In the 80s there was this idea of "situational geography" but it seems
to have disappeared. Not sure why but it may have been a victom of
affiliation with the SSSM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_social_science_model
No Sense of Place JOSHUA MEYROWITZ - 1986
Preface
At one time physical presence was a prerequisite for first-hand
experience. to see and hear a President speak in his office. for
example. you had to be with him in his office. If you read his speech
in the newspaper or if you listened to an account given by someone
else present at the time. what you read or heard was at best second-
hand information. Live and mediated communications were once vastly
dissimilar this is no longer the case.
The evolution of media has decreased the significance of physical
presence in the experience of people and events. One can now be an
audience to a social performance without being physically present; one
can communicate "directly" with others without meeting in the same
place. As a result. the physical structures that once divided our
society into many distinct special settings for interaction have been
greatly reduced in social significance.
Even in the home media have reshaped the social significance of
individual rooms. (parent used to be able to send a child to his room
to isolate them from the world but not so with the TV there.)
Traditionally neighborhoods, buildings, and rooms have confined
people, not only physically, but emotionally and psychologically as
well. Now, physically bounded spaces are less significant as
information is able to flow through walls and rush across great
distances. As a result, where one is has less and less to do with what
knows and experiences. Electronic media have altered the significance
of time and space for social interaction.
As the confines of the prison, convent, the family home, the
neighborhood, the executive suite, the university campus, and the oval
office are all invaded through electronics, we must expect a
fundamental shift in our perceptions of our society, our authorities,
and ourselves.
The Situational Approach
.........people behave differently in different social "situations,"
depending on where one is and who one is with......behavior in a given
situation is also affected by where one is not, and who is not
there......situations are usually defied in relation to physical
settings: places, rooms, buildings, and so forth.
This book is about the roles we play and witness in our everyday lives
as they are increasingly played before new audiences and in new
arenas--"audiences" that are not physically present and "arenas" that
do not exist in time and space. It is about the way individuals and
groups have changed their behaviors to match these new situations.
......electronic media affect social behavior--not through the power
of their messages but by reorganizing the social settings in which
people interact and by weakening the once strong relationships between
physical place and social "place." The structure of social settings is
shown to be a key element in all group identifications, in transitions
from role to role, and in the ranks of social hierarchies......as we
loose our old "sense of place," we gain new notions of appropriate
social behavior and identity.......
Introduction
When I was a college student I the late 60's, I spent one three month
summer vacation in Europe. I had a wide range of new and exciting
experiences, and when I returned home, I began to share these with my
friends, family, and other people I knew. But I did not give everyone
I spoke to exactly the same account of my trip. My parents, for
example, heard about the safe and clean hotels in which I stayed and
about how the trip had made me less of a picky eater. In contrast, my
friends heard an account filled with danger, adventure, and a little
romance. My professors heard about the educational aspects of my trip:
visits to museums, cathedrals, historical sites, and observations of
cross-cultural differences in behavior. Each of my many "audiences"
heard a different account.
The stories of my trip varied not only in content, but also in style.
There were varying numbers of slang words, different grammatical
constructions, and different pronunciations. The pace of my delivery,
body posture, facial expressions, and hand gestures were different in
each situation. Each description had its own unique mix of earnestness
and flipancy. My frinds, for example, heard a speech filled with
"sloppy speech" and sarcasm.
Did i "lie: to any of these people? Not really. But I told them
different truths. I did what most of us do in everyday interactions: I
highlighted certain aspects of my personality and experience and
concealed others.
......Erving Goffman describes social life as a kind of multi-staged
drama in which we each perform different roles in different social
arenas.....the general picture of social interaction....is one of
people actively involved in many different dramas: people are
constantly changing costumes and roles. learning and adhering to a
complex matrix of conventional behavior, and working hard to maintain
their performance in each ongoing situation without undermining or
threatening their different behaviors in other situations.....
