Social Construction of Reality

Social construction of reality is the core concept of the learning theories of social constructivism and social constructionism, but it is also a communication theory and a research movement stemming from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) book The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. The main focus of Berger and Luckmann’s book was to understand the way people make sense of reality and understand knowledge and not the communication process people make use of in order to understand the world. But linguistics, media studies, and communication scholars later developed the theory to explore the mechanisms through which communication serves as a human instrument for creating the world (via words, social practices, and media products) and the ways people use ...