Direction for [ Question No: 84 To 88 ] :
Read the following passage and answer the questions.
The term “ethnomethodology” was thought up by a distinguished sociologist, Harold Garfinkel. In an article titled “ The origins of the term ‘Ethnomethodology’, Garfinkel explains how he thought up the name :
“Ethno” seemed to refer, somehow or other, to the availability to a member of commonsense knowledge of his society as commonsense knowledge of the ‘whatever’. If it were ethno-botany, then it had to do somehow or other with his knowledge of and his grasp of what were for members adequate methods of dealing with botanical matters. Someone from another society, like an anthropologist in this case, world recognize the matters as botanical matters. The member would employ ethnobotany as adequate grounds of inference and action in the conduct of his own affairs in the company of others like him. It was that plain, and the notion of “ethnomethodology” or the term “ethnomethodology” was taken in this sense……
Thus ethnomethodology is interested in how people think and act in everyday life situations, in contrast to, for example, laboratory experiments or focus groups or other situations in which people recognize that they are, one way or another, being studied. ‘Common sense’ becomes a subject of inquiry, not just a ‘given’ that is neglected for other concerns.
These interests of ethnomethodologists have implications for advertising, in that advertisers want to know how people make sense of the world and how they react to ‘Commonsense’ appeals. Advertisers want to be able to ‘reach’ targeted segments of the population and to influence them, which means advertisers want to understand people’s ‘grounds for inference’. Thus, ethnomethodology has important implications when it comes to making commercials and print advertisements.
Ethnomethodologists assume that people have common understandings – which they don’t always articulate – and this leads ethnomethodologists to examine how people reason and what’s behind their everyday activities. It isn’t easy to find these common understandings or to determine how people reason …..
The question arises now. How can we use ethnomethodology in our research in communication and media analysis ? Let me suggest a few answers to this question.
What ethnomethodology provides us, we must remember, is a way of studying the codes and unconscious belief systems that lie behind our utterances and everyday actions. We can adopt Ethnomethodological approaches to the media by asking the same questions. Ethnomethodologists ask – not about conversation ê but about dialogue in films and television shows, lyrics in songs, and similar phenomena.
There are differences between the analysis of dialogue in media and the analyses that ethnomethodologists make of real-world conversations in that dialogue in mass-mediated texts is created by writers. In a sense, therefore, when we do research on dialogue in a film or other mass-mediated text, we are dealing with a writer’s perception of the world, but because writers create texts for large numbers of people, who presumably share their perceptions, we can assume that analyzing dialogue in mediated texts is not that different from analyzing dialogue in every day situations.
