It's On Time!: Mediated Identity and Interaction

So, this weeks post (I know, It's on time, I'm scared too) is all about interactions and identity via the internet. Interactions which are 'lifted from space and time' (Group who presented this week).

Essentially interactions like this:

(See, I knew I'd find a use for it)

Disembodied interactions like the one above don't really occur in real time and they don't exist in and sort of reality space (that sounds far too sci-fi for this blog). The biggest question, for me, which arises out of the screen shot though is; would these pepole react this way in person. I believe, for the most part, people feel more free to express themselves in this way, particularly with people they don't know and aren't likely to meet, during online interactions. In this way there is a disjuncture between their online identities and their real life identites.

Now I would like to talk a little about how social media has changedt he ways in which pepole can interact with each other. The idea came to me during the tute this morning. A few days ago a band I listen to made a fairly major announcement through Facebook.


In thinking about this I considered how that announcement would have been made years ago, before social media. Most likely it would have been done through some sort of interview, whether it be on a radio show or in a magazine. But with social media not only can speech reach a wide audience immediately, it allows others to weigh in and comment freely. In my opinion it is this which is the best aspect of online communication, the freedom and wide reach which it makes possible.

Finally, I'd like to say something briefly about the issue of online communication being either speech or text. In my opinion online speech is kind of like some hideous conglomeration of the two. Typically when communicating online we type in a similar fashion to the ways we speak, but in doing so we are putting that speech into text. This transfer can cause issues. As you may have noticed I tend to be fairly sarcastic, sarcasm tends to be hard to get across without tone and expression, things which are, obviously, missing from online communications. To deal with these issues we have other 'online specific phrases' (thats what I'm calling them), things such as "lol" and smileys. If after every joke you literally poked your tongue out...pepole would think your insane, but using smileys it's normal, and helps to show a lack of seriousness in the comment.

 

Thanks for reading

 

Words Constituting Identity

So, no funny post name...and I'm just gonna say it, I have no idea what this topic is all about. Damn uni net being down throwing everything out of wack and meaning we didn't get a decent tutorial on it. But I'll do my best.

So, just from that first paragraph, from the words I've used you get some sort of idea as to who I am as a person, a brief glimpse of me personality. So, how did I come off? Honest? Humerous? Is it obvious I'm not taking things too seriously? (As you might also get from my other blog posts).

This works on a larger scale as well though, the specific words and phrases that a particular social or cultural group use grow to identify that group. These types of jargon then become linked with that group to outsiders as well as those inside the group, so we are able to assign people to their social or cultural groups sight unseen by the types of words they use. Perhaps the best example of this is the stereotypical Surfey culture formed in the 80's, where words like radical, gnarly etc. were almost solely exclusive to that group.

In an essay on language use in courts Gibson (2004) briefly put forward an idea that through our language use we can create a variety of different identities for ourselves. From this point I started thinking, I speak differently around friends, family, at univeristy... and under each of those things I have a different identity, friend, son/brother, student. This then, helps to show just how strong the effect of words can be on identity.

Thanks for reading Katie...and any other insane pepole who for some reason felt the need to read this blog post


P.S.
I have views on my blog from Russia, and that makes me happy.

Gibson, K (2004). "English Only Court Cases Involving the U.S. Workplace: the Myths of Language Use and the Homogenization of Bilingual Workers' Identities". Second Language Studies, 22(2), pp. 1-60.

I'm Late, I'm Late, I'm Late, For a Very Important Blog Post: Social and Moral Codes

Soooo, having done the tutorial presentation on this topic, you wouldn't have thought I'd be so late with the actual post, but I guess the whole not doing the actual presentation till later threw me off a bit (lame excuse, but I'm sticking to it).

Social and Moral Codes are everywhere, literally, they exist all around us, whether we know about them or not. Every social interaction and situation in our lives is governed by these codes, whether it be in a tutorial class, having lunch with a friend or living on a tour bus (see, tutorial presentation reference right there...I'll post the link at the bottom).

The example from the reading, the convict code, might be hard to relate to for some of us, but that doesn't mean that it's not a valid one. This is because the codes we follow are all dependant upon the context they exist in, without that context most codes lose their meaning, so while the things in the convict code may seem socially and morally unacceptable or wrong to us they make sense for those that live under the code. On that note though, I'd like you to think about high school, particularly the later years of high school...
Thinking about it? No?...Just do it already!
Okay good, now then, how did you and the other people in your year act when someone had done something wrong?
Odds are most of you pled ignorance when a teacher asked about it...
So then, how is that any different to some of the aspects of the convict code? (rhetorical question for the win)

And now back to our featurue presentation, Social and Moral Codes:
As I was saying, these codes are Ceremonial in nature (I'm pretty sure I'm remebering the right term there), remove them from their given context, and they lose their meaning. Furthering my ability to link codes with past stuff, they are also, fairly obviously, Habitus, as I pointed out earlier in this incredibly in depth, mind blowing blog post, we act within them whether we know about it or not. Perhaps the strongest link for Social and Moral Codes though is with Rules of Conduct, the Codes that are around us are what shape our obligations and expectations. Breaking these obligations and expectation (I'm already sick of writing both of those, are you over reading them both?), meaning that you are going against the Code that your working within, can have damaging consequences for your Face (see a few blog posts ago for more on Face). To use an example from my part of the presentation, if you were to break the bathing rule of the Code of the Road, it's pretty easy to see how your reputation could be damaged.

And that's it from me

Presentation link:
http://prezi.com/bfh1v4kvnnuf/social-and-moral-order-in-talk/

Post Numero...I'm over it: Ethnometh.

