Its main thesis is an attempt to tie together epistemology and sociology. TO SUMMARIZE: Thought is a social construct. Our ways of thinking are influenced by our ancestors and traditions. There's also Wittgenstein's baby - how language affects thought. Of course, after watching both political conventions over the past two weeks, it is necessary to discuss the political role of this idea. One could see it being discussed by reformers/radicals, who want to change society and assist oppressed peoples by changing the long-held societal misconceptions which lead to their oppression. Another possibility involves a certain long-gone form of conservatism, which remarks on the fragility of society, and that any reform attempts must be undertaken with great care. This conservatism, of course, is not the naked imperial greed which calls itself 'conservative' today. One example of social constructs is race. Compare America and Western Europe. In the former, 'white people' are a monolithic bloc, in the latter, there are still hazy distinctions drawn up between North and South European, Germanic and Slav. I know the feeling of race directly - I have been mistaken, at various times in my life, for being Russian, Mexican, and half-Chinese or half-Vietnamese. My mother is also mistaken for Chinese, despite being Filipino. Other possibilities about social construction include sexuality, political beliefs, professions, and others. Such an idea has its charms, but also its detractors. I wonder how a biological approach to ideas, such as neuroscience or evolutionary psychology (as flawed as the latter is) might make an approach to such similar topics. For a book on sociology, it does raise the question of if we can truly attempt to understand the point of view of a person who's lived in a completely different society than we have. Political thought since the Enlightenment has turned largely on an apparent opposition between society and the individual. From this has emerged a libertarian argument that society and social facts are actually meaningless notions. Philosophy has largely lost interest in the question with the advent of positivism, yet positivism is itself a contentious proposition. The validity of the idea of “society” has been taken up in two books with maddeningly similar titles. The first, The Construction of Social Reality, looks at the status of a “social fact” from a philosophical perspective. This one, The Social Construction of Reality, looks at knowledge from a sociological point of view, noting that professional philosophers have now punted anything having to do with actual human beings to the human sciences. Philosophers have broached narrow epistemological issues such as ideology or false consciousness. The authors here widen the concept of knowing as it relates to society. They propose that a proper sociology of knowledge must include the study of everything that passes for reality or knowledge in a society, regardless of whether it’s true or false. The value of understanding how canards, for example, get embedded into a culture is a task for such a sociology, with its promise of fruitful research topics. A weakness mars the book's first thirty pages. The authors put quote marks around words and phrases being used in their ordinary context. This excess leads the reader to wonder if the authors have any idea what they're talking about or how stupid they sound. Compounding the impression is academic slang that aims words like “rootage” (for root), “ongoingly” and “eventuated” at general readers. Combined with minor grammar and noun/adjective errors, the book starts to give off a raw odin and a putrid olor

What we think we know, it claims, is shaped by our societies to an extent far beyond what one might expect; thought occurs in a social context, if for no other reason than that language itself is social in nature. Even the concept of self has a social component (as opposed to a psychological one).

Among other interesting points --

– Social order is not a product of the laws of nature; the natural law fallacy applies.
– The idea of collective identity is false. Individuals shape societies as much as societies shape individuals, and the process is a continuing flux.
– Philosophical positivism cannot be used to simply legislate away obvious problems involving human relations.
– It is psychology rather than sociology that tends to reify theories about humans, a point for libertarians to ponder. This reification is compounded by psychoanalytic claims of scientific fact.
– Social control stems from institutions, not individuals.
– Power in a society produces its own “reality,” and this definition of reality may even be enforced by the police.
– A totalitarian social structure is more characteristic of primitive societies than complex ones, regardless of ideologies.
– Society determines how long and in what manner an individual will live. Even sexuality and orgasm are experienced within a social frame.
– Intellectuals are marginal characters in all modern societies.

The authors argue for these points among many, but to recap them here gives readers an idea of the scope of the contents

..I am conscious of the world as consisting of multiple realities. As I move from one reality to another, I experience the transition as a kind of shock. This shock is to be understood as caused by the shift in attentiveness that the transition entails. Waking up from a dream illustrates this shift most simply (p. 21).

This reminds me of a passage from Pedro Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream

Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul
Yet uncorrected of the higher Will,
So that men sometimes in their dreams confess
An unsuspected, or forgotten, self;
One must beware to check—ay, if one may,
Stifle ere born, such passion in ourselves
As makes, we see, such havoc with our sleep,
And ill reacts upon the waking day.

Sigesmund, III,1

To continue with Berger and Luckmann:

Among the multiple realities there is one that presents itself as the reality par excellence. This is the reality of everyday life.... The tension of consciousness is highest in everyday life, that is, the latter imposes itself upon consciousness in the most massive, urgent, and intense manner. It is impossible to ignore, difficult even to weaken its imperative presence (p. 21).

Unfortunately for those who have "taken the blue pill" as in...

What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Morpheus, The Matrix

Sep 14, 2014 Adam von Eve

Berger's Social Construction of Reality is a thorough and concise expression of a lot of things I'd already learned or intuited about the topic. This is a nice thing to have, cementing a lot of thoughts in place and confirming that I had indeed understood the concepts accurately. And Berger's writing is nowhere near as impenetrable and arcane as I'd expected it would be. His style is a bit ornate, using unusual phrasings and word variants, but it's all straightforward enough to parse on a first pass. On the other hand, his examples are largely disappointing. Berger wrote this in the 1960's; a lot of its ideas were around even earlier.

