Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

My use of the phrase "doing modernity" comes from my work on "civil inattention".  Goffman famously studies encounters between strangers in public places and observed the micro-rituals of eye contact so involved. Originally published on a server called Friendster, the original entry using the phrase is now gone.   Encountering Strangers in Public Places: Goffman and Civil Inattention By Wayne Mellinger Instructor, Antioch University To live in the city is to live in the presence of strangers. For those of us living in cities, passing strangers on busy streets is unremarkable. We rush to our next appointment, preoccupied with our own thoughts, navigating through the crowded sidewalks. On “auto pilot,” we don't even think about our many brief encounters with unknown others in public spaces. There is a norm of anonymity which governs behavior in public between strangers. Normally strangers quickly glance at each other and then look away. Through this ritual, which ...

  Ownership, Copyright, & Disclaimer Doing Modernity: Using Critical Interactionism to Study Everyday Life  is a non-periodic journal and archive of critical interactionist social psychology, updated as needed, published and edited by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. All text materials, unless otherwise indicated, are officially copyrighted and registered with the United States Government (c) 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 by the publisher. Unattributed pages are editorial in nature and are authored by the editor, as can be seen from the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. All rights are reserved, but fair and good faith use with attribution may be made of all contents for  any  non-commercial educational, scholarly, and personal purposes, including reposting, with links to the original page, on the internet. It is not necessary to obtain copyright release for such uses, but Doing M...

  Harvey Molotch Ten Tips for Writing Something 1.     Put it off until guilt sets in. I write this small essay completely voluntarily but I nonetheless put off doing so. I have found guilt my master angst and with sufficient time it results in a deliverable. For me, there is no substitute for guilt. Ask for short deadlines to minimize the time spent in apprehension. 2.     Lose yourself. Quite often, despite all the odds against it, I lose myself in writing. The best is when I lose my whole life in the writing, waking up with it in the morning and dozing on it as I go off to sleep. It is my consciousness friend. 3.     Assume you know what you are talking about. Contrary to other feelings, almost all of them inner, I am not foolish. 4.     Also be under the illusion you have something to say that has not been said before. Each of us has a unique biography and sees the world in a distinctive way. A supp...

 DOING MODERNITY: THE BLOG 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 ongoing 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 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 t...

 PUBLICATIONS  Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. (1992) "Postcards from the Edge of the Colorline: Images of African Americans in Popular Culture, 1893-1917." Symbolic interaction  (1992) "Talk-as-Work: The Case of Paramedic Calls for Emergency Field Orders" in Current Research in Occupations and Professions Vol. 7 )  (1992) "Accomplishing Fact in Police "Dispatch Packages": An Analysis of the Situated Construction of an Organizational Record." Perspectives on Social Problems Vol. 4 )  (1992) "Representing Blackness in the White Imagination: Images of "Happy Darkies" in Popular Culture, 1893-1917. Visual sociology  (1994) "Toward a Critical Analysis of Tourism Representations" Annals of Tourism Research  (1994) "Negotiated Orders: The Negotiation of Directives in Paramedic-Nurse Interactions." Symbolic interaction  (1995) "The Anatomy of an Obituary: 'Rock Hudson Dies at 59 After Fighting AIDS'" Pe...