Old technologies live on alongside new ones. Often the old technologies become invisible, just part of the stuff of life while attention is focused on a subset of technologies deemed new and interesting. For example, David Edgerton points out that whereas the Second World War is often seen as the crucible for new technologies from microwave radar to the atomic bomb, the extensive role of horses in the war is frequently overlooked.1 These invisible, mundane technologies are my focus here, and I wish to address how making such technologies more visible might contribute toward our sociological understanding of technology.

In thinking about the future of the history of technology for the fiftieth-anniversary SHOT conference, I remain convinced that because of technology’s deep embedding in society, the sociology of technology has much to offer historians. Much of the contribution of the sociology of technology over the last decades has come from focusing on innovation and opening up the black box of design.2 Even the recent turn toward users has been framed in terms of users as “agents of technological change.”3 But our predominant interactions with technology do not attempt to change it, much less innovate new devices—most interactions with technology are much more mundane than that. Technology is so all-pervasive in our everyday world that we scarcely notice that the objects we interact with are technological at all. An important part of the largely invisible world of technology is what is often called infrastructure: things like sanitary systems, power grids, roads, or, increasingly, the internet.4 In looking for sociological insight into how humans interact with such mundane and largely hidden things we may need to mine different sorts of sociological insights than have been common in the sociology of technology thus far. I will thus start in a rather unusual place for the sociology of technology, with Erving Goffman.

Goffman as Sociologist of Technology

Many readers will be surprised to see Erving Goffman (1922–1982) described as a “sociologist of technology.” Most sociologists are of course familiar with Goffman as the supreme analyst of face-to-face social interaction, with his dramaturgical models for understanding social life. Notions such as “face work,” “front,” “co-presence,” “framing,” “backstage” and “front stage,” “impression management,” and “the presentation of self ” have not only become indispensable to thinking about social interaction in general but have also been applied to many areas of social life, including science.5 Goffman’s work has deservedly received much general attention from sociologists6 and has had a huge impact on other fields, such as social psychology and theater studies. But one does not find any essays on Goffman and technology.7 What one does find, however, is that scholars who study new media, and in particular the internet, have drawn on Goffman’s work.

For instance, the fluidity of online identities fits well with Goffman’s notion of “performing the self.”8 Also, the idea that personal websites can be analyzed as a form of “presentation of self” has not gone unnoticed.9 The dramaturgical model which Goffman offered with notions such as “front stage” and “backstage” (famously first instantiated in his study of dining behavior in a hotel in the Shetlands, where the waiters at the tables perform their roles “front stage,” as opposed to the roles performed “backstage” by staff in the kitchen—see below) has been applied with some success to discuss ethical issues and the internet and how online learning communities operate.10 When it comes to other new media technologies it is not surprising to again find that Goffman’s work has been influential. For instance, in his recent book on the mobile telephone, Rich Ling used Goffman to examine the extent to which everyday co-presence is interrupted by, or changed by, mobile phone use.11

The reason Goffman is so evocative in this area is that the new media technologies have become part and parcel of everyday interaction. Modern citizens spend so much time interacting with computers, cell phones, and the like that the role they play in framing and mediating interaction is obvious, and Goffman as the observer and theorist of everyday interaction par excellence seems an appropriate starting point. Indeed, my own studies of online interaction are, as we shall see below, indebted to Goffman. But in thinking about how to approach online interaction it is first useful to consider off-line interaction in more detail—in particular, the role played by technology and materiality in Goffman’s analysis of mundane interaction.12 It is here that I have noticed something which I think is quite interesting. Although largely unanalyzed, Goffman’s examples are often replete with technologies and materiality in general. If technologies are part of his examples, what then does this tell us about Goffman as a sociologist of technology?

It is in Goffman’s earliest studies of the late 1950s and early 1960s that one finds what might be called a “hidden sociology of technology.” Let us start with Goffman’s 1961 essay on “role distance,” published as part of the book Encounters.13 Goffman argues that actors not only embrace their roles; at the same time they also “step out of roles” to distance themselves from the role and thus, for a moment, to find another identity and to reveal to other actors that they are aware that they are playing a role. Role distance, he argues, can be a means of dealing with problems in interaction, such as social hierarchy, and with the complex, heterogeneous social worlds within which most social actors must operate. Although Goffman’s essay is cast within the then-traditional sociological approach to role analysis (largely structural functionalist), it is often taken as an example of the need for a departure from the then-predominant, rather static conception of role. In rereading Goffman’s essay today we must also be aware that it was based on behavioral observations made mainly in Western settings during the late 1950s.

