Michael James Walsh

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• B.Soc.Sci (Hons.); Ph.D
• Assoicate Professor at University of Canberra

In a context where Twitter has come under criticism for enabling and encouraging hostile communication , this article explores how users adopt a 'Twitter face' when navigating interactions on the platform. Extending Goffman's observation that face-work is applicable to both immediate and mediated interaction, this article provides a novel applicati...

While Erving Goffman’s renown stems from his pioneering efforts legitimising the study of the interaction order and everyday life, an appreciation for his conceptual contributions to the study of social media remains less understood. This could be due to the way Goffman articulated his ideas through the use of metaphor, a general reticence to syste...

Purpose-: To respond to the COVID-19 "infodemic" and combat fraud and misinformation about the virus, social media platforms coordinated with government healthcare agencies around the world to elevate authoritative content about the novel coronavirus. These public health authorities included national and global public health organisations, such as...

Drawing on Erving Goffman’s microsociology, this article explores the networking of music streaming technologies and their convergence with social media. Acts of privatized music listening that were once seamlessly secluded in back regions like the home and therefore removed from the view of others can now become presented more widely in front regi...

Disinformation research is increasingly concerned with the hierarchies and conditions that enable the strategic production of false and misleading content online. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was revealed that 12 influencers were responsible for a significant volume of antivaccine disinformation. This article examines how influencers use antiva...

This Research Note reports on an analysis of the speeches, media releases, opinion pieces, and transcripts of the utterances of both major party leaders, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, during the 2022 federal election campaign. We undertake a reflexive thematic analysis of these documents to identify the key messages of the two campaigns.

Introduction Music streaming represents a highly personalised, portable technology that enables a ubiquitous listening quality and transforms the relationship people have with music. It has implications for how music recordings can be engaged with and what people sense they can do with music. Streaming therefore expands the ability of users to infl...

In a time when music streaming has become the dominant mode of consuming music recordings, this book interrogates how users go about listening to music in their everyday lives in a context where streaming services are focused on not only the circulation of music for users but also the circulation of user data and attention. Drawing insights directl...

Music streaming services transform how users integrate music recordings throughout the everyday. Music platforms allow users to bring music in seamless and less seamless ways into a multitude of activities. Features such as playlists—both platform-made and user-created—as well as music streaming convergence with social media and other services enab...

This chapter explores music streaming as a type of connected social media technology that affords the display of streaming information and the presentation of desired identities to networked audiences. Music platforms converge with social media services and dating apps, providing users with the ability to display and interact with a user’s music st...

Music platforms allow users to share their own listening activity while also allowing these users to connect, view and interact with other users’ streaming. Users of streaming services must manage these dimensions of music platforms and respond to the networking of their music listening. This chapter examines the networked nature of music streaming...

Music streaming is configured and embedded across everyday life. Providing users with an array of auditory context states ready for use, streaming services aim to modulate and fit user-profiles and moments aimed at inducing engagement. But little is understood about how the seemingly ubiquitous music that streaming services offer as a soundtrack to...

This chapter examines the use of platform-generated playlists that feature prominently on streaming platforms. Comprising of editorial and personalised variants, platform-generated playlists supposedly offer users a seamless ‘lean-back’ consumer experience. Assembled by playlist editors and informed by algorithmic processes that flow into these pla...

This chapter examines how users configure their own user-made playlists and how this feature of music platforms now represents a central dimension of streaming cultures. Music streaming services allow users to interact and manage the immense depositories of music available through the organisation of their own playlists. Representing a type of cont...

Crowdfunding platforms remain understudied as conduits for ideological struggle. While other social media platforms may enable the expression of hateful and harmful ideas, crowdfunding can actively facilitate their enaction through financial support. In addressing such risks, crowdfunding platforms attempt to mitigate complicity but retain legitima...

Purpose To understand the impact of mobile social media use on absorption within the customer experience, and overall engagement with the physical service context, a qualitative research study was undertaken. In particular, this study aims to understand the impact of mobile technology use on service engagement by tourists. Design/methodology/appro...

In this article we examine the sonic framing of place. Our theoretical approach combines Goffman’s microsociology (and its sociology of music/sound studies off-shoots) with an account of sound in the urban atmospheres literature. Drawing on the work of French urban sociologist Jean-Paul Thibaud and associated work on sound in urban environments by...

This introduction positions the special issue by highlighting the inherent relationality of place as well as how place is not just an object of analysis but something that shapes thinking, writing and experiences of the world. We reflect on why sociology has found it somewhat more difficult than its social science counterparts to give place the cen...

In this article we examine the proliferation of anti-vaccine content on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ a case study approach to analyse the techniques used by 13 anti-vaccine influencers to promote vaccine refusal on Instagram for 19 months from January 2020 to July 2021. Our findings reveal that the maternal is strategically...

