Why the Internet Makes Buying a Car Less Loathsome: How Technologies Change Role Relations

Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a two-year period in two car dealerships, this paper employs role theory and a dramaturgical analysis of sales encounters to show how the internet has changed the relationship between car salesmen and their customers. The paper explores why Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to analyzing encounters provides a way of analyzing technologically occasioned changes in the interaction order of a work system that allows students to grapple more holistically yet systematically with the social and material aspects of such change.