Mediated environments: we must learn to write themselves into being
"In everyday interactions, the body serves as a critical site of identity performance. In conveying who we are to other people, we use our bodies to project information about ourselves.[32] This is done through movement, clothes, speech, and facial expressions. What we put forward is our best effort at what we want to say about who we are. Yet while we intend to convey one impression, our performance is not always interpreted as we might expect. Through learning to make sense of others’ responses to our behavior, we can assess how well we have conveyed what we intended. We can then alter our performance accordingly. This process of performance, interpretation, and adjustment is what Erving Goffman calls impression management,[33] and is briefly discussed in the introduction to this volume. Impression management is a part of a larger process where people seek to define a situation[34] through their behavior. People seek to define social situations by using contextual cues from the environment around them. Social norms emerge out of situational definitions, as people learn to read cues from the environment and the people present to understand what is appropriate behavior.
Learning how to manage impressions is a critical social skill that is honed through experience. Over time, we learn how to make meaning out of a situation, others’ reactions, and what we are projecting of ourselves. As children, we learn that actions on our part prompt reactions by adults; as we grow older, we learn to interpret these reactions and adjust our behavior. Diverse social environments help people develop these skills because they force individuals to reevaluate the signals they take for granted.
The process of learning to read social cues and react accordingly is core to being socialized into a society. While the process itself begins at home for young children, it is critical for young people to engage in broader social settings to develop these skills. Of course, how children are taught about situations and impression management varies greatly by culture,[35] but these processes are regularly seen as part of coming of age. While no one is ever a true master of impression management, the teenage years are ripe with opportunities to develop these skills.
In mediated environments, bodies are not immediately visible and the skills people need to interpret situations and manage impressions are different. As Jenny Sund´en argues, people must learn to write themselves into being.[36] Doing so makes visible how much we take the body for granted. While text, images, audio, and video all provide valuable means for developing a virtual presence, the act of articulation differs from how we convey meaningful information through our bodies. This process also makes explicit the self-reflexivity that Giddens argues is necessary for identity formation, but the choices individuals make in crafting a digital body highlight the self-monitoring that Foucault describes.[37]
In some sense, people have more control online-they are able to carefully choose what information to put forward, thereby eliminating visceral reactions that might have seeped out in everyday communication. At the same time, these digital bodies are fundamentally coarser, making it far easier to misinterpret what someone is expressing. Furthermore, as Amy Bruckman shows, key information about a person’s body is often present online, even when that person is trying to act deceptively; for example, people are relatively good at detecting when someone is a man even when they profess to be a woman online.[38] Yet because mediated environments reveal different signals, the mechanisms of deception differ.[39] "
(Danah Boyd 2008, p.128-129)
[32] Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[33] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956).
[34] Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: The Free Press, 1963).
[35] Jean Briggs, Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
[36] Jenny Sund´en, Material Virtualities (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003).
[37] See David Buckingham’s introduction to this volume for a greater discussion of this.
[38] Joshua Berman and Amy Bruckman, The Turing Game: Exploring Identity in an Online Environment, Convergence 7, no. 3 (2001): 83–102.
[39] Judith Donath, Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community, Communities in Cyberspace, eds. Marc Smith and Peter Kollock (London: Routledge, 1999).
1). Boyd, D. (2008). Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. D. Buckingham. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press: 119–142.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Changing our footing in talk
"the significance of production format cannot be delt with unless one faces up to the embedding function of much talk. For obviously, when we shift from saying something ourselves to reporting what someone else said, we are changing our footing. And so, too, when we shift from reporting our current feelings, the feelings of the 'addressing self,' to the feelings we once had but no longer espouse. (Indeed, a code switch sometimes functions as a mark of this shift)."
