COMM 502 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Ethnography, Erving Goffman, Participant Observation
18 Oct 2016
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George herbert mead, an early social constructionist, was an influential philosophy professor at the university of chicago, but he never published his ideas. After his death, his students published his teachings in mind, self, and society. Mead"s chief disciple, herbert blumer, further developed his theory. Blumer coined the term symbolic interactionism, and claimed that communication is the most human and humanizing activity in which people are engaged. The three core principles of symbolic interactionism are concerned with meaning language and thinking. These principles lead to conclusions about the formation of self and socialization into a larger society. First principle: humans act toward people or things on the basis of the meanings they assign to those people or things. Once people define a situation as real, it"s very real in its consequences: where a behavioral scientist would see causality as stimulus-->response, for an interactionist it would look like stimulus-->interpretation-->response. Meaning arises out of the social interaction people have with each other.