Situated Activity Systems

Goffman was particularly interested in a specific sort of interaction, that set within what he calls a situated activity system. This he defines as “a somewhat closed, self compensating, self-terminating circuit of interdependent actions.”14 He gives examples, including the playing through of a game; surgery; the execution of one run of a small group experiment; or having a haircut. These sorts of specific interactional situations, where a task is wholly performed by one person or by a group together in one locale, are distinguished from situations where an endeavor is multisituated. He is particularly interested in how people do things together (a specific activity) in a circumscribed (situated) environment. Goffman chooses to center his observations pertaining to role distance in this essay within two particular sorts of situated activity systems—children riding a merry-go-round, and surgery. Let us examine each example in detail.

Goffman describes the ways the situated role of riding horses on a merry-go-round are performed by children at different ages. Two-year-olds, for instance, have problems acquiring the necessary poise for the role of merry-go-round rider (often needing their parents to ride with them); four-year-olds are starting to “embrace” the role, first grimly waving at their parents each time they pass and then relaxing into the role; later (among boys at five years of age) they start to do the sort of riding whereby they show their lack of attachment to the role, or “role distance”—riding in a casual way with hands off the reins, trying to changes horse in mid-ride, larking around to look cool, and so on. Goffman writes:

At seven and eight, the child not only dissociates himself self-consciously from the kind of horseman a merry-go-round allows him to be but also finds that many of the devices that younger people use for this are now beneath him. He rides no-hands . . . clasps hands with a mounted friend across the aisle. He test limits and his antics may bring negative sanction from the adult in charge of the machine. And he is still young enough to show distance by handling the task with bored, nonchalant competence, a candy bar languidly held in one hand.15

The interesting thing for our purposes here is the role played by technology in the example. The merry-go-round is a technological system (of motion, sound, and light, which provides an administrative apparatus for extracting money from its riders). The whole staging of the role follows from what the technology permits, in particular the replication of the same circular ride time and again, which can be viewed by onlookers such as friends or parents. Because role distance is performed and requires an audience or recipient, the exact physical configuration of riders and onlookers becomes crucial. There are two potential audiences (or recipients) for the role-distancing performance: fellow riders, and the watching parents and/ or friends standing at the side of the merry-go-round. If the merry-go-round did not permit children to sit in close proximity to each other (so that they can monitor each others’ behavior), then role distance for other riders could not be performed. In other words, the physical layout of the horses is crucial for this form of social interaction. The machine’s design and operation ensures the performance of the child is also repeatedly visible to the stationary parent and/or friends. The parent watching the merry-go-round spin by is also expected to behave in a certain fashion when embracing the role of “merry-go-round watcher.” The parents must not only pay attention but also display the necessary startled expression as they enthusiastically wave every time the child passes (thereby themselves displaying role distance, perhaps to friends standing with them).

Technology plays a part in staging the role and is also crucial in terms of how the interaction is mediated. For instance, the view the stationary parents have of their child is mediated by the spinning merry-go-round. The parents see their child vanish from their visual field and come back into sight from the other side with each rotation of the merry-go-round. In effect, this is like watching a slowed-down movie where each frame repeats the same action.

We can make the analysis of the merry-go-round even more complicated if we bring in the administrative apparatus—what we might call the administrative technology. The visibility of the rider is linked to both safety and remuneration; the operator must be able to monitor the children and also determine who has or who has not paid for the ride (the operator is aided in the latter by the material technology of tickets and/or a barrier or gate). The sound of the music, the lights, and the raised carousel itself—like a brightly lit stage—may also be important in giving the right atmosphere to the occasion.

The link between materiality and performance can be seen most clearly if the materiality is changed. Interestingly enough, Goffman notes in passing a potential example of precisely this. He reports in a footnote on observations of role distance among slightly older (high school) lower-middle-class children who are out riding real ponies. In this case the performance of the role distance is different. Rather than lark around or change horses mid-ride (something that is really only feasible on mechanical horses), the children adopt a feigned style of riding which pokes fun at the rich kids (Goffman refers to them as the “horsey set”), who ride in an overly prissy style. Thus materiality (whether there are real horses or mechanical horses) really does matter for how the performance of role distance will be carried out.

