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...

Qualitative Sociology Review Volume II , Issue 3 – December 2006 Andrew Carlin St Columb’s College, Derry City, Northern Ireland “Rose’s Gloss”: Considerations of Natural Sociology and Ethnography in Practice Abstract This paper explores the nature and use of “Rose’s Gloss” for ethnographic research. Rose’s Gloss is a technique – credited to Edward Rose, late of the University of Colorado at Boulder – for eliciting information from members of society without imposing methodologically ironic categories onto members’ responses. This facilitates what Rose called “natural” (people’s own) rather than “professional” (stipulative) sociology, which is the distinctive feature of the “Ethno-Inquiries” approach to social research that he pioneered. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem provided unexpected opportunities to document the worded nature of social life. The pilgrimage demonstrates how Rose’s Gloss can be used as an ethnographic practice to pass as a competent participant in study sites...

Social Constructionism Darin Weinberg (appears in Bryan S. Turners's The New Blackwell Compassion to Social Theory Few terms in social theory ignite controversy like the term social constructionism.1 While embraced as a creed by scholars working throughout the human sciences, it is also the focus of some of the most passionate criticism one is likely to find in the academy. Some of this criticism is levied from outside the social sciences and is based largely on caricature and misunderstanding (cf. Gross and Levitt 1994; Sokal and Bricmont 1998). But much of it also comes from social scientists themselves, who fear that social constructionism threatens the very foundations of their craft (cf. Boudon 2004). I do not share this fear, and in this chapter seek to put it to rest. Indeed, I argue not only that it poses no threat to the social sciences but that a commitment to some form of social constructionism is an indispensable feat...