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~niman/media.html
Although people in the 60's were still "playing roles," they were not
playing the same roles that they had played in the past.......Things
that were once kept in the "backstage" area of life---such as sex and
drugs---were now being thrust into the public areas. People were
dressing and speaking in public as if they were at home. Many
journalists and scholars were abandoning the public ideal of
"objectivity" and were incorperating their personal experiences and
subjective feelings into their work. There were pressures to break
down old segregations of behaviors and audiences and to treat people
of different sxes, ages, races, and professions more alike.
Marshall mcLuhan, offered one possible source of explaination for
widespread changes in social behavior: changes in media of
communication. McLuhan wrote of widescale social change of
"retribalization," of the decline of traditional feelings of
nationalism, of the demand on the part of youth and minorities and
others for "in-depth" particioation, and of the distrust od distant
authority.
McLuhan attributed such changes to the widespread use of electronic
media........McLuhan describes media as extensions of the senses. and
he claims that the introduction of a new media to a culture,
therefore, changes the "sensory balance" of the people in that culture
and alters their consciousness.
......Goffman focuses only on the study of face-to-face interaction
and ignores the influence and effects of media on the variable he
decribes......McLuhan focuses on the effects of media and ignores the
structural aspects of face-to-face interaction......this study
explores a common denominator that links the study of face-to-face
interaction with the study of media: the structure of social
siuations.......
Consider, for example, what would have happened to the various acounts
of my European vacation if, on my return, my parents had decided to
throw a surprise homecoming party to which they invited all my
friends, relatives, proffessors, and neighbors. What would have
happened to my description of my trip if I could not have seperated my
audience? If my parents had ushered me to the center of a large circle
comprised of all these people and asked me to give a fifteen minute
talk on my trip, what could I have said?
Had I begun to give the "safe" description, that I would have given
privately to my parents, my friends would probably have been bored or
might even have started to giggle. Had I reported on my dangerous or
romantic adventures, my parents and the nieghbors might have felt
uncomfortable. Clearly, almost any account designed for a specific
audience would probably have offended or bored parts of the combined
audience. So I might have become tounge-tied or I might have been able
to adapt quikly to the combined situation and devise a new, sythesized
account that said a little bit to each segment of the audience, but
was bland enough to offend no one. But no matter what I said, the
situation would have been profoundly different from the interactions I
had with isolated audiences.
The point is that when different social situations are combined, once
appropriate behavior may become inappropriate. When a particular
private situation becomes more public by being merged into other
situations, behavior style must adapt and change. A combination of
situations changes the patterns of role behavior and alters the
texture of social reality. The combination of many different
audiences is a rare occurrence to face-to-face interaction, and even
when it occurs people can usually expect the speedy resumption of
private isolated interactions. Electronic media, however, have
rearranged many social forums so that most people now find themselves
in contact with others in new ways. And unlike the merged situations
in face-to-face interaction, the combined situations of electronic
media are relatively lasting and inescapable, and they therefore have
a much greater effect on social behavior. If, for example, I could
never get away from the mixed group at my return party, those things I
wanted to say only to my friends would have to to be spoken in the
presences of my parents and professors---or never said at all.
Further, if my parents and professors could never leave the mixed
audience of the party either, then my friend and I would likely begin
to see and hear aspects of their behavior---arguments, illnesses,
doubts, anxieties, sexual behaviors, and so forth---that they had once
kept hidden from us. The new merged patterns of behavior might lack
the extremes of the previously distinct encounters, but they would
also contain many behaviors that were once considered inappropriate in
"mixed company."
Similarly, I argue in this book that while there are still many
private forums, electronic media---especially television---have led to
the overlapping of many social spheres that were once distinct. In
contrast to face-to-face conversation and books, for example, radio
and television now make it more difficult for adults to communicate
"among themselves" because they are often "overheard" by children. In
a similar way, electronic media have heightened men's and women's
knowledge of each other's social performances for the opposite sex.
And the merger of different audiences and situations through radio and
television has made it difficult for national politicians to say very
specific things to particular constituencies or to behave differently
in different social situations. The theory developed here suggests
that such restructurings of social arenas ans social performances are
at least a partial reason for recent social trends, including the
blurring of conceptions of childhood and adulthood, the merging of
notions of masculinity and femininity, and the lowering of political
heroes to the level of average citizens.