In short, the staging of the interaction, the mediation of the interaction, and its performance depend crucially on the detailed material and technological arrangements in place. Although technology and materiality are relevant, they are largely invisible. For Goffman, as for many sociologists, the materiality and the technology involved are not seen as consequential for the sort of analysis of the social activity being pursued.16 Goffman notes in passing that, “as is often the case with situated activity systems, mechanical operations and administrative purpose provide the basis of the unit.”17 But Goffman does not explain why this is so, or how these mechanical operations might become important to the staging of the role.18

Let us also briefly consider Goffman’s other main example in his essay: surgery. Goffman uses this example because he wants to generalize his findings. Unlike merry-go-round riders, surgeons are almost iconic in what Goffman calls their “attachment” to their role. The role the surgeon plays is highly coordinated with anesthetists, juniors, and nurses, and often role distance is used as part of managing this tricky hierarchy (Goffman describes medical juniors as being “like over-age merry-go-round riders” in their jesting and antics to show that “this is not the real me”).19 But Goffman goes further with this example, showing how role distance is essential for the very activity itself—“surgery,” he writes, “requires acts unbecoming a surgeon.”20 One of his best-known examples is how the chief surgeon uses role distance to “mark the end of a critical phase of action and the beginning of a less critical phase.”21 Often at such moments the surgeon will make a joke or may “stretch himself in a gawky, exaggerated and clownish way,”22 thereby signaling to the rest of the team to relax somewhat.23

Surgery as a situated activity system is replete with technologies and materiality. In his essay, Goffman rather underplays surgery as a skilled practice set within the context of the discipline of medicine accompanied by all the technical apparatus and paraphernalia of the modern operating room. He describes the components as consisting of “verbal and physical acts and the changing state of organism undergoing the operation.”24 But this leaves a lot unsaid. The unfolding of any surgical operation is crucially dependent on the technical practices of the surgical team. In other words, the activity consists of a coordinated series of technical interventions over a period of time, set within a framework of knowledge, skills, and practices. The interventions involve not only physical interventions into the patient’s body (e.g. suturing, draining blood, tying blood vessels, and so on), but also interventions with the ancillary technology and equipment (adjusting dials and knobs, for example, and setting up pieces of apparatus).25 Throughout a surgery there is also intensive monitoring of the patient, of charts (including X-rays), and of digital displays (and today perhaps video images from within the body), as well as word-of-mouth communication and gestures among the members of the team.

Interventions depend crucially on the way the operation unfolds. For example, a dramatic drop in a patient’s blood pressure will lead to the anesthesiologist stepping in—becoming, as it were, “on stage.” The staging of surgical interaction thus depends crucially on a set of material arrangements, tools, and technologies.26 With this insight we can now see that Goffman’s point about role distance being essential to surgery can actually be strengthened. The moments of role distance which signal junctures of increased or decreased concentration by the team are actually dependent on the material circumstances of the unfolding operation (such as when the patient’s blood pressure drops dramatically).27 In short, there is no predetermined mechanistic rendering of time possible for surgery (a surgeon will never say in advance that this particular operation will last no more or less than, say, exactly fifty-five minutes).28 The temporal unfolding and the situational role distancing it enables are contingent on the technical practices themselves, and there is enough uncertainty that no two operations (even by the same team) will follow the exact same temporal path.29 The temporal ordering of the necessary role distance which Goffman identifies is therefore dependent on materials and technology—and on who has “charge” of the technology at relevant moments.

Hotel Shetland Islands

I now want to revisit briefly an even more famous example of Goffman’s, drawn from his well-known ethnography of the Shetland Islands in the UK. In this example the role of materiality and technology is even clearer.30 Goffman spent a lot of time hanging around the one hotel on the islands, and in his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he draws on this experience to make one of the key distinctions in his analytical vocabulary, the difference between “front stage” and “backstage” behavior.31 He notices that the presentation of self by the service personnel in the “front stage” parlor of the hotel, where guests are to be found, is very different from the crofter behavior found in the “backstage” kitchen and scullery. In the parlor and dining room the hotel personnel follow what Goffman calls the “middle class norms” for politeness and for the presentation of food. Backstage, however, things are rather different: “Crofter clothing and postural patterns also tended to appear in the hotel kitchen. Thus, the manager would sometimes follow local custom and leave his cap on; the scullery boys would use the coal bucket for a well aimed expulsion of mucus; and the women on the staff would rest sitting with their legs up in unladylike positions.”32 He goes on to observe that “mould would sometimes form on soup yet to be used. Over the kitchen stove, wet socks would be dried on the steaming kettle—a standard practice on the island. Tea, when guests had asked for it newly infused, would be brewed in a pot encrusted at the bottom with tea leaves that were weeks old. . . . Pats of butter, softened, misshapen and partly used during their sojourn in the dining hall, would be rerolled to look fresh, and sent out to do duty again.”33

