Chapter 5
Social Interaction and Everyday Life
Study Outline
The Study of Daily Life in the Internet Age
- Microsociology is the study of individual and group interaction. Erving Goffman, who pioneered this field of research, argued that studying social interaction was important for three reasons. First, our social lives are based on personal interactions and we tend to engage in these interaction in routine ways. Studying them can tell us a lot about how our society is organized. In addition, people tend to innovate and improvise in their daily lives, breaking their routines in creative ways. Studying microsocial behavior can tell us a lot about agency and the creative ability of people to shape reality. Finally, micro-level interactions can tell us a lot about large social processes and institutions. These institutions, like class or gender hierarchies, are reliant upon daily, micro-level social processes.
Nonverbal Communication
- The exchange of information and meaning through facial expressions, gestures and movements of the body are forms of nonverbal communication. The context and content of nonverbal communication are generated by the combination of innate reflexes and culture. E-mail and other forms of electronic communication seriously limit the context of nonverbal communication. For instance, conversing through e-mail requires a lot more words than face-to-face conversation, and disputes are more likely to occur over e-mail than in person.
The World as a Stage
- Each of us uses impression management to prepare the presentation of our social roles. Roles are the socially defined expectations that a person in a given status (or social position) follows. Status is the prestige or social honor accorded to members of a particular group by society. People tend to want to avoid embarrassment, so they collaborate with others in daily activities to "save face."
- Unfocused interaction is the mutual awareness of individuals have of one another in large gatherings when not directly in conversation together. Focused interaction, which can be divided up into distinct encounters, or episodes of interaction, is when two or more individuals are directly attending to what the other or others are saying and doing.
- Social interaction can often be illuminatingly studied by applying the dramaturgical model—studying social interaction as if those involved were actors on a stage, having a set and props. As in the theater, in the various contexts of social life there tend to be clear distinctions between front regions (the stage itself) and back regions, where the actors prepare themselves for the performance and relax afterward.
Social Contexts and Shared Understandings
- The most inconsequential forms of daily talk presume complicated shared knowledge brought into play by those speaking. Ethnomethodology, the study of ordinary talk and conversation, was first coined by Harold Garfinkel. Ethnomethodology is the analysis of the ways in which we actively—although usually in a taken-for-granted way—make sense of what others mean by what they say and do.
Social Rules and Talk
- Much of our interaction is done through talk—casual verbal exchange—carried on in informal conversations with others. Conversation analysis examines all facets of a conversation for meaning. Studying talk can give powerful insights into class, gender, and racial structures. For instance, the rules of conversation can be deliberately subverted through interactional vandalism. Conversation analysts also study response cries, which are the seemingly involuntary exclamations individuals make when they are taken by surprise, expressing pleasure, or in pain. Conversation analysts also study personal space—the physical space individuals maintain between themselves and others. Norms around personal space depend on cultures and social roles.
Interaction in Time and Space
- All social interaction is situated in time and space. We can analyze how our daily lives are "zoned" in time and space by looking at how activities occur during definite durations and at the same time involve spatial movement.
- Modern societies are characterized largely by indirect impersonal transactions (such as making bank deposits), which lack any copresence. This leads to what has been called the compulsion of proximity, the tendency to want to meet in person whenever possible, perhaps because this makes it easier to gather information about how others think and feel, and to accomplish impression management.
Linking Microsociology and Macrosociology
- Nonverbal communication links gender to status and can be discerned as behaving differently in different cultures. Gardner linked the harassment of women by men in public spaces to the larger system of gender inequality, represented by male privilege in public spaces, women's physical vulnerability, and the omnipresent threat of rape. Racial (mis)understandings at the macro level also structure interaction between racial groups at the micro level. For instance, Anderson found that studying everyday life sheds light on how social order is created by the individual building blocks of micro-level interactions.