Week 9 - Conversation analysis

I remember as a teenager wanting a new cellphone every time a new and more advanced one became available. My first phone was a flip phone, and at the time I thought I was the coolest kid on the block. I even decorated it with shiny rhinestones. After losing this phone, I got a slide phone with a touchscreen AND a camera built right in to the phone! Then came the smartphones. I can now check my email, update my status on Facebook, and instant message with my friends half way across the globe. Technology has advanced and in turn our modes of communication and the discourse that we use have changed with these advances. This new technology provided a new means of communication and conversation. Computer mediated communication is something that my generation has grown up with. First it was the email, a disembedded interaction lifted out of space and time. Now we have smartphones which have allowed computer mediated communication to dominate a large percentile of social interactions by re-embedding disembedded interactions. This means that interactions such as email, that were once only considered as online conversations, can now be considered to have time and space because most people have smartphones that allow them to reply instantly from anywhere. This being said, email is still considered to be an asynchronic interaction in that it is not live in the same way that a chatroom or instant message is.

There have been many trends in the past decade in computer mediated communication that allow people to interact both live simultaneously, asynchronically, anonymously or with an identity. There is an increasinging amount of information that people put on social mediated websites such as Facebook and Twitter about their identities or anonymity. Without even knowing someone, a lot can be discovered about a person through their comments, photos, and posts. The risks associated with attaching ones name to their online identity are very vast and exceed most peoples expectations. "When using the internet technology socially online for friendship or relationships there is an element of risk. People tend to lie and present false identities online, more so than face-to-face interaction, and deception can be hard to detect when it is computer mediated. A degree of disinhibition online that is associated with diminished feedback appears to contribute to deceptive or harmful behaviors" (Goh et al., 2011). Because people's names are not necessarily attributed to their true identities, they are more inclined to diminish others or act in extremist ways when online.
 
The question is, what sort of computer mediated interaction will be the next big craze? Surely Facebook is only the beginning of communication in virtual space and time.      

Ttyl :)


Reference

Goh, L. Y. Q., Phillips, J.G., and Blaszcynski, A. 2011. "Computer-mediated communication and risk-taking behavior." Computers in Human Behavior. vol. 27, no. 5: pp. 1794-1799.

Data

I am doing my data discussion presentation tomorrow. Here's a link to the data I have chosen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AAViRKF2mA

If I stutter in the morning I wont feel so bad, because apparently Miss Universe does it too.

Week 8 - The Code

"To call someone a fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that's like saying that you're nothing" (Pascoe, 2005, pp. 335). In another sociology course I am taking, Men and Masculinities, we recently studied the intersections of masculinities and sexuality. This involved the study of the slang word 'fag' and it's pragmatics and sociolinguistics. To call someone a fag is defined as an offensive way of calling someone a male homosexual. Although, in a study done by Pascoe among high school students, this was not the typical meaning that they associated with the term 'fag'. As noted by Pascoe, "'fag' is not necessarily a static identity attached to a particular (homosexual) boy. Any boy can temporarily become a fag in a given social space or interation" (pp. 330). In the study, both heterosexual and homosexual boys were called 'fags' based on their failure of competence and masculinity, not because of their sexual preferences. The literal meaning of the term 'fag' was not used between schoolmates but instead there was social understanding of what the words unwritten meaning was.

Pascoe's study of high school students relates to the topics of SOC250 in that we study forms of communication and conversational structure. The discourse of many words, including 'fag', are capable of having many meanings in different social contexts. For example, many people may call their heterosexual friends 'fags' when they do something embarrassing and in this context the term is taken much more lightheartedly than if a homosexual was called a 'fag'. The genre of one's speech, or hedging, may also influence the way these words are interpreted and how offensive they are meant to be.         



References

Pascoe, C. J. (2005). 'Dude, you're a fag': Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse. Sexualities, 8(3):  329-346.

Week 7 - Ethnomethodology

A baby boy picks up a utensil. He calls it a fork, when it is actually a spoon. Is he wrong? How do we know that it is a spoon? What defines a spoon? The answer lies in the haecceity, or thisness of the spoon: it's characteristics and properties that define it. What gives things these characteristics and definitions? The only reason that we, as a society, know the difference between a spoon and a fork is because we were taught the characteristics of each as a young child and these notions have been passed down through generations and are reflected in dictionaries, etc. As defined by Garfinkel, the documentary method of interpretation is the method used to make sense of such social means such as why a spoon is understood to be a spoon among societies. This method helps us recognize patterns in social situations and rationalize things for ourselves while interpreting our surroundings. The forks and spoons that the baby plays with are reinforcing that the baby is in a kitchen. The patterns of cutlery, chairs, tables, food, etc., are all justification that the setting is a kitchen because of their relevancy to the kitchen environment.

In a review of Garfinkel's idea of ethnomethodology, John Heritage states that it is "utterly devoid of significant content [and is] preoccupied with narrow methodological concerns" (1986, pp 346). John also claimed that ethnomethodology was "lacking any methodology whatsoever, especially procedures of deciding validity and replicating accounts of the social world" (pp 347). I also found Grafinkel's terms within ethnomethodology very ambiguous and hard to understand. The definitions all seem very intertwined in that they all describe ways to rationalize and understand the social world in means that make sense to oneself.


Reference
Heritage, J 1986, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 346-349, viewed 13 September 2012.