Morality and Media
I think the frame analysis article and this article overlap in a variety of ways - I particularly like the quote on pg. 6 "Experience, both mediated and non-meditated is culturally specific" and they go on to so say that "moral order ....should be commensurate with the scope of global interdependence"
I think the article seems to make the claim that technology etc. have "Extended the range of communication" but I wonder really? to what extent? In most of the world, people scarcely have Internet still, even though they might have a phone- even still are the more "global" portrayals of what is occurring in the world being accessed? I'm not so sure, I think alot of the world lives through folk wisdom and gossip, regardless of our perspective...just a thought..
Monday, February 23, 2009
Looking Out My Window and Thinking about Goffman
On page 8 of Frame Analysis (1974), Erving Goffman writes:
“I assume that when individuals attend to any current situation, they face the question: “What is going on here?” Whether asked explicitly, as in times of confusion and doubt, or tacitly, during occasions of usual certitude, the question is put and the answer to it is presumed by the way the individuals then proceed to get on with the affairs at hand.”
For me, Goffman’s ideas are most helpful and accessible when I come back to the idea that his fundamental purpose as a social scientist was to (hopefully) help other social scientists to be able to address the question of what is going on in different social settings. Right away, he kicks things off by throwing out two terms that ground his investigation of social life:
"The term “strip” will be used to refer to any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity, including here sequences of happenings, real or fictive, as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them. …And of course much use will be made of Bateson’s use of the term “frame” I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them." (p. 10).
Later, he puts these concepts in the context of an overall analytic model:
In sum, then, we tend to perceive events in terms of primary frameworks, and the type of frameworks we employ provides a way of describing the event to which it is applied. (p. 24)
So. I am writing this post a Monday morning. In the still chilly, pre-spring sunlight, with the sky a very pale blue, I look out of my window onto the quad at 10:52am, and I see people—presumably, mostly students—hurrying across several zigzagging lines of sidewalk, some crossing the lawn that separates these walks, and almost all of them walk with a sense of urgency, many of them walking in groups of twos, threes and fours. Clearly, I can apply Goffman’s question to this scene, from my vantage point. In a while, I will view a similar scene, but I will be among increasing numbers of people traveling across campus.
With this in mind, the other points that Goffman eloquently brings out for me are the ideas that:
(1) The frames provided by different kinds of media (he uses theater, movies, radio) shape how we perceive social action, and
(2) Media (or modes of communication) can take on different kinds of significance within social action of different types (he gives examples of music as a background while working, music as a bridge between scenes in a radio drama, and music as a portent to dramatic action).
Accordingly, in order to explore these concepts as they are evidenced in everyday life, Goffman writes that “a corpus of transcription practices must be involved for transforming a strip of offstage, real activity into a strip of staged being,” (p. 138) and in developing these transcription practices and conventions, he says that:
Behind the need for these conventions is something worth examining in more detail, something that might be called the “multiple channel effect.” When an individual is an immediate witness to an actual scene, events tend to present themselves through multiple channels, the focus of the participant shifting from moment to moment from one channel to another…The staging of someone’s situation as an immediate participant therefore requires some replication of this multiplicity, yet very often replication cannot be fully managed….In addition to the “multiple channel effect,” another element in the organization of experience can be nicely seen in the radio frame: syntactically different functions are accorded to phenomenally similar events. The question is that of the realm status of an event; and some sort of frame-analytical perspective is required in order for this question to be put.
Goffman wrote Frame Analysis within a time period in which more fluid interactionist perspectives brought a significant challenge to social science that emphasized structure and form. However, the ability of his ideas (particularly in a time when the means for sophisticated multi-channel analyses were limited) to help us to continue to keep in mind the “laminated” character of all social life, continues to shape my thinking, even within the postmodern, post-structuralist times that we currently inhabit.
