Assignment task:
What about situations in the real world in which people make trouble through their conversational practices? The term interactional vandalism describes cases in which a subordinate person breaks the tacit rules of everyday interaction that are of value to the more powerful.
Though homeless people on the street often conform to everyday forms of speech in their interactions with others, when they choose to, they subvert the tacit conventions for everyday talk in a way that leaves passersby disoriented.
Even more than physical assaults or vulgar verbal abuse, interactional vandalism leaves victims unable to articulate what has happenedHow might interactional vandalism play out on the Internet? Can we think of ways in which less powerful people engaged in electronic communications undermine the taken-for- granted rules of interaction that are of value to the more powerful? The very existence of the Internet creates spaces in which less powerful people can hold their superiors accountable in ways they were never able to before.
Because of the Internet, powerful people are less able to segregate their audiences treating some people poorly behind the scenes and treating others nicely in public-and get away with it.
People who are high status tend to look longer at people they're talking to, compared with others.
Following Goffman's lead, Anderson asked, what types of behavioral cues and signs make up the vocabulary of public interaction? He concluded that the people most likely to pass inspection are those who do not fall into commonly accepted stereotypes of dangerous persons: "Children readily pass inspection, while women and white men do so more slowly, black women, black men, and black male teenagers most slowly of all.
One of the great puzzles that social scientists will seek to resolve in the coming decades is whether "New" forms of social interaction, such as social networking sites, will alter gender relations and race relations.
What is this stating?