According to Goffman, micro-sociology is a phenomenon that focuses on people and interpersonal interactions. Micro-sociologists focus on face-to-face to interactions, accentuate meanings, and stress the importance of their everyday lived experiences. For example, I would consider our flashmob that we did today to be an example of sociology because we were physically in the Inner Circle having face-to-face contact with our peers. I can honestly say that I had fun while doing the experiment. I was a little embarrassed at first, but once others started to join in I started to feel more comfortable; I think this was because I had more people to relate to in that other people were joining in and I did not feel alone. I was completely blown away when some of the people in there with us decided to actually join in on the chaos. There was one person that I can remember explicitly because of how obvious he was making it seem that it was him cawing. He would hear someone from the class start cawing and then he would get up on his chair in the corner, perch like a bird, and caw like a pterodactyl. However, most of the other people that were around us either ignored what we were doing, started laughing, or were looking around to see where the noise was coming from. There was a table that was sitting behind and three other people, one of the guys at the table asked his female counterpart if he join in and she said no because what we were doing was annoying. However, I do not think she knew exactly who was doing it was because we were doing very discretely. It seemed as if some of the people ignored what we were doing because we were not threatening their immediate safety or causing harm to anybody. I can honestly say that in this experiment we went completely against the norms of what the atmosphere in the Inner Circle was supposed to be like. It is normally a place for someone to grab a bite to eat or chat with friends. All in all, I think our experiment was successful to some extent. That is in the fact that we disrupted the normal flow of what the Inner Circle is supposed to be like. However, it did need to be choreographed a little bit more because towards the end we were all supposed to caw at the same time to show our onlookers that we were a part of a larger group and not just randomly doing it to be annoying. Do you think that we would have made a larger impact on our onlookers if we were to have choreographed something at the end? Would it have been more successful if we had assigned a time slot to a group of people to caw at the same time?
Goffman also brings up the notion of phenomenology. This is a concept that accentuates the close observations of an individual’s experience and the ways in which basic categories are formed. This relates back to the idea of saying that something is socially constructed. For example, this could be the social construction of gender or the social construction of race and the list goes on. In my other Sociology class from last year, Professor Garcia had mentioned in class that we as a collective society need to categorize the things around us in order to make sense out of them. If it were not for these constructions, our world would be hectic because we would not know where to place someone and helps us to create meaning out of our social world. Do you think that society would be chaotic if we did not categorize people, or, would it make issues like racism and oppression diminish?
Goffman also brings up the notion of phenomenology. This is a concept that accentuates the close observations of an individual’s experience and the ways in which basic categories are formed. This relates back to the idea of saying that something is socially constructed. For example, this could be the social construction of gender or the social construction of race and the list goes on. In my other Sociology class from last year, Professor Garcia had mentioned in class that we as a collective society need to categorize the things around us in order to make sense out of them. If it were not for these constructions, our world would be hectic because we would not know where to place someone and helps us to create meaning out of our social world. Do you think that society would be chaotic if we did not categorize people, or, would it make issues like racism and oppression diminish?