“I assume that when individuals attend to any current situation, they face the question: “What is going on here?” Whether asked explicitly, as in times of confusion and doubt, or tacitly, during occasions of usual certitude, the question is put and the answer to it is presumed by the way the individuals then proceed to get on with the affairs at hand.”
For me, Goffman’s ideas are most helpful and accessible when I come back to the idea that his fundamental purpose as a social scientist was to (hopefully) help other social scientists to be able to address the question of what is going on in different social settings. Right away, he kicks things off by throwing out two terms that ground his investigation of social life:
"The term “strip” will be used to refer to any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity, including here sequences of happenings, real or fictive, as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them. …And of course much use will be made of Bateson’s use of the term “frame” I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them." (p. 10).
Later, he puts these concepts in the context of an overall analytic model:
In sum, then, we tend to perceive events in terms of primary frameworks, and the type of frameworks we employ provides a way of describing the event to which it is applied. (p. 24)
So. I am writing this post a Monday morning. In the still chilly, pre-spring sunlight, with the sky a very pale blue, I look out of my window onto the quad at 10:52am, and I see people—presumably, mostly students—hurrying across several zigzagging lines of sidewalk, some crossing the lawn that separates these walks, and almost all of them walk with a sense of urgency, many of them walking in groups of twos, threes and fours. Clearly, I can apply Goffman’s question to this scene, from my vantage point. In a while, I will view a similar scene, but I will be among increasing numbers of people traveling across campus.
With this in mind, the other points that Goffman eloquently brings out for me are the ideas that:
(1) The frames provided by different kinds of media (he uses theater, movies, radio) shape how we perceive social action, and
(2) Media (or modes of communication) can take on different kinds of significance within social action of different types (he gives examples of music as a background while working, music as a bridge between scenes in a radio drama, and music as a portent to dramatic action).
Accordingly, in order to explore these concepts as they are evidenced in everyday life, Goffman writes that “a corpus of transcription practices must be involved for transforming a strip of offstage, real activity into a strip of staged being,” (p. 138) and in developing these transcription practices and conventions, he says that:
Behind the need for these conventions is something worth examining in more detail, something that might be called the “multiple channel effect.” When an individual is an immediate witness to an actual scene, events tend to present themselves through multiple channels, the focus of the participant shifting from moment to moment from one channel to another…The staging of someone’s situation as an immediate participant therefore requires some replication of this multiplicity, yet very often replication cannot be fully managed….In addition to the “multiple channel effect,” another element in the organization of experience can be nicely seen in the radio frame: syntactically different functions are accorded to phenomenally similar events. The question is that of the realm status of an event; and some sort of frame-analytical perspective is required in order for this question to be put.
Goffman wrote Frame Analysis within a time period in which more fluid interactionist perspectives brought a significant challenge to social science that emphasized structure and form. However, the ability of his ideas (particularly in a time when the means for sophisticated multi-channel analyses were limited) to help us to continue to keep in mind the “laminated” character of all social life, continues to shape my thinking, even within the postmodern, post-structuralist times that we currently inhabit.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Silverstone- Media Ethics
I found Silverstone to be very dense reading. There was discussion and defining of many important ideas such as other versus self, thinking versus judgment, author versus audience, mediation, appearance, mediapolis, boundaries, globalization, proper distance and narrative. Some of the questions that came up during the reading where:
Do other people’s views of us change us, and if so, how?
Does the Internet distance us or bring us closer together?
Do we or don’t we live without reference to the media?
Has technology homogenized culture? Is this a good or a bad thing?
Can globalization be conceived without media?
Is the Internet making the world more global and liveable?
Who controls the online media, the author or the audience?
How is media “a key component of the cultural infrastructure?
How does online space influence relative moralism and ethics?
Why can’t human beings live without the play of differentness and sameness?
Has the media lost its role as the guardians of public good?
Is media the key to rhetoric’s formation and acceptance?
How does mediated communication offer and define our participation with others?
