The invisible technologies of goffman's sociology: From the merry-go-round to the Internet

Technology and Culture

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 409-424

  Pinch, Trevor ^a  

^a Cornell University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77952908736     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: 10973729     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0456     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford, 2006).
2. See for example Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);
3. Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1995);
4. Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, Mass., 2002);
5. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the History and Sociology of Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1987);
6. W. E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society (Cambridge,Mass., 1992).
7. Ronald R. Kline and Trevor Pinch, "Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," Technology and Culture 37 (October 1996): 763-795
8. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch offer a wider range of users, including nonusers; see Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds.,How UsersMatter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology (Cambridge,Mass., 2003). Ronald Kline's monograph on the introduction of technology into rural America says much more about the routine use of technology which led to changes in everyday life.
9. Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, 2000).
10. On the history of some of these systems, see Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: The Evolution of Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio, 1996);
11. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1933 (Baltimore, 1983)
12. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983);
13. and Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
14. There have been recent calls by sociologists of science and technology to take infrastructure more seriously, most notably Susan Leigh Star, "The Ethnography of Infrastructure," American Behavioral Scientist 43 (1999): 377-391.
15. For a detailed examination of infrastructure and the problem of how to deal with non-humans, see Trevor Pinch, "On Making Infrastructure Visible: Or Putting the Non-Humans to Rights," Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 77-89.
16. For an attempt to apply Goffman to science, see Steven Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Palo Alto, Calif., 2000). For a recent extension of Goffman to economic sociology,
17. see Alex Preda, "Brief Encounters: Calculation and the Interaction Order of Anonymous Electronic Markets," Accounting, Organizations, and Society 34, no.5 (2009): 675-693
18. See for instance Paul Drew and AnthonyWootton, eds., Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order (Boston, 1988)
19. Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (London, 1991);
20. and Thomas Scheff, Goffman Unbound: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences (New York, 2006).
21. For a recent essay on Goffman by a philosopher of science who tries to bring together Goffman with Foucault, see Ian Hacking, "BetweenMichel Foucault and Erving Goffman: Between Discourse in the Abstract and Face-to-Face Interaction," Economy and Society 33 (2004): 277-302.
22. Nikki Sannicolas, "Erving Goffman, Dramaturgy, and On-Line Relationships," Cybersociology no.1 (1997), available online at http://www.cybersociology.com/files/1- 2-sannicolas.html (accessed 11 February 2010).
23. Hugh Miller, "The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet," paper presented at Embodied Knowledge and Virtual Space Conference, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, 1995;
24. and Charles Cheung, "A Home on the Web: Presentations of Self on Personal Homepages," in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, ed. David Gauntlett (London and New York, 2000), 43-51.
25. Allison Cavanagh, "Behavior in Public: Ethics in Online Ethnography," Cybersociology no.6 (1999), available online at http://www.cybersociology.com/files/6-2-ethicsin onlineethnog.html (accessed 9 March 2010),
26. and Drew R. A. Ross, "Backstage with the Knowledge Boys and Girls: Goffman and Distributed Agency in an Organic Online Community," Organization Studies 26, no.3 (2007): 307-325
27. Rich Ling, New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (Cambridge,Mass., 2008).
28. I began to examine Goffman for his use of technology as part of a wider critique I have been making of sociology in general for ignoring materiality and technology in particular. See Trevor Pinch, "Technology and Social Institutions: Living in a Material World," Theory and Society 37 (2008): 461-483,
29. and Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg, eds., Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies (Cambridge,Mass., 2008).
30. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis, 1961).
31. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis, 1961)., Ibid., 96.
32. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis, 1961)., Ibid., 108.
33. This argument is developed in Pinch, "Technology and Social Institutions."
34. Goffman, Encounters, 97.
35. The notion of an activity system with a mechanical basis possibly shows the resonance of cybernetics with Goffman's thinking at the time. He refers to the pattern of roles in a situated activity system as part of "a concrete self-compensating system"
36. and notes that, "[a]s with any face-to-face interaction, there is much chance for communication and its feedback through a wide variety of signs, for the damping and surging of response, and for the emergence of homeostatic-like controls" (ibid., 97).
37. Goffman, Encounters (n. 13 above), 117-118
38. Ibid., 134, Goffman, Encounters, 117-118.
39. Ibid., 124, Goffman, Encounters, 117-118.
40. Ibid., Goffman, Encounters, 117-118.
41. The use of humor at different stages of operations has also been observed by Pearl Katz in her anthropology of surgery; see Katz, "Ritual in the Operating Room," Ethnology 20 (1981): 247-257
42. Goffman, Encounters, 116.
43. Because of the need to maintain sterility, this "setting up" will often be hande off to nurses.
