To begin with, we should start with a group and looking at scenarios. According to PBSchildren \cite{pbs} children age seven to twelve children have started to perform fully cognition development. If there are parents who would like to
improve their children learning performances then this will be a perfect fit in focus group study. For example, in traditional school
setting, children learn the same material in classroom but have
different results when it comes to testing their understanding of
materials. A grade and rank is given depending on how well they do on
understanding the material. A yearly check up of student’s visual
perception ability will help to understand individual improvement in
overall performance and sustainable way of learning. The focus group will test not only about children's vision but also visual perception ability. If students and parents understand their children's visual perception ability, they will more likely to understand what the children's tendency to see and what they might have missed. Through the individual understanding, they are according test to improve the revenant visual perception ability. Once the visual perception ability improves, the students are more likely to have a better performance in learning school materials.
Despite the research in cognitive psychology, I feel like there are pieces missing to understand the greater problem of communication. I wonder if there are other ways we can see our daily life. The readings in sociology offers a deeper understanding about people interaction, and through media archeology, perhaps we can rethink or define human's relationship with others nonhuman, including but not limit to technology.
Live a life of a play, you are the director of your scene. Through Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of
Self in Everyday
Life
Goffman is a sociologist, in one of his most influential work in the field is his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman made the analogy of our
life as a play in the theatre. It takes about the face to face
interaction. In this piece, it imagined a play in daily life. Take
myself for example, I have face to face communication with people
everyday, from purchasing a cup of coffee, to attending school lectures,
but rarely I think of my daily life as a play or theatre. In Goffman’s
piece, the presentation of self in everyday life. He uses this imaginary
theatre to talk about face to face interaction. There is front stage
where people contact the other person, there are some degree of control
to present the impression, this contact will change one person’s
“setting.” Goffman’s theory takes us to a closer look to small scale
people’s interaction.
In order to understand the bigger picture, sometimes it takes to see
from bottom up and it is what Goffman’s approach for people sudy back in
1956 when it is first published. However, I found the idea interesting
and useful. The same method is seen in use in psychodrama therapy
between 1920-1940 created by Jacob L. Moreno. The timeline make me
wonder does it have to do with the war? Then people started to re-think
of what people to people interaction means and how we see it. To
stressed the importance of people to people communication, I would like
to take a look of the experiment done in April 1967 at Cubberley High
School, Northern California. The well-known experiment is called the
Third Wave. It started out as a history class experiment, where there
have students participate a week long experiment which modeled after
Fascism and Nazi period in Germany. There were about 30 student
participants in the class and they started out with made up salutation
posture and disciplines. “Strength through discipline! Strength through
community! Strength through action!” From an outsider’s point of view,
it seems strange how an obviously wrong concept can move so many people,
and followed by a nation’s population. The experiment later turned into
a novel for young adult called “The Wave.” However, in reality the
experiment runs well, in terms of getting students into the concept of
fascism. But what is the problem here? In the later written novel, it
attribute the reasoning to peer pressure. Do they know it was a play and
the students were all actors in the setting? Besides the novel, the
“successful” experiment later turned into film, tv shows, and numerous
article. Was it too late to learn from history? Or can we educate
students what to see from the begiing to avoid peer-pressure, to see
beyond what is presented? Even it is, as Goffman said, a “All the world
is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are
not easy to specify” (Goffman, 1959: 72).
In Goffman’s piece, one important notion that consist the modern stage
of the play, which is: telecommunication. To me it adds more
complication, and it can be a strength to the modern world if we see it
wisely. Otherwise, I can see the situation of communication worsen.
Because when we can’t communicate well in face-to-face with enough
information to read and understand the actor’s intention. How can we
tell from telecommunication, when we can’t see the other party. Does it
mean there are more backstage acting?
Actor-network theory can affect
people’s approach for using technology to
communicate
Actor-Network Theory