and reality of a person.
Construction of the social context
The human being is an entity with social characteristics, whose development depends on the links that it establishes with its environment. This means that people are the ones who build the social context but, at the same time, this context affects their reality.
Let’s take the example of two girls born in Rio de Janeiro. One of them lives in an upper-class neighborhood, has access to the best health services in the area, attends classes at a private school and is raised by her parents, both professionals. The other little girl was abandoned by her father, spends her days in a favela and has to work instead of study.
All these circumstances (housing conditions, the possibility of accessing education, etc.) form the social context in which the girls in the aforementioned case grow up. These contexts determine her present and her future: the girl from the favela, given that she does not receive basic academic training, will have great problems finding work. Thus it is likely that, when she becomes a woman and has children, as she surely will, they will go through experiences similar 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 into 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 our personality in the same way and force us towards attitudes that often go against our own will, even when not we are aware of it.
The influence of the environment
For example, eating meat is very common in most countries, and no one has the option to eat exclusively plant-based for the first few years of life. Many people decide to modify their diet once they reach a certain age, because they do not feel identified with the decisions necessary to be omnivores ; The question that arises in these cases is: has this individual changed or has he always felt disgusted against mistreatment and abuse of animals? Perhaps your upbringing prevented you from analyzing these issues so that it would not go against the principles of your guardians?
Human beings tend to think that they are incapable of living discovering their own needs and tastes at every step. Prefer false securitythat it contributes to grouping, joining other people who believe they have things in common, thus canceling the spontaneity of their decisions, even those apparently altruistic. Collaborating monetarily with a cause that one considers just, as long as 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 is not so far from hitting a homeless person so that we are labeled cowards. Both cases are the product of not being able, of not wanting to get rid of the context in which we live, which reduces us to mere document numbers that pass through a city and then are discarded, but that do not leave anything, that do not generate any change in the society.