Soc250 Blog #3

In this week’s readings Garfinkel explores the idea of “Breaching Experiments” which are essentially where one person intentionally disrupts the assumed norms of a given situation, in an attempt to see how the disruption will impact the interaction/social system.  The two primary examples he gives are breaking the rules in games, and asking for elaboration during conversations on simple things.  The subjects whom these experiments were conducted on often responded with hostility due to the broken moral enforcement of trust.  These breaches break the subject’s already preconceived ideal of social roles and break the general thesis of reciprocal perspectives.  Garfinkel enjoyed this conflict, he believed that it was more useful for sociologists to study factors that disrupt a system, rather than simply observe a system functioning properly. 

Mark Seilhamer applies this concept today by analyzing the social dynamic of modern prank phone calls.  Seilhamer argues that the crank callers view the interaction as a play while intentionally breaking accepted norms and the subject who is being called is treating the situation as reality and continually trying to save their “fabricated frame” of their community.  The subject often responds with confusion while trying to rationalize the behavior of the prank caller and then hostility once they discover that their moral enforcement of trust has been broken. 

The author of this article only examines the dynamic within one particular prank phone call, so that could be a potentially dangerous method to assume that this model is true for all prank call breaching experiments.  Although his general conclusions do line up quite similarly to those of Garfinkel, it does make me weary that only one conversation was analyzed for this study.  I think that the author would have been able to draw a more complete set of conclusions if they had widened their data pool.  All in all, I do find it fascinating to apply Garfinkel’s theory to modern prank calls.  It is definitely not an example that I would have thought of on my own. 

Reference:

Seilhamer, M., 2011. “On Doing ‘Being a Prank Caller’ A Look Into the Crank Call Community of Practice”, Journal of Pragamatics, Vol. 43, pp. 677-690.