Of course, to observe this sort of distinction Goffman himself needed to move freely between front stage and backstage, but even more crucially, these spaces have to be attended to by the participants themselves. Materiality does matter—not only the moldy soup and the pats of butter, but also the way the spaces are bounded and connected. The two spaces must be bounded enough to permit the participants to change their behavior accordingly as they enter or leave them; the different parts of the hotel have to be connected for the personnel to be able to pass between them; and last, the two spaces must to a degree be screened from each other so that the hotel guests cannot easily observe the mold growing in their waiting soup bowls, for example, or the scullery workers spitting into the coal buckets. For the analytical terminology of front stage and backstage to work, there must be material constraints on the setting.

The materiality of the setting—if you like, the architecture of the different stages—is something to which Goffman closely attends.34 In introducing this chapter of his book on what he calls “Region and Region Behaviour,” he defines a region as “any place that is bounded by some degree by barriers to perception.”35 He notes in passing the importance of the materiality of these barriers. He contrasts the thick glass panels of a radio broadcasting studio, which isolates an area aurally but not visually, with the beaverboard partitions in offices, which do the opposite. Goffman notes that while “front stage” is by and large a public space, control must be exercised over who can go backstage. Indeed, in most service industries it is taken for granted that clients or members of the public cannot go backstage. But in certain situations this becomes problematic. One case Goffman discusses is automotive repair shops where male clients feel they have the right to enter the repair shop and examine the backstage work being carried out on their car.36 Hotels present another sort of problem because of the need for constant passage between front stage and backstage by waiters and the like and for waiters to be able to monitor the clients as to when they need serving. But if the door between kitchen and dining room is always left open, then the guests may be able to look into the kitchen and thus threaten the necessary bounded character of the backstage space.

Such a problem did indeed occur in the Shetland hotel. As Goffman writes:

Given, then, the various ways in which activity in the kitchen contradicted the impression fostered in the guests’ region of the hotel, one can appreciate why the doors leading from the kitchen to the other parts of the hotel were a constant sore spot in the organization of work. The maids wanted to keep the doors open to make it easier to carry food trays back and forth [and to observe the needs of guests]. Since the maids played a servants’ role before the guests, they felt they did not have too much to lose by being observed in their own milieu by guests who glanced into the kitchen when passing the open doors. The managers, on the other hand, wanted to keep the door closed so that the middle class role imputed to them by the guests would not be discredited by the disclosure of their kitchen habits. Hardly a day passed when those doors were [not] angrily banged shut and angrily pushed open.37

So here we can see that a particular material technology, a door, is crucial in understanding the mediation between front stage and backstage. Goffman notes that there are other technological solutions to the problem of managing the bounded nature of the backstage at the same time as allowing easy passage to the front stage. A “kick-door” (a swing door with a special reinforced plate used to “kick” it open), for example, is used in many restaurants to solve precisely this problem.

With Goffman’s example we see how the use of this technology can be contested by social actors in the course of their ongoing social interaction. Goffman does not analyze the doors and architecture of rooms as part of an explicit sociology of technology, but he does note that the different technological and material options are crucial to the sorts of social interaction they permit to be staged. The beauty of Goffman’s analysis is that in these situated microcosms of social interaction we see not only that performances of class and gender matter in contestations of the workplace (the maids thinking of themselves as servants, as opposed to the managers’ desire to be seen as “middle class”), but also that such performances are embedded in the mundane materiality of social life. The sociologist of technology Bruno Latour has also shown interest in mundane artifacts such as doors.38 But Goffman’s sociology of doors, unlike that of Latour’s, is grounded in performances of gender and class as well as materiality. The inspiration for the sociology of technology to be found in Goffman’s work is that the material form of technologies, although never explicitly analyzed, really does matter. The “interaction order” studied by Goffman is embedded within, mediated by, and staged by material circumstances and mundane technologies.

