Erving Goffman, Cellphones, Social Cohesion

Andy Orum most recent post, What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity on O’Reilly Radar, has brought back graduate course work memories of reading the works of our dear 73rd President of the American Sociological Association.

Goffman is most famous for his work on presentation of one’s identity in American culture. He studied micro-personal interpersonal interactions and argued that people’s actions could be seen as a type of performance, making active choices to display one’s self to an audience (friends, co-workers and etc).

Oram find’s Goffman’s work

” rather distasteful…I don’t see my entire life as a performance and everyone around me as an audience. That seems to be just what Goffman wants me to do. (He calls this attitude his “dramaturgical perspective.”)”

I had the similar thoughts when I first read Goffman. But Oram redeems Goffman’s work by saying that he does provide some useful ways for thinking online internet identity. Read Oram’s blog post - he makes great connections to Yang’s book on the internet in China, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

I think that from an ethnographer’s point of view, the issue with Goffman is that his project was not to describe the world from an individual’s point of view, but rather to describe the social interaction that was taking place from his (Goffman’s) point of view. This means that fundamentally, his frameworks and theories will look from different from say Harold Garfinkel - an ethnomethodologist, who is concerned about understanding the world from the subject’s perspective. Goffman primarily relied on observation as his fieldwork method - that in itself should reveal his goals.

I wonder what would’ve happened if Goffman didn’t use the word “performance” to describe micro-interaction because that insinuates that we are all identity-making peons on a stage unengaged with our “real selves” (as if there was a real non-performing self), but rather just called it “gaming.” Games can take on a range of qualities from being collaborative to individualistic, from being playful to serious, and from being zero-sum to non-competitive. The stakes are always different depending on the game. Decisions are always being made. Perhaps “gaming” would’ve been a less condescending way to describe interpersonal interaction.

This is where Randall Collins comes in - another sociologist who is a Goffman’s fan - who takes Goffman’s work on interaction rituals and publishes a book that reframes GOffmans’ theory, Interaction Ritual Chains. What I like about Collin’s work is that it doesn’t make a judgement on the interaction - so a swinging SMS club to a bible study reading group can both be put on the same analytical plane - both are evidence of interactions that are attempting to increase social bonds.

Goffman’s and Collin’s work heavily informs Rich Ling’s work on the social uses of cellphones. His latest book was published in 2008. New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion. His central argument is that cellphones increase social cohesion. I like how Ling draws on Goffman’s and Collin’s work for his analysis. Ling’s methods ranged from interviews to participant observation.

One of the luxuries of Ling’s studies is that he is working in countries with exceptional cellphone coverage, stable governments, and responsive cellphone companies. While we are hearing reports of increased adoption of cellphone usage outside of Europe and the US  - I think we should be careful to make the jump to say that all around the world people are now becoming more connected with cellphones without any consideration of political and economic situations.

One thing that I am observing in my field site in rural Mexico is that while youth are now the first owners of cellphones in their village, they are no longer using it or relying on it after their first year of ownership because they’ve become frustrated with the poor coverage and expensive costs. Rather, youth have switched over to IM’ing as their primary technology tool for maintaining and/or increasing their social connections.

This just goes to speak that mobiles are not where ALL the connections are at - and that it’s important to consider a variety of ICT tools when examining social uses of technology.