Put very simply, the basic argument here is that many of the
traditional perceived differences amoung people of different
social :groups," different stages of socialization, and different
levels of authority were supported by the division of people into very
different experiential worlds. The seperation of people into different
situations (or different sets of situations) fostered different world
views, allowed for sharp distinctions between people's "onstage" and
"backstage" behaviors, and permitted people to play complementary---
rather than reciprical---roles. Such distinctions in situations were
supported by the diffusion of literacy and printed materials, which
tended to divide people into very different informational worlds based
on different levels of reading skill and on training and interest in
different "lituratures." These distinctions were also supported by the
isolation of different people in different places, which led to
different social identities based on the specific and limited
experiences available in given locations. By bringing many different
types of people to the same "place," electronic media have fostered a
blurring of many formerly distinct social roles. Electronic media
affect us, then, not primarily through their content, but by changing
the "situational geography" of social life.
Perhaps the best analogy for the process of change described in this
book is an architectual one. Imagine that many of the walls that
seperate rooms, offices, and houses in our society were suddenly moved
or removed and that many once distinct situations were suddenly
combined. under such circumstances, the distinctions between our
private and public selves and between the different selves we project
in different situations might not entirely disappear, but they would
certainly change. We might still manage to act differently with
different people, but our ability to segregate encounters would be
greatly diminished. We could not play very different roles in
different situations because the clear spatial segregation of
situations would no longer exist.
In one large combined social situation, for example, students would
see thier teachers falling asleep in front of the television set, blue
coller workers would see corperation presidents being yelled at by
their own children, voters would see politicians have one drink too
many, women would overhear men talking about strategies for
interacting with women, and children would see the sometimes childish
behaviors of their parents. As a result, many types of behavior
possible in the past would no longer be feasible. It would be
difficult, for example, to plan strategies for dealing with people
while these very people were present. We would have trouble projecting
a very different definition of ourselves to different people when so
much other information about us was available to each of our
audiences. Certain behavior patterns that never existed before,
therefore, would come into being. In the combined setting, some
behaviors that were once kept in the "backstage" of each performance
would, of necessity, emerge into the enlarged "onstage" area. We would
be forced to do and say things in front of others that were once
considered unseemly or rude. The behavior exhibited in this mixed
setting would have many elements of behaviors from previously distinct
encounters, but would involve a new synthesis, a new pattern--in
effect, a new social order.
An outside observer from the old social order might conclude that the
people in this new social system had lost their sense of etiquette and
even, perhaps, their morality and sanity. Yet that observer would, in
fact, be witnessing the effects of a merger of social situations
rather than a conscious decision to behave differently.
The use of this architectural analogy to describe the effects of
electronic media is, of course, overstated. Walls, doors, gates, and
distances still frame and isolate encounters. But electronic meda have
increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in
physically defined settings. More and more, the form of mediated
communication has come to resemble the form of live face-to-face
interaction. More and more, media make us "direct" audiences to
performances that happen in other places and give us access to
audiences that are not physically present.
While Goffman and many other sociologists tend to think of social
roles in terms of the places in which they are performed, I argue that
electronic media have undermined the traditional relationship between
physical setting and social situation. Electronic media have created
new situations and destroyed old ones. One of the reasons many
Americans may no longer seem to "know their place" is that they no
longer have a place in the traditional sense of a set of behaviors
matched to physical locations and the audiences found in them.This
book explores a new conception of social situations that includes both
physical settings such as rooms and buildings and the "informational
settings" that are created by media. For media, like physical places,
include and exclude participants. Media, like walls and windows, can
hide and they can reveal. Media can create a sense of sharing and
belonging or a feeling of exclusion and isolation. Media can reinforce
a "them vs. us" feeling or they can undermine it. This book attempts
to describe who and what we are becoming as our social situations
change and as, in response, our behavior takes on new forms and
meanings.
http://www.libraryoflatinamerica.org/toc/tc_019504231X.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019504231X/102-3719066-3520160
