Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

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 check messages, look up information, post something on Facebo...

On Cellphones and Civility: The Emergence of “Uncivil Inattention” in Public Life The people around us in public places are increasingly physically present while being socially absent.  They are, in a sense, both simultaneously” there” and “not there”.  The popularization of cell phones, laptops, iPods (and the like) has drastically transformed the nature of the norms of acceptable behavior in public places.  While people might be sharing our immediate social space, they have often substantially removed themselves from the possibility of social interaction. I am apprehensive about ranting on too much about the “decline of civility” in modern public life, as I see a change in normative behavior.  Yet, I am fearful for what these changes might portend for the health of a robust public sphere and participatory democratic polity. Everywhere I go I find people tethered to electronic devices, which keep them connected to their known social worlds, but det...