media, etc. Agents of
socialisation will consequently be teachers, priests, television
personalities, celebrities and so forth. Secondary Socialisation
In any society, the process of secondary socialisation is necessary because it represents the way we start to learn about the nature of the social world beyond our primary contacts. We have to learn to deal with people who are not emotionally close to us, mainly because the vast majority of the people we will come into contact with in life will be dealt with unemotionally. We have to learn how to cope with this, which is why this second type of socialisation is necessary.
When we think about agencies
of secondary socialisation we can talk about education, religion,
the mass media, etc. Agents of
socialisation will consequently be teachers, priests, television
personalities, celebrities and so forth.
In some cases, such as
school and teachers, we are in daily, face-to-face contact with the people who are
socialising us without ever developing a primary attachment
to them. 
In other cases, such as when we admire a particular film / TV star or musician, we may never meet or talk personally with them, yet we can still be influenced by what they look like, what they do and how they do it.
Talcott Parsons claimed that the main purpose (or function as he called it) of secondary socialisation is to:
"Liberate the individual from a dependence upon the primary attachments and relationships formed within the family group".
What Parsons' meant by this was that, in modern societies, the vast majority of people that we meet will be strangers to us - and to relate to them in the same way we relate to people we love and for whom we have affection would not be possible or desirable. We have, therefore, to learn how to deal with people in terms of what they can do for us and what we can do for them in particular situations (that is, instrumentally).