Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

Life-as-Hypertext By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. “If we still tell our lives as a narratives, we may nonetheless be coming today to experience them more as hypertexts”  (Jay Lemke) In “Newz from the ‘Hood” (1997),  a paper based on my study of ‘gang murder stories’ in the Los Angeles Times as told as a "postmodern" modern collage in multiple disjointed voices (this was the 1990s!), I compared media consumers to “channel surfers”—the often bored, detached, and distracted viewers reluctant to become cognitively engaged in any sustained narrative and often defiantly emotionally disconnected.  I argued that: “The ecstatic pleasures of the hand-held remote control derive from its power to momentarily relieve us from the tedious boredom and plain dull pain of the previous television show. Entertainment in the postmodern age is the endless shifting of commodity spectacles before eyes.  The flashing screen and collage and electronic signals crea...

Running-Together: Some Ethnomethodological Considerations Jacquelyn Allen Collinson Abstract There is a degree of irony in the fact that in activities as thoroughly embodied as sport and exercise, there is relatively little phenomenological and particularly ethnomethodological analysis of members’ subjective experiences of accomplishing these practical activities. This paper aims to address this lacuna in a modest way, by analysing one particular sporting activity, distance running, and more specifically, ‘running-together’ as a joint accomplishment. Based upon data generated from a collective autoethnographic research project on distance running, the paper seeks to combine the autoethnographic approach with the insights of phenomenology and specifically, ethnomethodology, in order to examine the production of running- together, and thereby to ‘mark’ this particular mundane activity. Introduction ...

Newz from the hood: The stephanie Kuhen murder  in the los angeles times (Editor's Note:  There were 805 gang murders in Los Angeles County in 1995. In spite of this fact, few of these tragic events became newsworthy. When Stephanie Kuhen, an angelic three-year old was killed in September of that year, over 40 articles on her death appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Supposedly, her family took a wrong turn down a deadend street after returning from a barbeque and was ambushed by gangsters. This paper seeks to understand why this story was newsworthy by examining the nature of "innocent victim" stories. It also provides a textual analysis of the story of Kuhen death, highlighting the inherent racism throughout. Finally, it questions whether the event as portrayed in the Times actually occurred. If you click on these photographs of the pages and zoom you should be able to read the text.  Sorry at this point this was the best I could do.  If you kno...