What are the differences between just viewing the mediapolis (pumping the key pad, clicking the mouse) and participating in it?
What resources has globalized media provided for understanding and responding to differences?
How does media, particularly online media, polarize global culture?
In what ways does media change the possibilities for collective action?
Is it as Sliverstone asserts, that it is the responsibility of public media to provide resources to make effective judgments?
Is proper distance the same for all?
What is the status of the mediapolis in global communications and in mediation?
What are the implications in that the creators are also the audience?
Do all of the Web 2.0 tools make the Internet a plural medium?
Monday, February 16, 2009
La Perruque…
Authoring Selves and Language and Agency
The concepts of authoring oneself or Holoquist’s notion of “dialogism” based on Bakhtin’s work are relevant for our discussions of identity. Essentially, Holland et al. set out the parameters of authoring oneself based on his or her context (thus using the language in all its avenues of the culture and historical situatedness, or heteroglossia) in dialogue, whether as an inner voice (influenced by external voices and vocabulary) or a spoken dialogue. Consequently, identity is always developing, based on these dialogic relationships. Ahearn takes the issue of language further by illustrating how language affects agency (agency defined as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” p. 130), even looking at the grammar constructions of expressing self as the primary agent acting upon something/one else in different languages.
Holland et al. take great efforts to compare and contrast Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s ideas. One avenue I found interesting was the elucidation of Vygotsky’s “pull yourself up by your bootstrap through language” as criticized for lacking in addressing the power and privilege often embedded in language. Ahearn also addressed a similar concept with “symbolic violence” as coined by Bourdieu while connecting it to Bakhtin’s idea that there are “no neutral words” (p. 111). I like the quote from Bakhtin used by Ahearn (and possibly in the Holland et al. text) that uses the imagery of “taste” to illustrate how words are always nuanced with flavor or association beyond a sterile meaning.
In thinking of the self authoring the world based on what is already in existence reminds me a little of the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Is a person’s identity completely bound to the language and social setting where one finds oneself? De Certeau’s explanation of “la perruque” begs the question of how much self-authoring can one do under the constraints of those in power of language, economics, and society? And as Ahearn questioned, “how [can] social reproduction become[s] social transformation” (p. 131)?
Agency and the absence of it
Just a thought..after reading the ahearn article, I really am questioning if there
is such a thing as agency ..I think some very important points were made about how agency is
situated and inextrivable from history, power relations, language and so on. I think of revolutionary figures in history and, to me, it makes more sense (concerning their agency) in that they went agianst frameworks of meaning (understanding agency in a different way) in that they realized adversity but that it was an opportunity to overcome ideologies/situations etc. that were socially constructed realities for certain people.
The "autonomous model" of literacy practices was pretty nuts...I guess when you want to rationalize things you find a way..
is such a thing as agency ..I think some very important points were made about how agency is
situated and inextrivable from history, power relations, language and so on. I think of revolutionary figures in history and, to me, it makes more sense (concerning their agency) in that they went agianst frameworks of meaning (understanding agency in a different way) in that they realized adversity but that it was an opportunity to overcome ideologies/situations etc. that were socially constructed realities for certain people.
The "autonomous model" of literacy practices was pretty nuts...I guess when you want to rationalize things you find a way..
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Language in a Social Perspective
I thought it was interesting the first part of this section how Firth and Malinowski are differentiated based on their interpretation of linguistics – the context of culture versus Firth who studied context of situation (and the generalized patterns of actual behavior) and how behavior potential and meaning potential are derived from them. First, it makes me think of a phrase we talked about in Qual I “bless your heart” and how it can mean different things in different contexts –or what can be referred to as “delicacy” on pg .49, so if language is so incredibly situated, how can we interpret meaning as researchers? This was a question I struggled with, because every situation we observe, comes with it inherent meanings, (gestures, winks etc. ) that people privy to that situation understand—I guess what I am asking is, can we ever understand the “social foundations” of behavioral meanings? (Pg 60 end of second paragraph proposes we can?).
