Weekly Research (6): All the World's a Stage.

Week 6 has arrived and thus a new reading is to be read and new topic to be talked about. This week's reading covers the idea of social life, life as a game or drama as described by Goffman using his dramaturlogical metaphor. In 285 words (probably a disarray of 1000), I will endeavor to elaborate.

Goffman, a symbolic interactionist, decided to represent his understanding of social life using the dramaturlogical metaphor. Now, Dramaturgy as a theory is simply the idea that all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely actors. Person's act to convince others of a certain concept of self and in doing that they must perform and we learn how to play our assigned roles from others. Thus it can be said that the self isn't so much a stable, coherent entity as it is something that is defined and redefined by interactions with others.

Front Stage: what the 'audience' sees, so, how you present yourself either intentionally or unintentionally, ie: body language, appearance* and manner**.
Back Stage: what the audience doesn't see, where the performer can be out of character without affecting the performance.


*Appearance: refers to stimuli that works at a superficial level (and where first impressions start and end, as it's said it takes 30 seconds to figure someone out and that is rarely overridden in the minds of others), what is immediately observed about a person, telling one of their status and/or state.

**Manner: refers to stimuli that indicates what role the 'performer' will take in an oncoming social situation, how one carries themselves, primarily nonverbal cues (expressions, gestures, body language). ie: Aggression will signal to others to expect the social situation be directed by the aggressor, just as a meek 'performer' would signal to others that s/he is able to be lead.

At the end of the day, you'll find that most performances will incorporate the values of the society that they are in, which is why you might choose to hide certain aspects of yourself that will taint your performance as a functioning entity in society.

It also becomes difficult to define where the backstage and front stage actually is. Think of work, you would imagine that front stage is the shop front (see, even front is part of the title) and that back stage would be out back somewhere with your colleagues, but is that really back stage? You might have to put on a certain performance with your colleagues that you normally wouldn't (ie: you hate swearing, but you work with a bunch of truckies and they'll think you're a sissy if you don't cuss). So where is the back stage, then? I argue that it's when you're on your on, I argue still that back stage might be when you click 'anonymous' and write what you actually think on the internet. So, when you think about it, our back stage self must be kind of a prat.

References:
Goffman, Erving. 1971. "Performances." Pp. 28-82 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Weekly Research, Me, Myself and I-really-don't-want-to-do-this

As you're all probably aware, this week's reading is "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor" by Goffman. This week, in 285 words exactly, I will be telling you about the reading and what I've learned thus far. I would draw on the lecture material, but the lecture hasn't happened yet and I don't have a time machine (much to my eternal shame). These will happen once a week, ending on October 18th and making up 2000 words over 7 weeks.

References (because this is a public blog and lots of people have access to this, apparently):
Goffman, Erving. 1967. “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor.” Pp. 47-96 in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New York: Pantheon Books.

Presentation

It's late. I hate you all. I can't get this to work. I'm waiting for it to upload, let's see what it does.

Symbolic Interactionism Definitely Finished (without video)

Week 4 Presentation (Spoilers!)

In the infamous words of River Song, and though it pains me to make reference to her existence (because I am not a fan), spoilers!

Weekly Research (3): Symbolic Interactionism

Summary:

In essence, the theory suggests that the world is socially constructed and that each individual manages and perceives the world differently based on the meaning they have imposed/ascribed to certain events, objects and behaviours. As such the way that people react to these things are not the things themselves but to the meanings that they have been ascribed.

"Symbolic interactionism presents a commonsensical approach to analyzing how

two parties interpret each other’s actions.” (Baghdadi, L. 2009)

The core themes of Symbolic Interactionism are:

• Humans act toward things based on internalised meanings
• These meanings eventuate from socialisation
• These meanings are handled, modified and interpreted

Some criticisms:

• The theory has been criticised for neglecting the macro level interpretation, or the ‘bigger picture’, with too much emphasis put on micro interactions and its importance.
• Gives too much credence to higher institutions and their influence on the human psyche and thus interactions between them.

This post will be constantly expanded upon (beneath the cut), comment at your leisure.

An Introduction

Alright, I've never used this before, so let's see what this does. It has a HTML option, that's helpful I suppose, and it saves drafts sporadically, so again, helpful.

Let's see what a new paragraph looks like, bold, italic, underline, cross-through, highlight, link. I can also insert an image, a video, and a