Interactionism in the age of ubiquitous telecommunication

ABSTRACT

The following paper aims to engage recent reconsiderations of Gibson’s theory of affordances and Goffman’s concept of copresence in the context of the material turn – especially in the form expressed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. The paper’s central claim is that microsociology cannot avoid engaging material turn theory. It will be argued that contemporary attempts to reconceptualize classical microsociological frameworks set out on a path that invariably leads to problems investigated by thinkers like Latour: as communication technology advances, the importance of mediated interaction grows, prompting attempts to update interactionism for non-face-to-face interactions such as teleconferencing, social networks and virtual reality. These new social situations are then made sense of in terms of the way these technologies have a transformative effect on interaction. This effect ‒ be it a modifier of the temporal structure of the interaction, or of the interactional capacity of the agents ‒ is argued to always lead back to a central question of the material turn: if technology is a static transformational effect, where is its agency? Or, conversely: if a technological object’s effect is uniform across all external factors, how is that not a form of technological determinism? The paper investigates whether attempts to avoid determinism manage to keep Latourian metaphysics at bay. The paper concludes by suggesting that contemporary social theory must work towards a middle way that does not gloss over important contributions of material turn theorists whilst also not ignoring the importance of considering human political responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Ubiquitous telecommunication
• framework extension
• social situation
• actor-network theory
• microsociology
• mediation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nils Klowait is a microsociologist researching technologically mediated interaction and human–computer-interaction within a conversation- and frame-analytic framework. Specific research interests include studies of virtual reality, autonomous conversational agents as well as methodological considerations of emerging sociological and social-psychological schools. He currently teaches Academic Writing and Introduction to Social Theory on undergraduate levels, in addition to a special postgraduate course on Digital Microsociology. [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Nils Oliver Klowait http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7347-099X

Notes

1 For a more detailed treatment of the semiotic components of Goffmanian frame analysis, see Vakhshtain, 2011.

2 Other notable examples of reconsidering key Goffmanian concepts include disattendance and privacy in the digital age (Ford, 2011; Marx, 1999), self-presentation in computer-mediated communication (Walther, 1996), identity construction on social networking sites (Tufekci, 2008; Zhao et al., 2008), personal websites (Schau & Gilly, 2003), and ICTs in general (Lamb & Kling, 2003), facework on Facebook (Selwyn, 2009), ‘giving shows’ in online games (Martey, Stromer-Galley, Banks, Wu, & Consalvo, 2014), dramatic performances in e-dating (Hardey, 2008) and electronically enhanced memorial services (Gotved, 2014), online emotion management (Miller & Mundey, 2014; Robinson, 2017) and online stigma management (Lageson & Maruna, 2017).

3 For perspectives that question the concept of ‘unmediated environments’, see Hayles, 2008 and Rey & Boesel, 2014.

4 A related line of inquiry concerns the question of the embodiment of social interaction. See Goodwin, 2000; Crossley, 2001; Shilling, 2012. For reviews, see Nevile, 2015; and Mondada, 2016.