This article also discusses the “grammatical system of adult language” (pg.61) as 1) ideational, 2) interpersonal and 3) textual. These refer to a persons (generally) experience, social interplay and within context and creating text. I thought that was a good start to understanding how language functions and is organized –but I wonder if it’s more complex than these idea suggest. On pg. 64, I agree with the statement that “some concept does underlie the approach of the school towards its responsibility for the pupils success in his mother tongue.”
I think I am beginning and *trying* to make sense of this field called “sociolinguistics” and its relation to the classroom, you see in the classroom that I have experienced, I had students with different dialects, different ways of speaking the normalized version of English and a subject that I was supposed to teach that was a whole new set of vocabulary. So I definitely understand the blending in of different cultures and “life worlds” but to a point where everyone understands what you are talking about is difficult. For example, the DNA example that they gave in the text—too explain the functioning of the protein complexes that modify DNA and the functioning of each to students is incredibly time consuming –I guess I am thinking of the practicality of teaching linguistics from a basic level, and I see it, in the current educational context, an *almost* insurmountable endeavor…
I thought it was interesting the first part of this section how Firth and Malinowski are differentiated based on their interpretation of linguistics – the context of culture versus Firth who studied context of situation (and the generalized patterns of actual behavior) and how behavior potential and meaning potential are derived from them. First, it makes me think of a phrase we talked about in Qual I “bless your heart” and how it can mean different things in different contexts –or what can be referred to as “delicacy” on pg .49, so if language is so incredibly situated, how can we interpret meaning as researchers? This was a question I struggled with, because every situation we observe, comes with it inherent meanings, (gestures, winks etc. ) that people privy to that situation understand—I guess what I am asking is, can we ever understand the “social foundations” of behavioral meanings? (Pg 60 end of second paragraph proposes we can?).
This article also discusses the “grammatical system of adult language” (pg.61) as 1) ideational, 2) interpersonal and 3) textual. These refer to a persons (generally) experience, social interplay and within context and creating text. I thought that was a good start to understanding how language functions and is organized –but I wonder if it’s more complex than these idea suggest. On pg. 64, I agree with the statement that “some concept does underlie the approach of the school towards its responsibility for the pupils success in his mother tongue.”
I think I am beginning and *trying* to make sense of this field called “sociolinguistics” and its relation to the classroom, you see in the classroom that I have experienced, I had students with different dialects, different ways of speaking the normalized version of English and a subject that I was supposed to teach that was a whole new set of vocabulary. So I definitely understand the blending in of different cultures and “life worlds” but to a point where everyone understands what you are talking about is difficult. For example, the DNA example that they gave in the text—too explain the functioning of the protein complexes that modify DNA and the functioning of each to students is incredibly time consuming –I guess I am thinking of the practicality of teaching linguistics from a basic level, and I see it, in the current educational context, an *almost* insurmountable endeavor…
Sunday, February 1, 2009
frame analysis and schemata
This was an interesting essay- I think it was an important introduction to understanding human intention, but can they completely explain this in terms of primary frameworks? I guess thats what I am grappling with here..I do agree there is a certain order and predicatablity of human behavior but, I guess are they overarching and can we depend on them to determine/predict (accurately maybe?) human behavior?
I am going to conduct my first observation of a PTA meeting next week for my qual class and this essay does help me to see that there are certain actions that are "natural", "social" and "causal" phenomena..but I guess it might be difficult to understand/determine in that short span of time which is which..especially when they might have underlying meanings I might not be aware of..
Great essay, cant wait to discuss in class..
I am going to conduct my first observation of a PTA meeting next week for my qual class and this essay does help me to see that there are certain actions that are "natural", "social" and "causal" phenomena..but I guess it might be difficult to understand/determine in that short span of time which is which..especially when they might have underlying meanings I might not be aware of..
Great essay, cant wait to discuss in class..
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