Understanding Social Interaction: A Micro-Sociological Perspective
Social Interaction
Social interaction is the process by which we act and react to those around us. Many aspects of our behavior reveal complex and important aspects of social interaction. Social interaction can involve the participation of other countries or cultures.
Study of Everyday Life
Study of everyday life: Not inattention to ignore the other person. Each person acknowledges the other’s presence, but avoids any gesture that might be considered too bold. (We do this unconsciously)
Three Reasons for the Importance of Studying Everyday Life:
- Structured daily routines confirm what we do. Our lives are organized around the repetition of patterns.
- The study of everyday life reveals how human beings act creatively to shape reality. Reality is not fixed and static; it is created through human interactions.
- The study of social interaction in everyday life influences broader social systems. All large-scale social systems depend on the patterns of social interaction in which we participate daily.
Microsociology and Macrosociology
- Microsociology: The study of everyday behavior in situations of face-to-face interaction.
- Macrosociology: The study of large groups, institutions, and social systems. Includes analysis of the processes of change over time.
Both microsociology and macrosociology are related and complement each other.
Nonverbal Communication
- Nonverbal communication: The exchange of information and meaning through facial expressions, gestures, and body movements.
The face, gestures, and emotion are basic modes of emotional expression. Words are used to supplement and clarify meaning when nonverbal cues are not clear.
In interactions with others, we care about protecting our self-esteem (saving face).
Touch is a kind of protective instrument, ensuring that each one’s weaknesses are not deliberately exposed publicly.
Social Norms and Speech
- Social norms and speech: The study of speech and ordinary conversation has been called ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel). It is the study of the ways we actively interpret what others want to express through what they say or do. Everyday language is quite complex and depends on the existence of a certain complicity between those who talk. If they break the rules of conversation, people are altered and feel insecure.
Garfinkel’s Experiment
- Garfinkel’s experiments exposed the expectations of substance with which we organize ordinary conversations.
- The stability and significance of our everyday social life depends on the fact that we share implicit cultural assumptions about what is being said and why.
- Deliberate misinterpretations can be used for parody and jokes.
Interactional Vandalism
Interactional vandalism occurs when participants in conversations do not follow the expected norms, disrupting the flow of interaction.
Participants in nearly all conversations are attuned to cues that allow the conversation to flow easily.
Talkers are cooperating in the opening and closing of interactions and in taking turns talking. Conversations in which one of the participants does not cooperate could lead to tensions.
Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis: A methodology that examines all aspects of a conversation in search of their meanings.
Interaction of Face, Body, and Speech
Encounters: Targeted interactions, usually within unfocused interaction contexts (established with others in the same scene).
Unfocused interaction: The awareness that individuals have of the presence of other people in large crowds, even if they do not engage directly in conversation.
Focused interaction: Occurs when individuals attend directly to what others say or do.
The Dramaturgical Model
Social interaction can be studied using the dramaturgical model, i.e., analyzing social interaction as if it involved actors on a stage. In different contexts of social life, clear distinctions exist between front regions (the setting) and back regions, where actors prepare for their performance and relax afterward.
Personal Space
Personal space describes the distance that individuals keep between themselves and others during social interaction. The idea of personal space varies from culture to culture.
Time and Space
All social interaction is localized in time and space. Our daily life is “zoned” in these coordinates, paying attention both to how activities take place during specific periods and, at the same time, involve spatial movements.
Compulsion of Proximity
Contemporary societies are characterized by the existence of indirect and impersonal transactions that are not performed in the presence of another. This leads to the compulsion of proximity: the tendency to want to have face-to-face meetings whenever possible. These situations provide much richer information than indirect forms of communication about what others think and feel and about their sincerity.