Technology and Society Lecture

Lecture #12: Social Interaction

Vocabulary:

Social Interaction: the process by which people act and react in relation to others

Status: a social position that a person holds

Ascribed Status: is a social position a person receives at birth or takes on involuntarily later in life

Achieved status: a social position a person takes on voluntarily that reflects personal ability and effort

Master Status: is a status that has a special importance for social identity, often shaping a person’s entire life

Role: behavior expected of someone who holds a particular status

Role Conflict: as conflict among the roles connected to two or more statuses

Dramaturgy: the study of social interaction in terms of theatrical performance

Before we get started discussing the internet and social interaction; it is important to better understand what social interaction entails. So, for this lecture we are going to discuss social interaction and some of its theories.

Why is socialization and interaction important?

According to David Newman this is why it is important

• “[E]ach individual has a role in forming a society and influencing the course of its history.”

• “[W]e are constantly creating, maintaining, reaffirming, and transforming society.”

• We need to understand why and how we interact because it is so important in functioning in a global society
• To better understand ourselves
• And to better understand others

In this lecture we are going to dive into the theoretical perspectives on social interaction. What are we doing when we act and react in relations to others.

To begin with let’s look at the specific concepts of social interaction.

Status: This is the social position that one holds in a given social act. Notice how I said social act. Throughout the day we take on many different statues. For instance, right now has you read this you are taking the status of student, and I, a teacher. You may also take on the status of mother or father or bother, colleague, friend, lover, etc.

• Each status has a socially accepted role that most be performed in order for you to not be considered deviant in that position. (More on deviance in the next lecture). It is important to remember that a role is determined by society and its culture.

 There are multiple classifications of statues.

Ascribed status: is a social position a person receives at birth or takes on involuntarily later in life

• This could be a brother or some other kinfolk, your race

Achieved status: is a social position that a person takes on voluntarily that reflects personal ability and effort

• This could be a profession, or a lifestyle.

Master status: is a status that has a special importance for social identity, often shaping a person’s entire life.

• This is a social position that is the most dominant in a given social condition. For example, W.E.B Dubois argued that race was someone’s master status, because this social category created a role for an individual in any given social act, and it overshadowed every other social status.

• For many their careers would be their master status
• Or when you call your mother, your master status for that given social condition would be son or daughter, not professor or student.  

Now that the basic concepts have been given, let’s jump into some basic social interaction theory. We will start out with Goffman’s Dramaturgy.

Erving Goffman: work is indebted to Mead’s concepts. (Remember Mead from last week’s lecture)

        Tension between the   I, (the spontaneous self) and Me (social constraints within the self).  There exists a tension between our all-too-human selves on the one hand, and our socialized selves on the other. We are confronted with demands to do what is expected of us. In order to cope with this tension and to maintain a stable self-image, people perform for their social audiences.

Dramaturgy: or a view of social life as a series of dramatic performances akin to those performed in the theater. Basically we are on a stage. Every social act we do, are done as if we are performing them for the approval of our social context.

• Impression Management: The techniques actors use to maintain certain impressions in the face of problems they are likely to encounter and the methods they use to cope with these problems

Front Stage: Performance that generally functions in rather fixed and general ways to define the situation for those who observe the performance.

        Ex. Teacher and student, if we met in a classroom, that classroom would be our front stage. It is there that we perform our socially accepted roles reflected by our social status.