Re: spontaneous noticing and symbolic mediation
Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Wed, 7 Feb 1996 11:19:01 -0800 (PST)
I don't want to dominate the list, but let me reply to Timothy Koschmann's
question about the relationship between intermediation and ethnomethodology.
They are both motivated, in my opinion, by the same ethical concern: undoing
the abstraction of the human sciences by directing attention to the actual
phenomena of experience. Both projects are thus grounded in phenomenology,
and treat phenomenology as almost a therapeutic activity (among other things).
Both projects are also concerned with defamiliarization, and both proceed by
documentary report of naturally occurring events, with due attention to the
role of the investigator as a participant in these "natural occurrences".
But they differ in some ways as well. Ethnomethodology is very much a reply
to Parsonian functionalism in sociology. As such it is focused upon the
traditional sociological questions of social order, and it is preoccupied
with a critique of the functionalist handling of theoretical categories --
it wishes to undo the habit of recruiting vernacular terms and turning them
into social scientific terms. Intermediation has no such motivation. It is
atheoretical and not geared to the investigation of any particular problem.
This is not to say that I, as a one-time practitioner of intermediation, am
or was opposed to theory; it's just that intermediation as such can be filled
in with whatever theoretical questions concern you -- with the important proviso
that they must refer to things that you can "notice" or "see" in your own
experience. If you are interested in exploring questions whose theoretical
categories are located deep in your head, or in macroscopic social structures,
or anyplace else that is distant from experience, then you have to start out
with categories that are much closer to experience. If you don't *have* any
categories that are close to your own experience then you are a prime candidate
for the type of therapy that intermediation offers. It so happens that almost
all of our intermediational effort went into questions concerning individual
cognitive life, and particularly with the organization of an individual's daily
activities, but the method would be equally applicable to categories located
in the interactions between people -- again, assuming that the categories refer
to things that you are capable of noticing. I expect that you could cause
quite a lot of disruption in your relations with other people if you really
set out intermediating on the sorts of things that many people on this list
study through videotape or other sorts of mediations. I'm thinking for example
of Chuck Goodwin's work -- intermediation on the dynamics of gaze in conversation
could really mess up your ability to have a conversation, I should think.
Phil