Tourism and hospitality service experiences are both delivered with and experienced amongst other individuals as part of the service setting. Understanding consumer perceptions of these shared experiences is essential for providers. Consumer recollection of these experiences, however, are sometimes limited. This paper explores the opportunity to us...

The COVID-19 crisis highlighted issues of trust in government and experts, as citizens were asked to accept restrictions on liberties in order to slow the spread of the virus. Based on a survey of 1992 Australians conducted in May 2020, this paper reports on the attitudes of Australians toward the responses of their State and Federal governments to...

Context collapse blurs the boundaries between public, private, and professional selves and has emerged as an important research focus in relation to vocational identity. However, the conditions under which context collapse occur have been empirically neglected in the literature. Utilizing Davis and Jurgenson’s theoretical framework of context colla...

Food cultures are shaped by the ubiquity of digital photography. Embedded in social media sites, such as Instagram, images of food are used in photographic exchanges to perform identity and interact with community. In a context of proliferating food media, an ethics of "clean eating"- dietary practice adhering to consuming "healthy" foods deemed to...

Social media have been central in informing people about the COVID-19 pandemic. They influence the ways in which information is perceived, communicated and shared online, especially with physical distancing measures in place. While these technologies have given people the opportunity to contribute to public discussions about COVID-19, the narrative...

In this article, we synthesize Goffman's microsociology with recent developments in fields such as aesthetics, geography, and urban studies labeled “atmosphere theory.” Our central rationale is if microsociology is to deepen its account of embodiment and the noncognitive it needs a theory of spatialized moods. In the second half, we develop our syn...

Digital technologies have altered the way that many people consume food. Whereas food was traditionally consumed in co-present situations, digital technologies function as ‘disembedding mechanisms’ that ‘lift out’ social relations from local contexts of interaction so they can be experienced across indefinite spans of time-space (Giddens, 1992, pp....

Despite the discussion of globalisation and the success of Korean boyband BTS, it is still the case that English language songs are far more popular in non-English speaking countries than are non-English songs in Anglophone countries.

In the digital era, there is a tendency to consider knowledge and its creation to be increasingly untethered from place. No longer limited by linguistic, cultural and spatial barriers, knowledge and its production can be acquired and shared with ease on a global scale. In this chapter, however, we contend that knowledge and its role in the contempo...

Professionally produced wedding videos are evocative artefacts. Capturing the ritual of the wedding, the wedding video stands as a postcard that showcases the conspicuous display of emotion that assumes a central place in the memorialization and indeed the very praxis of the modern wedding ritual. The role of music in the wedding video is crucial;...

Drawing upon Goffman's notion of the interaction order we propose that home and homeliness pertain to the degree to which we can control our auditory involvements with the world and with others. What we term "homely listening" concerns the use of music to make oneself feel at home, in some cases, through seclusion and immersion, and, in others, thr...

This article presents an account of the social media tourist gaze. It does this by reporting on a qualitative exploratory study that considers the use of photography and its dissemination on social media while participants stayed overnight at a zoological park. To examine the impact of photography and social media, our study separated participants...

Despite some contentions and ambivalences, the Western wedding retains a vaulted place in cultural imaginaries. However, little scholarship exists on wedding videography, despite holding rich insights regarding memorialisation of belonging. Accordingly, this content analysis of 132 videos explores their utterances, signifying artefacts and ritual d...

Drawing on qualitative interviews and extending insights provided by Erving Goffman (1983, 1971), this article argues that music plays a crucial role in the interaction order of retail environments. I suggest music permeates these locations of consumption; shoppers are presented as perceiving musical sounds as both “territorial offenses” and sounds...

In an era where digital and co‐present involvements become entangled, the role of face‐to‐face conversation now vies with mediated communication. Applying insights provided by Erving Goffman, we explore conversational interaction and consider how engrossing face‐to‐face conversation can be understood as a form of socialized trance. We explore how t...

Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting...

The selfie is a contemporary form of self-portraiture, representing a photographic image of the human face. The selfie is created for the purpose of reproduction and to communicate images visually with others from a distance. The proliferation of web 2.0 technologies and mobile smart phones enables users to generate and disseminate images at an unp...

We argue that sight and sound help to frame how we perceive the world and that focusing on sound is particularly central to any study of the messiness and noisiness of everyday life. Our notion of ‘framing’ is derived from authors such as Alfred Schutz, Gregory Bateson and Erving Go(man, although we argue that the social theorist Georg Simmel pione...

The concept of mobility seems to be sweeping across the humanities and social sciences. We argue that the close relationship between communication and movement is to some extent independent of specific communication technologies. We demonstrate this through the particular ‘knottings’ of music and physical/imaginative movement. We also suggest that...

The car is a room stimulating particular senses and emotions.(Urry, 2007, p. 127) This chapter explores practices associated with musical listening within the car. It embraces DeNora's approach to the social study of music in conjunction with symbolic interactionism. I focus on musical elements partnered with social interaction that commonly occur...