Everyday Surveillance, Goffman, and Unfocused Interaction

Unfocused Interaction in Distributed Workgroups

Face-to-face human interaction is divided into "focused" and "unfocused" types. Unfocused interaction often conveys important content and context information and contributes to group cohesiveness and effectiveness. Research in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) is also concerned with human interaction. CMC tools, such as electronic mail, and C...

Goffman and Globalization: Strategic Interaction on a World Stage

Depression and everyday social interaction.

The present study examined the relationships between depressive symptoms and everyday social interaction in a nonclinical population. Depressive symptoms were measured using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and social interaction was measured using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record. People who were classified as at risk for depression had less rewarding inter...

Back to Social Behavior: Mining the Mundane

This article examines the declining attention to behavioral research in personality and social psychology and proposes an alternative to the typical laboratory paradigm for studying social behavior. Specifically, the study of ‘‘unfocused interactions,’’ that is, situations where people simply share a common presence without talking to one another (Goffman, 1963), provides an opportunity for ana...

Technological Interventions in Everyday Interaction

The works in Act/React create an impression of sociability through interactivity. In our encounters with other people, we take for granted the premise that social interaction involves autonomous beings who are aware of each other. Yet when the other is a machine, the autonomy and awareness exist primarily in the mind of the human: the sociability is subjective and the transparency or opaqueness...