Mundane technologies thus matter for social interaction, and which technologies are chosen (a regular door versus, say, a kick-door) may configure interaction in quite different ways. One question that it would seem important to ask, then, is how are these sorts of mundane technologies chosen? Is there some sort of negotiation? Elsewhere I have argued that political sites, such as town planning meetings and other local forums where infrastructural decisions are planned and debated, are places to study precisely these sorts of negotiations over mundane infrastructure.39

Online Interaction

One of the infrastructural technologies currently being put in place is the internet. In the rest of this essay I want to return to the study of online interaction to see what follows from this excursion into the Goffmanesque world of mundane technology. It is immediately obvious that when it comes to the internet we should avoid the trap of declaring that online interaction is special because it is technologically mediated interaction. Goffman’s studies of the merry-go-round and of the Shetland Island hotel are also studies of technologically mediated interaction! This is important to note because often analysts make the mistake of assuming that online interaction, because it is computer mediated, takes place in a different social realm with its own rules of interaction. Worse, sometimes a false dichotomy is drawn between the “virtual” world of online interaction and the “real” world of social interaction. If my reading of Goffman is correct, all interaction can be materially mediated. This is not to say that there may not be crucial differences between online interaction and so-called “face-to-face” interaction, but mediation per se does not seem to be the crucial difference.

Probably the most important part of the interaction order to discuss when it comes to the internet and Web 2.0 (the assemblage of technologies which permit the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook) is what Goffman refers to as co-presence, “being accessible, available and subject to one another.”40 In Goffman’s own work, he mainly restricted this notion to full bodily presence, by which he meant something like a physical area where interactants find themselves in visual and aural range of one another. If co-presence is interpreted as only bodily co-presence, then the idea will have limited applicability to online worlds.41 But if co-presence is conceived of as a means whereby interactants are available and accountable to each other for their mediated interactions, it has a wider application.42

The clue to thinking about co-presence and its application to an online world is again to think about mediated interactions which do not involve computers. A useful example here is letter writing.43 This is a mediated form of communication with its own special norms and obligations. Writing and receiving letters are accountable social actions.44 The importance of the mediation and how it affects the accountability of actions can be seen when for some reason a person who writes a letter is present when the recipient reads it. The ensuing mild embarrassment is telling and derives precisely from the changed form of mediation and co-presence. The different forms of mediation and co-presence which email provides, with its possibility of instant reply and lack of bodily presence of the interactants, is exactly what encourages email flaming (think of the contrast with telephone conversations where the greater signaling via voice intonation makes a crucial difference).45 It is notable also that the temporal aspect of “being available” shifts between different sorts of mediation. An overlong pause in face-to-face conversation can signal trouble; email demands a response within a certain time period; and letter writing is far more stretched out in terms of temporal response. Mediation matters hugely to the types of normative constraints, and forms of trust and credibility, which can be built in interaction, but in all cases the interactants are available and accountable. My claim here is that co-presence is manifest online, but it crucially depends on the exact form of material mediation. Obviously the type of mediation that occurs when interaction is facilitated through a screen, mouse, keyboard, interconnectivity, and so on is different and crucially needs to be unpacked.

In the online world interaction is displaced in space and time.46 “Traces,” whether profiles, posts, blogs, lists, reviews, songs, videos, or votes, are left at the website by remote users for other users to inspect, listen to, and interact with, leading to yet new traces.47 Most such interactions between traces are visible (or if need be audible) to anyone visiting the website with the requisite access. Some traces (typically economic transactions) will of course be private. Co-presence in the sense of being “accessible, available and subject to one another” occurs but is established by the interaction between the traces. An online “gathering” may take place even if only one person is visiting the website at any one time. Goffman writes that “[t]hose in a given situation may be referred to aggregatively as a gathering, however divided, or mute and distant, or only momentarily present, the participants in a gathering appear to be. Cultural rules establish how individuals are to conduct themselves by virtue of being in a gathering, and those rules for commingling, when adhered to, socially organize the behavior of those in the situation.”48

