Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

  PRINT THIS PAGE Wayne Mellinger: Life as Web Surfing http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/083012_wayne_mellinger_life_as_web_surfing/ By Wayne Mellinger Modern forms of media consumption have come to dominate the social character of contemporary life If we still tell our lives as stories, we may nonetheless be coming today to experience them more as web surfing. Within the last 20 years, electronic devices of all kinds and new media of all kinds have colonized our lives and our brains. I want to explore how the “orientation” that infused channel-surfing and web-surfing with its character now seems to pervade more types of activities. Both web-surfing and channel-surfing are practices that media consumers employ to cross genre boundaries, content themes and types of information. Throughout our days, often with 24-hour connectivity, we are plugged in to our  iPads , smartphones, laptops and tablets, and often dip into them multiple times to ch...

Editors’ Choice Memorial Essay Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011): A Sociologist for the Ages Douglas W. Maynard University of Wisconsin Harold Garfinkel, the founder of Ethnomethodology, died at home on April 21, 2011 of congestive heart failure. A major sociologist of the twen- tieth century, his contribution to many fields will undoubtedly continue to be felt for years to come. In this essay, I will discuss the origins of the term ‘‘ethnomethodology,’’ briefly explore ethnomethodology’s rela- tionship with symbolic interactionism, provide a biographical overview of Garfinkel’s oeuvre, list some ways in which the work has had a massive influence, and end with a short discussion of Garfinkel’s legacy. Keywords: Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, sociological theory THE TERM ‘‘ETHNOMETHODOLOGY’’ By his own account, Garfinkel invented the term ‘‘ethnomethodology’’ (EM) just after he had been working collabo...

An Intellectual Remembrance of Harold Garfinkel: Imagining the Unimaginable, and the Concept of the “Surveyable Society” Douglas W. Maynard Human Studies A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences ISSN 0163-8548 Volume 35 Number 2 Hum Stud (2012) 35:209-221 DOI 10.1007/s10746-012-9226-0 132 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self- archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your work, please use the accepted author’s version for posting to your own website or your institution’s repository. You may further deposit the accepted author’s version on a funder’s repository at a funder’s request, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after publication. 132 Hum Stud (2012) 35:209–221 DOI 10.1007/s10746-012-9226-0 MEMORIAL An Inte...