There is a wiki on reification and several of its meanings...
Psych: where an object is perceived as having more spatial information than is actually present in the original stimulus
Knowledge representation: used to represent facts that must then be manipulated in some way
Marxism: the consideration of an abstraction or an object as if it had living existence and abilities, at the same time it implies the thingication of social relations.
What you can see in all these various definitions is they are different manifestations of the same thing---the process of transforming people, ideas, objects into their symbolic forms or representations as a matter of thought.
The mistake, or what we see as mythological thought, is to relate to the people, ideas or objects as if they had taken on the qualities of the way we represent them symbolically...
The entire sweep of capitalist society is thoroughly saturated, supersaturated with this process of reification, turning the world we inhabit into a mythological envelop. The great power advantage the creation of the envelop, is that the representations or symbolic forms can be deliberately manipulated through mass media to steer the public mind as a totality for this or that purpose for the power elite..
This sounds way too conspiratorial... It isn't intended to. The information and communications systems along with the socio-political systems automatically follow the concensus of the power elite---they all agree---hence this concensus is given as the public mind.
There isn't anything wrong or pathological about the operations and processes, since they seem to be a natural part of the way we think, relate to eachother communicate and so forth.
All the problems come from the uses and purposes these systems are put to in our society.
This is really an emence subject since it lays at the foundation of a theory of knowledge, that Cassirer outlines in his Philosophy of Symbolic forms. Essentially reification is an other word for the way we manipulate our world symbolically in our mind to work with it, represent it, and relate to it....
Understanding these processes, ``seeing'' them is one reason I keep bringing Cassirer up. Now he didn't discuss these processes quite this way. I think he was only beginning to see the applications of his ideas, very late in life, when he began to look at our world, say in the Myth of State and the Essay on Man. These begin to open up our world under the lens of this theories on symbolic forms.
So then reification is a great way to begin to understand how we live, how we can be made to act against our own political interest, screw ourselves economically, be made to believe that Iraq had weapons of mass distruction... or more recently believe that the Russians are the evil aggressor against the lilly white, innocent Georgians....
CG