If we turn now to studies of online interaction that use Goffman we can see how the materiality of the form of interaction is highly consequential for the interaction order. A study by Danah Boyd of Web 2.0 social networking sites, such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace, is instructive. Drawing on Goffman, Boyd shows that in offline interaction the term “friend” is often used in order to “save face”;49 Boyd argues that the performativity of friendship and the need to “show face” also occur in the online world, where they are aptly called “friending.”50 But here performativity is deeply influenced by the material technology, in this case the types of features which the website offers. For example, MySpace offers a “Top 8” feature where users can list their Top 8 friends. Boyd shows how the Top 8 feature creates all sorts of social dramas among teenagers, especially when friends get delisted from another friend’s Top 8. There seems to be no clear social script for ending a friendship in this way. The teenagers she studies thus come up with “backstage” explanations of how they choose their Top 8 friends in order to try and ameliorate the potential damage to face by delisting someone (one such explanation offered to Boyd was that the Top 8 choices this week were “my Sagittarius friends”).

In this type of example we see how the new material mediation of interaction (the internet, and specifically MySpace’s Top 8 feature) creates new sorts of interactional problems which interactants need to solve. In principle the interactional difficulty is the same as if, say, a restaurant, perhaps as a sales ploy, built a one-way mirror so that diners could look straight into the backstage world of the kitchen to see their food being prepared. This might seem attractive to restaurant goers (and indeed is used in some restaurants today as a marketing gimmick), but it presents all sorts of interactional difficulties for the backstage world of kitchens. In short, a new material circumstance will have produced an interactional difficulty.

Although Boyd’s application of Goffman is intriguing in terms of the sociology of technology, it still does not quite open the black box of how the technological gets negotiated. Like Goffman himself, she uses material and technological staging to see how interaction is performed but does not examine how participants might negotiate the technological choices and what sorts of factors constrain or enable those choices. It seems in her work that some independent entity—MySpace, or possibly the webmaster at MySpace—is making technological choices for users; the sociotechnological space where these negotiations occur is left unexamined.

What then would a more satisfactory application of the Goffmanesque style of analysis in the online world look like? A more satisfying case might be to examine technological choices specifically, and how they are negotiated as part of the interaction order, but this sort of work largely remains to be done.51

Conclusion

I would like now to return to general issues in the sociology of technology. In this essay I have echoed David Edgerton’s call for a move away from innovation-driven studies of technology to studying the mundane technologies of everyday use. Because such technologies have become so mundane it is often hard to identify what is sociologically interesting about them. In order to open up the black box of the mundane world I have turned to the pioneering studies of Erving Goffman. I have tried to show that Goffman, although he does not explicitly deal with materiality and technology, has embedded within his studies many references to mundane material objects and technologies. These objects, and how they are arranged and change, turn out to be important to the ways social interaction is performed or staged. If nothing else, there is something to be learned from Goffman in terms of how the interaction order is materially staged.

When it comes to studying the internet, with its multitude of users, we are again thrown into the world of the mundane. These objects need unpacking, and sociologists and historians of technology are starting to do this. The history of computing can teach us much here about where these technologies come from and how they are configured.52 We can also examine technical developments of the internet in general.53 There is no doubt that technical developments such as added bandwidth (e.g., asymmetric DSL); more CPU power, which allows more server-side computation; improvements to HTML allowing content to change on a page without refreshing; new data aggregation techniques, such as “tag clouds”; increased hard drive size; and so on have all played a role in the burgeoning development of so-called Web 2.0 sites.54 Certainly infrastructure studies have much to offer here. But the web is a peculiar infrastructure because of the interactional meaning-generating capacity it offers. Approaches such as social construction of technology and actor network theory could examine these technical changes, but I think that they have a hard time dealing with the world of interactive meaning that the internet provides for its users.55

My suggestion is that we need to combine the attention to technological artifacts, which is the strength of approaches such as actor network theory and social construction of technology, with more traditional sociological approaches like Goffman’s, which attend to the interaction order and the meanings which materiality and technology facilitate. I hope in this essay to have started to sketch out what such a Goffmanesque sociology of technology might look like. Goffman liked to end each piece of his writing by reminding his readers of the fragility of social life as we poor humans do our best to play our roles and find and negotiate our fractured selves on the stage of social life. That the technology of the internet seems to have made this human project even harder reminds us of the profound insights which Goffman may still have to offer.

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1. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford, 2006).

2. See for example Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Wiebe. E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the History and Sociology of Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); and W. E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

3. Ronald R. Kline and Trevor Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture 37 (October 1996): 763–95. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch offer a wider range of users, including nonusers; see Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds., How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). Ronald Kline’s monograph on the introduction of technology into rural America says much more about the routine use of technology which led to changes in everyday life. See Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, 2000).