Yep, Ethnomethodology...what to say about Ethnomethodology...where to start. Incase you haven't guessed yet I'm a little vague on this weeks topic. But I'm gonna figure it out as I write this. On a not completely unrelated note I can't seem to find this weeks reading...that may be a problem, but I'll make do for now. Neverind, we're all working now.
Actually, this may work as an example of some of this stuff. Right now as I began this, I attempted to log in to sols and then elearning to access this weeks reading, much to my annoyance the elearning site, and then a moment later when trying again the sols one as well, wouldn't load, but every other site I have open at the moment is working perfectly. This prompted me to try and come up with reasons why this could be happening, obviously it wasn't something on my end (atleast that's my thinking) so then it must have been something on the universities end that was causing only those pages to mess up, I came to this conclusion because it was the only thing which made sense in the situation.
We as people do this with everything. Because we have certain pieces of knowledge into how things are supposed to work (Our Recipe Knowledge for those of you who are gonna want to see the actual terms used), when they don't we are forced to come up with explanations in order to make sense of whats going on around us no matter how insane or random those things seem. Examples of this phenomena going on can be seen in Garfinkel's Breaching Experiments. The aim of these experiments is to break the rules of social interactions in order to see what they are. For example, in today's tute we took part in a Breaching Experiment, in which the group I was assigned to aimed to simply annoy the hell out of the other's in the class. While some of the student's did actually notice, and get annoyed and frustrated, by what we were doing, none of them actually did anything about it. This is fairly typical of us as humans, particularly amongst people who we aren't completely familiar with. In order to avoid a possibly uncomfortable situation, and possibly as a face saving excersise (yeah see, linking this shit together), we ignore these things. Another possibility though is that we simply, as mentioned above, try to make sense out of these situations, "surely they aren't deliberately being annoying, there must be some other reason".
And now, just because I like the word, a quick definition of Haecceity, I intend to use more than the word thisness to do this. Haecceity dates back to medieval philosophy were it was first used by John Duns Scotus (I may or may not be spelling that wrong), despite its impossible-to-say-without-prior-knowledge-ness the idea behind Haecceity is actual rather simple, it relates to the specific aspects of a thing which make it that thing, so somethings Haecceity is it's 'thisness', what makes it it.

And that ladies and gents, is the end of my possibly nonsensical post about Ethnomethodology...
But you'll try and make sense of it


Edit: I commented on a post this week, dunno how relevant it is, I think I mostly ended up going on about Alice in Wonderland...but i quoted Einstein!
http://bea091.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/wk7-garfinkel-alice-in-wonderland.html?showComment=1346919120144

Anchor vs Reporter

Was considering this for my presentation, but it's too short, so I figure I'll just share it here instead

Well...That escalated quickly

Not planning on using this for my Data Discussion thing or anything, though I probably could've if I'd gotten the entire thing. Just FIgured I'd throw it up there as an example of interactions on line...and how amusing they can be

Believe it or not things actually escalated further than that, and they both ended up swearing and threatening and all that fun stuff that happens on comment boards all over the web. It ended with one saying they weren't going to comment any more because it was a waste of their time and the other person was stupid, or something similarly intilligent (this was after about 30 minutes, if not longer, I can't remember, of going back and forth by the way), to which the other replied saying they were bi-polar and I dunno, some other thing they self diagnosed themselves with, because apparantly everyone who gets into fights online is mentally ill in one way or another...or if you believe their self-diagnosis, six ways or another...

Just remember kiddies, arguing online is like...well you all know the joke so I won't finish it because it makes me feel bad how amusing I find it

Post Numero Dos: Dramaturgy

So, last weeks tute, and the week before thats lecture was on Dramaturgy (Yeah, I'm writing this one a bit late, but oh well). Essentially dramaturgy is the study of social interactions through the gaze of theatre (I'm not 100% sure gaze is the right word to use, but it's my blog and I'll do what I want). Taking this view all of human interactions are viewed as a 'Grand Play'. Perhaps the best way to sum up the theory is with the classic quote from Shakespears comedy As You Like It:

"All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" (Shakespeare, 1623)

It seems possible to me, if not likely, that this quote may have been the core influence in the production of the theory of Dramaturgy, mostly because it was the first thing I thought of when I heard about the theory.

In line with this theory Goffman proposed three stages in which this 'Grand Play' takes place:

• Front Stage: Which Consists of the Perfermors as well as an Audience.
  Interactions on the front stage are goeverned by social rules which are approrpriate to the 'scene'. Furthermore the performers maintain a 'Personal Front'. This 'Personal Front' consists of the performers appearance as well as the way they carry themselves in front of different audiences. An example of this front stage would be when you are in the presence of new people, or people who you may not be completely comfortable with
• Back Stage: Which Consists of only the Performers
  The lack of audience in backstage scenes allows performers to step out of 'character'. Furthermore the backstage is less controlled by social rules, generally creating a more relaxed scene. An example of the Back stage would be simply hanging out with family or close friends.
• Off Stage: Which consists of...no one...except yourself...I guess you count
  The off stage is purely interpersonal, consisting of self talk and all that fun stuff...I guess there could be other voices though...I mean, you never know...Good point, if your talking to a range of voices in your head, does it still count as Off Stage...or does it become more like Back Stage?

In my head, I link the whole stages thing and the personal front stuff with the idea of 'masks', I can't recall where the idea of masks comes from, but it relates to the need for us as humans to be able to control which aspects of our personality different peope are allowed to witness in order to maintain our lives. These masks are quite often seen in the differences in how we behave at work, with friends and with family.

Shakespeare   (1623).  As You Like It. Act 2, Scene 7