44. For science studies-orientated ethnographies of surgical practices, see Stefan Hirschauer, "The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery," Social Studies of Science 21, no.2 (1991): 279-319,
45. and Rachel Prentice, "Drilling Surgeons: The Social Lessons of Embodied Surgical Learning," Social Studies of Science 32 (2007): 534-553
46. For a general argument as to why cognitive plans concerning the operation of technologies are better understood as situated actions, see Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Cambridge, 1987).
47. Windows of time (e.g., the amount of time, bounded by upper and lower limits, for performing a particular procedure) and numbers of reiterations of a search routine (say, looking for a particular organ) can, however, guide a surgeon through some aspects of the technical work.
48. see Trevor Pinch, Harry Collins, and Larry Carbone, "Inside Knowledge: Second Order Measures of Skill," Sociological Review 44 (1996): 163-186 (Pubitemid 126057546)
49. Surgery is replete with uncertainties-no two bodies are exactly alike (even the exact location of organs varies from individual to individual)
50. no two bodies will respond identically to interventions; no two surgeons work at exactly the same pace. Procedures are fine-tuned to the state of health of the patient and depend for their implementation on the skills, knowledge, and experience of the team.
51. Materiality and technology are, of course, not synonymous. Some technologies which I have defined elsewhere as "social technologies" (see Trevor Pinch,Malcolm Ashmore, and Michael Mulkay, "Technology, Testing, Text: Clinical Budgeting in the U.K. National Health Service," in Bijker and Law [n. 2 above], 265-89), may have few material elements. For a definition of materiality, by which I mainly mean human-made things, objects, and materials.
52. see Pinch and Swedberg (n. 12 above).
53. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, [1959], 1982).
54. Ibid., 119, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1982.
55. Ibid., 120, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1982
56. The architecture of technology is something to which feminist analysts of technology have paid close attention. See for instance Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park, Pa., 1991).
57. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 109.
58. Goffman was writing in the 1950s and 1960s, when car repair was something which many men believed themselves capable of carrying out, or at least understanding (unlike today).
59. Goffman, The Presentation of Self (n. 31 above), 120-121
60. Latour'smain concern is withmorality embedded in automatic door-closers. See Bruno Latour, "Where Are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts," in Bijker and Law (n. 2 above), 225-258
61. See Pinch, "On Making Infrastructure Visible" (n. 4 above).
62. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York, 1963), 22.
63. Bodily presence is, however, increasingly relevant to sites such as Second Life, which use avatars, and sites where video interaction is permitted. Recently, Karin Knorr Cetina has also drawn attention to the need to extend Goffman to cover what she calls the "synthetic situation"-these are situations like those found in the trading rooms of banks, where bodily interaction and onscreen interaction and their attendant "response presences" occur together. See Knorr Cetina, "The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World," Symbolic Interaction 32 (2009): 61-87.
64. That online interaction is a form of "mediated presence" is suggested by Charles Goodwin, Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers (New York, 1981).
65. Another example is how the party-line telephone changed the meaning of what it was to "visit" someone. See Kline, Consumers in the Country (n. 3 above).
66. For a detailed and subtle analysis of the normative constraints on letter writing between scientists, see Michael Mulkay, The Word and theWorld: Explorations in the Form of Sociological Analysis (London, 1986).
67. There is a large literature on the analysis of email flaming from the perspective of the field of communications. See for instance A. K. Turnage, "Email Flaming Behaviors and Organizational Conflict," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no.1 (2007), available at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/turnage.html (accessed 14 January 2010).
68. See Don Miller and Dan Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (New York, 2000).
69. See H. T.Welser, M. A. Smith, E. Gleave, and D. Fisher, "Distilling Digital Traces: Computational Social Sciences Approaches to Studying the Internet," in Handbook of Online Research Methods, ed. N. Fielding, R. L. Lee, and G. Grant (London, 2008), 116-140
70. Erving Goffman, "The Neglected Situation," American Anthropologist 66, no.6 (1964): 133-136 (quote on 135).
71. Danah Boyd, "Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites," First Monday 11, no.12 (December 2006), available at http:// firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/ view/1418/1336 (accessed 14 January 2010).
72. She draws on J. L. Austin's speech act theory to show how the term"my friend" is used in speech to signal a certain kind of relationship and not necessarily the speaker's "actual feelings."
73. For an attempt to apply this sort of analysis to a Web 2.0 music site, see Trevor Pinch and Katherine Athansiades, "Performing Online Interaction: From Market Pitchers to Mashups and Moshes," unpublished paper, Cornell University, Department of S& TS, 2009.
74. See for example Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
75. Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Computers, Scientists, and Engineers during the Rise of American Cold War Research (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).
76. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
77. I am grateful to Fraņois Briatte for discussion of these issues and for his University of Edinburgh unpublished paper, "The Technological Structure of Current Online Networks" (2008).
78. See for instance Trevor Pinch, "Where is the Goffman of the Internet?" paper presented at the Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting in Montreal, Canada, 11 October 2007.