4. On the history of some of these systems, see Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: The Evolution of Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio, 1996); Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1933 (Baltimore, 1983); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983); and Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). There have been recent calls by sociologists of science and technology to take infrastructure more seriously, most notably Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43 (1999): 377–91. For a detailed examination of infrastructure and the problem of how to deal with non-humans, see Trevor Pinch, “On Making Infrastructure Visible: Or Putting the Non-Humans to Rights,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 77–89.

5. For an attempt to apply Goffman to science, see Steven Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Palo Alto, Calif., 2000). For a recent extension of Goffman to economic sociology, see Alex Preda, “Brief Encounters: Calculation and the Interaction Order of Anonymous Electronic Markets,” Accounting, Organizations, and Society 34, no. 5 (2009): 675–93.

6. See for instance Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton, eds., Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order (Boston, 1988); Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (London, 1991); and Thomas Scheff, Goffman Unbound: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences (New York, 2006).

7. For a recent essay on Goffman by a philosopher of science who tries to bring together Goffman with Foucault, see Ian Hacking, “Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: Between Discourse in the Abstract and Face-to-Face Interaction,” Economy and Society 33 (2004): 277–302.

8. Nikki Sannicolas, “Erving Goffman, Dramaturgy, and On-Line Relationships,” Cybersociology no. 1 (1997), available online at http://www.cybersociology.com/files/1_ 2_sannicolas.html (accessed 11 February 2010).

9. Hugh Miller, “The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet,” paper presented at Embodied Knowledge and Virtual Space Conference, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, 1995; and Charles Cheung, “A Home on the Web: Presentations of Self on Personal Homepages,” in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, ed. David Gauntlett (London and New York, 2000), 43–51.

10. Allison Cavanagh, “Behavior in Public: Ethics in Online Ethnography,” Cybersociology no. 6 (1999), available online at http://www.cybersociology.com/files/6_2_ethicsin onlineethnog.html (accessed 9 March 2010), and Drew R. A. Ross, “Backstage with the Knowledge Boys and Girls: Goffman and Distributed Agency in an Organic Online Community,” Organization Studies 26, no. 3 (2007): 307–25.

11. Rich Ling, New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

12. I began to examine Goffman for his use of technology as part of a wider critique I have been making of sociology in general for ignoring materiality and technology in particular. See Trevor Pinch, “Technology and Social Institutions: Living in a Material World,” Theory and Society 37 (2008): 461–83, and Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg, eds., Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

13. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis, 1961).

14. Ibid., 96.

15. Ibid., 108.

16. This argument is developed in Pinch, “Technology and Social Institutions.”

17. Goffman, Encounters, 97.

18. The notion of an activity system with a mechanical basis possibly shows the resonance of cybernetics with Goffman’s thinking at the time. He refers to the pattern of roles in a situated activity system as part of “a concrete self-compensating system” (ibid., 96) and notes that, “[a]s with any face-to-face interaction, there is much chance for communication and its feedback through a wide variety of signs, for the damping and surging of response, and for the emergence of homeostatic-like controls” (ibid., 97).

19. Goffman, Encounters (n. 13 above), 117–18.

20. Ibid., 134.

21. Ibid., 124.

22. Ibid.

23. The use of humor at different stages of operations has also been observed by Pearl Katz in her anthropology of surgery; see Katz, “Ritual in the Operating Room,” Ethnology 20 (1981): 247–57.

24. Goffman, Encounters, 116.

25. Because of the need to maintain sterility, this “setting up” will often be handed off to nurses.

26. For science studies–orientated ethnographies of surgical practices, see Stefan Hirschauer, “The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery,” Social Studies of Science 21, no. 2 (1991): 279–319, and Rachel Prentice, “Drilling Surgeons: The Social Lessons of Embodied Surgical Learning,” Social Studies of Science 32 (2007): 534–53.

27. For a general argument as to why cognitive plans concerning the operation of technologies are better understood as situated actions, see Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Cambridge, 1987).

28. Windows of time (e.g., the amount of time, bounded by upper and lower limits, for performing a particular procedure) and numbers of reiterations of a search routine (say, looking for a particular organ) can, however, guide a surgeon through some aspects of the technical work; see Trevor Pinch, Harry Collins, and Larry Carbone, “Inside Knowledge: Second Order Measures of Skill,” Sociological Review 44 (1996): 163–86.

