Theoretical perspectives – Communication as Interaction

Media Technology and Culture

Outline

• Goffman and the study of human interaction

• Concepts

• Talk as a form of interaction

• Home-exam walk through

The social/the individual

• Marx, Weber, Durkheim – macro socioloy

• Class, state, capitalism – collectives

• Sociology of everyday life – ordinary life, ordinary social members

Erving Goffman

• Self interaction with others – empirical, descriptive

• Sociology of the self: what is required of individuals for them to be social actors in interaction with one another.

• Little theoretical discussion

• Episodic writing

The Self

• Is not an identity, but something performed

• ’Impression management ´in social gatherings

• Concern with maintaining a front

• Social life as a theatre

Front stage and backstage

• Backstage: places or occasions in which the individual is not on display.

• Front stage – managed performances

Examples

A virtual front stage?(or backstage)

Arts of impression management

• Social networks

• ’two-faced’ self

Civil death

• Mental institutions• Concentration camps• Civilian, everyday self is constructed

Civil innatention

• Social life has structures that must be maintained by all participants

• How are they maintained.

• Virtual social-life – structures need to be created

Civil Inattention

• Mutual awareness of being in the presence of others

• We must let others know (communicate) that we are aware of their presence

• Possibility of being in public with others without anxiety

By according civil innattention, the individual implies that he has no reason to suspect the intentions of the others present and no reason to fear the others to be hostile to them, or wish to avoid them. […] This demonstrates that he has nothing to fear or avoid being seen or being seen seing, and that he is not ashamed of himself or of the place and company in which he finds himself. (Goffman, 1963b:84)

Face engagements

• Social interaction, any time, any place, presuposes and draws upon the existing known and taken for granted world in which all of us find ourselves to be.

The biography of the self

• We create our biographies, memories

• Virtual biography – no possibility of rewriting our biography

• New ways of sharing your biography

Talk as interaction

• Discovery of talk as an enquiry object• Talk – expressive medium of everyday

existence• Academics must prove themselves by dealing

with serious weighty matters

Speaker identity

• Who is speaking? To whom? Different forms of talk.

Lionel (speech therapist) : - You still stammered on the ‘w’King George VI: - I had to throw in a few extra ones so they knew it was me

Talk as conversation

• Speaker and hearer• Hearer : who is listening and who is

addressed?• Addressed and unaddressed recipients• Participation frameworks (hearers),

production formats (speakers)• Conversation Analysis

Virtual talk

• Imediacy: process in which the medium is ‘erased’ from the experience as much as possible, in order to achieve a more ‘real’ experience.

• The self• Time/place• New rituals