I grew up in a world suffused with fiction exploring implications of Berger's thesis, from Borges and Philip K. Dick to Wade Davis and Barry Lopez. I've seen tons of explorations and examples of Berger's ideas by writers far more creative than him. It's no surprise his thought experiments fall a bit flat. But it's not just that they're boring or don't take ideas to interesting places; this isn't really the place for that. It's that they often are quite unhelpful at just explaining the ideas, or distract from his thesis in some way. His examples are colorful and memorable, from a love triangle between a lesbian, a gay man, and a bisexual, to a peasant who must integrate into his identity his role as a peasant “cringing before his lord” and as a husband beating his wife, to an island tribesman thrashing his insolent nephew. He often cites gender as an example, which, while it is a social construct, is certainly too complex and debated to be used as an introductory example from any point of view.

The other problem with Berger's examples is that many of them seem too naïve to believe in this day and age. Perhaps it is true that, at one point, people were so credulous and straightforward about their concepts of reality, but these days post-modernism and irony have suffused our culture so fundamentally that it raises eyebrows to speculate on individuals who take their own ideas about the world so seriously, who completely lack even the concept that other ways of doing things exist, on issues that are relatively apolitical. Berger does make mention of the fact that his decentralized, relativist ideas about culture and reality are a result of the proliferation of worldviews in our rapidly globalizing and industrializing world. The introduction of many worldviews that function side by side without serious friction or disfunction undermines the primacy of one's own worldview.

I had for some reason expected Berger to focus more on ontology, essentially to the application of sociology of knowledge to scientific realism. Instead, Berger essentially takes a provisional level of realism for granted. He assumes the existence of the world, including humans as biological entities with some fixed properties that distinguish them from other animals (the nexus between evolutionary biology and culture is super interesting and one I'm sure is becoming better-studied now, and by holding it as a constant Berger makes the biggest oversimplification of the book. Probably not a bad choice given his goals, though) and posits culture as a product of that interaction, unique to each society and sub-society. Culture then affects both humans and the world and the three have a complex mutual interaction ever since, one that is quite difficult to exactly decipher. The point is, Berger's question is not about the ontological status of reality, but rather about the formation, evolution, and maintenance of worldviews and identity groups.

Studying abroad in Tanzania, some of my anthropology major friends were complaining about how sociologists always say that “reality is socially constructed.” I believed this to be true at the time, so I asked what their alternative would be: “reality is culturally constructed.” Aside from being a really dumb petty disciplinary squabble, this distinction misses the point of Berger's idea. The book is an abstract, speculative theory about how cultures are created, and it constantly asserts that culture is an all-encompassing, subjectively experienced set of concepts and relationships synonymous with “reality” itself. Berger of course rarely uses the word “culture,” though subculture appears quite often, but it's impossible to mistake his meaning without stooping to willfully obtuse jargon quibbling.

For all its inadequacies, Social Construction of Reality is probably the best simple introduction to post-modernism I've come across yet. It focuses on the material, cultural underpinnings and consequences of what are often framed as philosophical debates and problems, driving home the contingency of our arguments and identities in historical and biographical circumstance. It emphasizes that reality is on every level created and maintained by repeated enactments by individuals. It also illustrates quite saliently the literal ubiquity of tropes and narratives in every facet of life. It would be fun to teach this book, pulling from the post-modern literary corpus for more interesting and well-executed examples. Definitely recommended for anyone looking to get a better understanding of post-modernism, relativism, or just a theoretical framework for how culture works.
... reality is something agreed upon by yourself and other social actors.

At any rate, think of "The Social Construction of Reality" as a sort of pre-Matrix scholarly article that deals in a similar subject. No there are no machines using us as batteries creating an alternative reality for us -- we do it to ourselves along with others

 define reality as “a phenomenon that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition.” However, it is evident that humans themselves create their own form of realities and eventually have extreme belief that their realities are actually real. Then, how objective can our reality be if we cannot avoid bias?

Society is a human product. “Man’s relationship to his environment is characterized by world-openness.” Humans are species who are moldable within the constraints of their biological being. They continuously alter any factors of the society for it to completely develop into their favor. It is not a wonder then that humans have created and produced society. Through this, society becomes an objective, enthroned and domineering reality which in turn makes the individuals eventually turn into the pawn of society. They themselves become the product of their own creation.

Society is an objective reality. The Social Construction of Reality is an orthodox text that discusses the individual identity structure, socialization and influence of social prowess. The text is based on the sociology of knowledge wherein there is a profound affiliation between human thought and the social framework within which it arises. Furthermore, it explains how knowledge – common sense, values, and social norms – is socially constituted thereby explicating constraints and extent of the society’s influence on an individual’s life. With this, the knowledge obtained and the ensuing social institutions forms an objective reality which makes it possible for a reality to exist separately of our subjectivity.

Man is a social product. Social institutions promote habitualization within the limitations of human life. It constructs a stable background wherein the life of the individual is routine. This in turn relieves the stress and frees the individual from making decisions for themselves. This is where the idea that man is a social product. The social institutions – created by humans – takes control and becomes the dogma of men themselves. Also, these social institutions provide the symbolic universes wherein the individual’s life is revolving around. The symbolic universes are a set of circumstances that endeavors in creating an institutionalized structure that is acceptable for humans. It gives the explanations for why things happen the way they do, why people act the way they do. We see the world as unchangeable, always constant. This is because from the moment we were born, we have been socialized to believe the limitations that the predetermined social institutions taught us. The socialization originated from our family, the church, friends, teachers, even the people we see fleetingly. 
It’s unbelievable how much the society can dictate and shape us into how we view the world. 
In other words, the society had us become institutionalized.