An Introduction to Doing Modernnity: A Crtical Interactionist Appproach to Social Psychology by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Doing Modernity: A Critical Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology

Monday, 11:23 AM. State Street, Santa Barbara.

A man in a weathered black hoodie shuffles past Saks Fifth Avenue, his cart rattling under the weight of salvaged cans, plastic, and clothes. A woman in athleisure and earbuds swerves slightly to avoid him. Their eyes never meet. A tourist couple approaching from the opposite side of the sidewalk glance briefly, then cast their gaze upward—toward the palms, the shopfronts, the theater marquee. He disappears into the flow of pedestrians without incident, absorbed into the city’s daily rhythm. No words are exchanged. But something profound has just occurred.

This is civil inattention. A micro-ritual of recognition through non-recognition, first described by Erving Goffman. It is the modern self’s most practiced performance. You acknowledge the presence of others by tactfully not engaging them. Eye contact is strategically avoided—not rudely, not coldly, but as a sign that no threat is posed, no encounter is warranted. Through these fleeting gestures—glances withheld, gazes redirected—urban subjects reproduce the very conditions of modern social life: anonymity, boundary, and mobility. No law was invoked, no identity card shown, no explicit claim to space asserted. And yet, modernity itself was made and remade in that silent choreography.

This, then, is what it means to speak of "doing modernity." The phrase does not signal a condition we inhabit, but a structure we collectively produce through interaction. Modernity, in this view, is not merely an epoch marked by industrialization, bureaucracy, or rationalization; it is a moral order sustained through everyday practices of attention, recognition, and detachment. The Critical Interactionist approach—drawing on Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks—sees these rituals not as incidental behaviors but as constitutive acts. As Anne Rawls observes, these thinkers share a vision of the social world as produced, not merely reflected, in interaction. Giddens, in his theory of structuration, captures this beautifully: social structures both constrain and are sustained by human agency. In the subtle ballet of civil inattention, the rules of modern city life are not just obeyed—they are accomplished.

To be a Critical Interactionist, then, is to train one’s gaze on the micro-moments where inequality, exclusion, and recognition are enacted—not in abstract, but in real time. It is to see the street corner, the sidewalk, the waiting room, the welfare office as sites of structure and strategy. My project—auto-ethnographic, grounded, recursive—is animated by this insight: that the world is built not only in institutions or ideologies, but in the flicker of a look, the shrug of a shoulder, the refusal to see. These are not small things. They are the scaffolding of modern life.

For much of the twentieth century, sociological social psychology fixated on minds: attitudes, beliefs, schemas, traits, and intentions. Behavior was explained by what lurked behind it—hidden variables stored in the skull. Theories borrowed from cognitive psychology and survey research imagined the self as a container of predispositions, motives, and perceptions. The social was background; the mind, the star. Identity was a possession, meaning a private map, and morality a matter of internalized norms. This was a psychology of abstractions and averages, of individuals divorced from the messy immediacy of interaction.

But a quiet revolution stirred at the margins. With Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and Harvey Sacks came a profound redirection: what if social psychology was not about minds at all, but about moments? Not deep motives but observable practices? As Goffman famously wrote in Interaction Ritual, “Not then, men and their moments. Rather, moments and their men.” Here, the situation itself—with its local rules, roles, and rhythms—takes center stage. Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis reveal that identity is not housed in the head but enacted through accountability; that morality is not internalized, but interactionally managed; and that meaning lives in sequences, not schemas. In this new sociology of interaction, the individual is not erased—but emerges as a competent member, forged by and through the unfolding structures of everyday life. From minds to moments: this is the shift that redefines the field.

With every action, we make the world. With every action, we potentially make the world better or worse. Our ordinary activities count. For it is through these everyday behaviors that the social world is ongoingly constituted as an orderly event.

In 2008, I created a blog entitled "Doing Modernity." That blog covered a wide range of interests, but was centrally concerned with how we "do modernity"—that is, I hoped to examine a few of the concrete practices social actors employ in everyday life to produce and reproduce our society. I began this blog to supplement a class in Social Psychology I regularly taught at Antioch University Santa Barbara, and to illustrate an auto-ethnographic approach to examining everyday life, particularly concrete instances of social activity.

This class forged a Critical Interactionist approach to studying social psychology in everyday social life. Theoretically, I drew upon critical social theories to examine power and domination in concrete moments of social life. I also drew upon ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, symbolic interactionism, cultural studies, urban sociology, and the sociology of Erving Goffman. Methodologically, I drew upon a wide range of qualitative research methodologies, including participant observation/ethnography, auto-ethnography, discourse analysis, and textual analysis.

I sought to promote studies of the everyday world as it happens. Initially, the blog only had materials related to this class. Over time it became an archive for Critical Interactionist thought. At some point, it became a place to share any of my publications.

The title "Doing Modernity" seeks to emphasize our human agency—our ability to act. While we can "reproduce" the structure of society by doing what we have previously done so many times before, there is no guarantee that we will. The possibility of change is inherent in every single act. People are always able to act differently than they do.

Think of it. Another world is possible. We are now more aware than ever before that we can, and perhaps must, construct a different way of social life for the future survival of our species and our planet. That we are conscious of other imaginal worlds, and conscious that our actions will create a different world, are particularly "modern" phenomena. We know that the world will change and that those changes will be the result of changes in our actions. In earlier times in human history, people thought of the world as just being "the way it is," and did not regard it as connected in any significant way to their personal behavior. The world was seen to exist "out there," constraining personal action, but not really created by it.