(Erving Goffman 1981, p.151)
Goffman, Erving. 1981 'Forms of Talk', Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell Publisher. 081221112X
Fig.1 Norman Rockwell "The Gossip" [cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post published 6 March 1948]
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Bystandering As A Footing Position
"consider that much of talk takes place in the visual and aural range of persons who are not ratified participants and whose access to the encounter, however minimal, is itself perceivable by the official participants. These adventitious participants are 'bystanders.' Their presence should be considered the rule, not the exception. In some circumstances they can temporarily follow the talk, or catch bits and pieces of it, all without much effort or intent, becoming, thus, overhearers. In other circumstances they may surreptitious exploit the accessibility they find they have, thus qualified as eavesdroppers, here not dissimilar to those who secretly listen in on conversations electronically. Ordinarily, however, we bystanders politely disavail ourselves of these latter opportunities, practicing the situational ethic which obliges us to warn those who are, that they are, unknowingly accessible, obliging us also to enact a show of disinterest, and by disattending and withdrawing ecologically to minimise our actual access to the talk. (Much of the etiquette of bystanders can be generated from the basic understanding that they should act as to maximally encourage the fiction that they aren?t present; in brief, that the assumptions of the conversational paradigm are being realised.) But polite, bystanders will still be able to glean some information; from example, the language spoken, 'who' (whether in categorical or biographical terms) is in an encounter with whom, which of the participants is speaker and which are listeners, what the general mood of the conversational circle is, and so forth."
(Erving Goffman 1981)
Goffman, Erving. 1981 'Forms of Talk', Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell Publisher. 081221112X
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Tactical Behaviour Vs Strategic Planning
"I call a 'strategy' the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an 'environment.' A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, 'clienteles,' 'targets,' or 'objects' of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.I call a 'tactic,' on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a 'proper' (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other.[20] A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The 'proper' is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time-it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing.' Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into 'opportunities.' The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. This is achieved in the propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogeneous elements (thus, in the supermarket, the housewife confronts heterogeneous and mobile data-what she has in the refrigerator, the tastes, appetites, and moods of her guests, the best buys and their possible combinations with what she already has on hand at home, etc.); the intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner in which the opportunity is 'seized'."
(Michel de Certeau)
[9] By Erving Goffman, see especially Interaction Rituals (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976); The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1973); Frame Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). By Pierre Bourdieu, see Esquisse d'une th?orie de la pratique. Pr?c?d? de trois ?tudes d'ethnologie kabyle (Geneve: Droz, 1972); "Les Strat?gies matri-moniales," Annales: economies, societies, civilisations 27 (1972), 1105-1127; "Le Langage autoris?," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. 5-6 (November 1975), 184-190; "Le Sens pratique," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. I (February 1976), 43-86. By Marcel Mauss, see especially "Techniques du corps," in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1950). By Marcel D?tientie and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les Ruses de l'intelligence. La metis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1974). By Jeremy Boissevain, Friends o 'Friendv. Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). By Edward O. Laumann, Bonds of Pluralism. The Form and Substance of Urban Social Networks (New York: John Wiley, 1973).
[10] Joshua A. Fishman, The Sociology of Language (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury, 1972). See also the essays in Studies in Social Interaction, ed. David Sudnow (New York: The Free Press, 1972); William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973); etc.
[20] The works of P. Bourdieu and those of M. D?tienne and J.-P. Vernant make possible the notion of "tactic" more precise, but the socio-linguistic investigations of H. Garfinkel, H. Sacks, et al. also contribute to this clarification. See notes 9 and 10.
[Michel de Certeau makes a distinction between 'top-down' strategic planning and structure that impose a 'proper' place and behaviour upon subjects of power - for example, the classical score is the proper score, everything mapped out (or at least, that's what the powers that be think - the conservatorium that I was trained in though that all the musical content of a work was IN and ONLY IN the static permanent score, fuck the temporary sounds and performances - logos).Whereas, tactical behaviours comes from the 'bottom-up', guerrilla style, in which there is no proper place for things, no condensation of activities into discursive or commercial commodities. Shit happens is kind of what it means. Improvisational, tactical ways of operating that aren't solely bounded by strategies from above. This is the political potential of Jazz, freeing up listeners and performers to be with the immediate moments of sound and play.What is tactical planning and tactical structure then? It must be a minimal way in which to encourage guerrilla behaviour without denying it. Blogging and Picture communities on the net might be examples, but think then of how corporates try to take over this spontaneous communal grass-roots activity and commodify it (Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum tried to market themselves through a corporate blog about how fictional 'Fred' loved it some much and found many tactical uses for it beyond chewing it).When Jazz improv becomes codified and taught/assimilated into conservatorium schools, then its loses its purely tactical nature and becomes strategic. Which perhaps is always giong to be the case if we agree with Guy Debord that the strategic Spectacle will always come to incorporate the tactical interventionist Fringe.]
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
