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...
Posts
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...
Life As Websurfing
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...
Whitehead and Lerner: "When Are Persons 'White'?
When are persons ‘white’?: on some practical asymmetries of racial reference in talk-in-interaction1 KEVIN A. WHITEHEAD AND GENE H. LERNER UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA, USA Discourse & Society Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) www.sagepublications.com Vol 20(5): 613–641 10.1177/0957926509106413 A B S T R A C T This report contributes to the study of racial discourse by examining some of the practical asymmetries that obtain between different categories of racial membership as they are actually employed in talk-in- interaction. In particular, we identify three interactional environments in which the ordinarily ‘invisible’ racial category ‘white’ is employed overtly, and we describe the mechanisms through which this can occur. These mechanisms include: (1) ‘white’ surfacing ‘just in time’ as an account for action; (2) the occurrence of referential ambiguities w...