The Social and Moral Order in Talk;

The documentary method of interpretation was my assigned definition in the tutorial and it’s almost paradoxical nature is lending me to write about it for this week’s blog. I managed to grasp the analogy towards the end of the lesson, but seeing as I had difficulty I wanted to alter the analogy and explain it in my own words here for others that struggled with the concept!

Think of the people you know as draws in the (hopefully large) filing cabinet that is your brain. When you think about a person you know, you open that person’s draw and view the files or documents associated with that person. They may be memories, ideas or labels you have for this person. Each person’s files will be different and each person’s filing cabinet will be different. The documents in each person’s draw are constructed on the basis of your experience with them.

You have an idea about who a person is every time you make a draw for them. If you meet someone new and they’re particularly friendly to you, the documents in their draw will reflect that you feel they are a nice person. Once this hypothesis is made, each subsequent file/document (meeting/experience) you have for a person will alter their draw or your overall opinion about that person.

Your documenting system works in a cyclic fashion. You meet a person and develop an understanding within yourself of who they are. You put the file in their draw and future experiences dictate the future direction of the documents in the draw. If the next time you see the friendly person you just met they are helping an old lady cross the street you will attribute this to their friendliness and this is the interpretation aspect of the documenting system.

Having written this out, I don’t know it makes it any simpler than the documentary analogy, but in my head, the documenting system seems to make more sense.

xoxo Gossip Mitch

p.s. At some point in the future I might try and justify the completely irrelevant gossip girl reference/signature because right now I just don't know...