29. Surgery is replete with uncertainties—no two bodies are exactly alike (even the exact location of organs varies from individual to individual); no two bodies will respond identically to interventions; no two surgeons work at exactly the same pace. Procedures are fine-tuned to the state of health of the patient and depend for their implementation on the skills, knowledge, and experience of the team.

30. Materiality and technology are, of course, not synonymous. Some technologies, which I have defined elsewhere as “social technologies” (see Trevor Pinch, Malcolm Ashmore, and Michael Mulkay, “Technology, Testing, Text: Clinical Budgeting in the U.K. National Health Service,” in Bijker and Law [n. 2 above], 265–89), may have few material elements. For a definition of materiality, by which I mainly mean human-made things, objects, and materials, see Pinch and Swedberg (n. 12 above).

31. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, [1959], 1982).

32. Ibid., 119.

33. Ibid., 120.

34. The architecture of technology is something to which feminist analysts of technology have paid close attention. See for instance Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park, Pa., 1991).

35. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 109.

36. Goffman was writing in the 1950s and 1960s, when car repair was something which many men believed themselves capable of carrying out, or at least understanding (unlike today).

37. Goffman, The Presentation of Self (n. 31 above), 120–21.

38. Latour’s main concern is with morality embedded in automatic door-closers. See Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Bijker and Law (n. 2 above), 225–58.

39. See Pinch, “On Making Infrastructure Visible” (n. 4 above).

40. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York, 1963), 22.

41. Bodily presence is, however, increasingly relevant to sites such as Second Life, which use avatars, and sites where video interaction is permitted. Recently, Karin Knorr Cetina has also drawn attention to the need to extend Goffman to cover what she calls the “synthetic situation”—these are situations like those found in the trading rooms of banks, where bodily interaction and onscreen interaction and their attendant “response presences” occur together. See Knorr Cetina, “The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World,” Symbolic Interaction 32 (2009): 61–87.

42. That online interaction is a form of “mediated presence” is suggested by Charles Goodwin, Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers (New York, 1981).

43. Another example is how the party-line telephone changed the meaning of what it was to “visit” someone. See Kline, Consumers in the Country (n. 3 above).

44. For a detailed and subtle analysis of the normative constraints on letter writing between scientists, see Michael Mulkay, The Word and the World: Explorations in the Form of Sociological Analysis (London, 1986).

45. There is a large literature on the analysis of email flaming from the perspective of the field of communications. See for instance A. K. Turnage, “Email Flaming Behaviors and Organizational Conflict,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007), available at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/turnage.html (accessed 14 January 2010).

46. See Don Miller and Dan Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (New York, 2000).

47. See H. T. Welser, M. A. Smith, E. Gleave, and D. Fisher, “Distilling Digital Traces: Computational Social Sciences Approaches to Studying the Internet,” in Handbook of Online Research Methods, ed. N. Fielding, R. L. Lee, and G. Grant (London, 2008), 116–40.

48. Erving Goffman, “The Neglected Situation,” American Anthropologist 66, no. 6 (1964): 133–36 (quote on 135).

49. Danah Boyd, “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites,” First Monday 11, no. 12 (December 2006), available at http:// firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1418/1336 (accessed 14 January 2010).

50. She draws on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory to show how the term “my friend” is used in speech to signal a certain kind of relationship and not necessarily the speaker’s “actual feelings.”

51. For an attempt to apply this sort of analysis to a Web 2.0 music site, see Trevor Pinch and Katherine Athansiades, “Performing Online Interaction: From Market Pitchers to Mashups and Moshes,” unpublished paper, Cornell University, Department of S&TS, 2009.

52. See for example Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), and Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Computers, Scientists, and Engineers during the Rise of American Cold War Research (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

53. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

54. I am grateful to François Briatte for discussion of these issues and for his University of Edinburgh unpublished paper, “The Technological Structure of Current Online Networks” (2008).

55. See for instance Trevor Pinch, “Where is the Goffman of the Internet?” paper presented at the Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting in Montreal, Canada, 11 October 2007.

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Trevor Pinch is professor of science and technology studies and sociology at Cornell University. He is grateful to Ron Kline and Rachel Prentice for helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. This paper was first presented at SHOT’s Fiftieth Anniversary Conference in Lisbon on 12 October 2008.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.