mass-communication-theory

social cues
In frame analysis,
information in the
environment that
signals a shift or
change of action
Chapter 11 Media and Culture Theories: Meaning-Making in the Social World 331
millions of dollars using what appear to most people to be outrageous email
scams? Like Alfred Schutz, Goffman was convinced that daily life is much more
complicated than it appears (Ytreberg, 2002) and we have ways of dealing with
these complications.
Although Goffman agreed with social constructionist arguments concerning
typification schemes, he found them too simple. He argued that we constantly and
often radically change the way we define or typify situations, actions, and other
people as we move through time and space. We are able to adjust the schemes to
fit specific circumstances and other individuals. We don’t have only one typification
scheme—we have whole sets of schemes ranging along various dimensions.
But we usually won’t have any conscious awareness of when we are making these
changes. In other words, our experience of the world can be constantly shifting,
sometimes in major ways, yet we may not notice these shifts. We can step from
one realm of experience to another without recognizing that a boundary has been
crossed. We don’t operate with a limited or fixed set of expectations about social
roles, objects, or situations. Thus, we don’t have a simple stock of institutionally
controlled knowledge as most social constructionists contend. Rather, we have
enormous flexibility in creating and using expectations. Goffman argued that our
experience of reality is bound up with our ability to move effortlessly through daily
life making sense of situations and the people in them.
Let’s consider the example of airport security checks again. We may be traveling
with a group of friends. It’s a nice day and we’ve been having fun. We find it
hard to take the security check seriously or it slips our mind that we need to be
careful. We forget some of the things we normally do when we’re taking a security
check seriously. But then the alarm goes off. Suddenly things get serious. We have
to make fast readjustments but we do it fairly easily. Our smile vanishes. We stand
up straight and pay close attention to the security agents. It’s likely that we blame
ourselves for making stupid mistakes; we forgot to take off our shoes or to remove
our keys from our pockets. According to Goffman, we’ve gone from framing the
situation playfully to imposing a serious frame.
If the symbolic interactionists are right and our meaning-making ability is so
great, so innovative, and so flexible, why is there any pattern or order to daily existence?
How are we able to coordinate our actions with others and experience
daily existence as having order and meaning—how can we routinely adjust ourselves
to life within the boundaries set by social institutions, as social constructionists
believe we do? Life, Goffman argued, operates much like a staged dramatic
performance. We step from one social realm or sphere to another in much the
same way that actors move between scenes. Scenes shift, and as they shift we are
able to radically alter how we make sense of them. As the scenes shift, we locate
and apply new sets of expectations. Sometimes, as in the example of the problematic
security check, we don’t make the proper shift and then we’re forced to do so.
But just how do we and the people around us know when to make shifts?
How do we know when one scene is ending and another beginning and act jointly
so a shift can be made so seamlessly that we don’t even notice that it has happened?
According to Goffman, we are always monitoring the social environment
for social cues that signal when we are to make a change, and we ourselves are often
quite skilled at using these cues. For example, when we view a play in a theater, we
Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.