Ethnomethodology

So the title of this weeks topic is “ethnomethodology”, a mouthful of a word that I have to constantly say in a caveman voice to fully get it out. This topic ended up being more interesting than the name suggests through the work of Grafinkel. It’s a topic of discussion that explores the meanings of the ‘rules’ of everyday interaction. Grafinkel does this so by producing an experiment that meddles with these rules of conduct and records how this disrupts the interaction presented.

As I was reading I was thinking about situations I’ve been in where rules of interaction have been meddled with and how I felt during those situations….one word…AWKWARD!  For example, there have been times where I’m on a bus and then suddenly some I know gets on, but I don’t know well enough to hold a conversation with, I always try and smile at them anyway out of respect. When they don’t reciprocate the smile is when I feel awkward and I begin to wonder if they didn’t recognise me or if they were just being plain rude. Then I proceed by putting in my headphones and looking like I’m texting someone. I’m sure all of you have been in situations like this where someone doesn’t reciprocate your friendly gesture and you automatically think they’ve “changed” in a negatively way since you last saw them.

The example above is what Grafinkel was determined to investigate. He wanted to discover how people reacted to the disruption of the unwritten rules of society. In the reading “contextualization cues” are brought up. What this basically talks about are hints on how someone should act depending on the interaction. So Grafinkel’s experiment pretty much attempted to mess up this idea of “contextualization cues”, by disrupting the rules of interaction that we usually take for granted.

In the end I found ethnomethodology to be a lot more interesting and simple to understand, once you get past learning how to say the actual word! While you’re here you should check out a comment I made on a great post about this weeks topic. I found her example to be quite relevant and interesting on the unwritten rules of interaction

Ethnomethodology Comment

I thought I would leave you with a gif of an interaction that doesn't usually happen with a police officer, enjoy :)