ABSTRACTS
Elena Esposito, Bielefeld University & University of Bologna
Face-to-Face or interface ?
Face-to-face interaction, as explored in sociology, is the first form of communication for every participant and exists in all societies, but now it is not necessarily the primary form of communication. This contribution addresses its peculiarities and discusses its advantages and limitations comparing them with the notion of interface as point of interaction between human users and computer systems. Should interface be considered social interaction, i.e., communication? Although recent developments in digital information processing can be described as an unprecedented form of “artificial communication”, this communication is different from face-to-face interaction for some fundamental shortcomings and some relevant advantages. Artificial communication is not artificial interaction.
Jack Katz, UCLA
The life and times of the digital self
Billions of people now routinely express themselves in digitized forms, through using cell and smart phones, engaging with social media, making purchases and investments through the internet, creating written and photographic representations of themselves, working via computer-mediated actions, reproducing and commenting upon others’ digitized expressions, etc. How should researchers try to identify the social consequences of the many varied activities in which people produce a digitized (bitstream) self? The common approach has been to draw on pre-existing substantive social theories (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Bourdieu) and to organize inquiry around moral/political issues, such as economic exploitation, threats to privacy, and damage to the quality of personal and interpersonal life. Given the myriad ways that the digital self has changed social life across the globe, we might consider the lines of inquiry that would grow from taking a more open intellectual strategy based on social ontology, or the three processes that people engage as they live any moment of social life: interaction; sequencing; and the aesthetic and emotional embodiment of situated action in which people sense how the immediate situation of action here and now is meaningful in their ongoing relationships with others elsewhere and at other times. I will illustrate how various concepts and distinctions in the interactionist and phenomenological histories of sociology enable us to specify a range of changes in the self as people have shifted to relating to others in digitized forms.
Giancarlo Corsi, UNIMORE
Interactional structure resolution through the public sphere. Historical cases and contemporary problems
Sociology and historiography have demonstrated for several decades that some fundamental structures in traditional societies, which were based on physical presence, have been dismantled during the period of transition to modernity. The most evident examples can be seen in the political sphere, where the introduction of the printing press led to a shift in the centrality of the court and the interactions that took place there. This resulted in a shift from dealing with a select, physically present audience to engaging with a broader, more anonymous public, since then called public opinion. This also meant a shift away from the classical forms of rivalry, such as the courtier and the friend/enemy scheme. Some scholars, starting from the seminal work of J. Habermas, showed the dissolution of traditional forms of interaction and their recombination in new forms, both in administrative institutions and in the public sphere. Similar developments can also be observed in other areas, such as the economy. The question now is what will happen when new forms of communication, such as social media and digital platforms, emerge after the advent of print and television? What are the consequences for public opinion if communication takes place mostly on digital media and only residually in interactions?
Mathieu Berger, University of Louvain
Interaction fatigue in democratic practices
The exhaustion of participatory democracy, which has been tried everywhere over the last thirty years with varying degrees of conviction and commitment, reveals among other things an interaction fatigue. I have proposed the term "demophobia" to denote this progressive aversion, on the part of elected officials and public servants, to the organization of public meetings, to face-to-face encounters with citizens, to their speaking out. Based on the ethnography of city councils and town meetings in Europe and the USA, I will show how this aversion emerges and expresses itself, first in its milder form, through a slight distortion of interactional expectations in public exchanges with citizen participants ; but also in its much more severe, or extreme, forms. Finally, we will look at the methodological, technological or legal strategies used by government officials and facilitators to implement a democratic process while alleviating, mitigating, or simply bypassing democratic interaction.
David Stark, Columbia University
Megachurch: Belong before you believe
With 3 large outdoor-movie-size screens, 5 cameras, a darkened space, strobe lights, and loud music it seems we are in a nightclub. But it’s Sunday morning and we’re not in Berlin. The setting is Life Church, the largest megachurch in Oklahoma City and the fifth largest in the United States. The senior minister’s message has just been simulcast to more than 15,000 congregants on the screens of seven other Life Church “campuses” and perhaps to as many more on their monitors or smart phone screens in the online simulcast. Prayers are in PowerPoint. Worship, like other forms of ritual, involves the synchronization of bodies, motions, and emotions. Does megachurch worship bypass interaction? Perhaps worship is not interactive. But what about other aspects of church membership and the church experience?
Pieter Vanden Broeck, Columbia University & UNIMORE
Algorithms in the classroom
Ever since education moved into schools, instruction has been considered the purview of teachers and their pupils. This contribution examines how their role complementarity holds up when algorithms enter the classroom. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in elementary schools, I study how teachers relate to the digital tools they are increasingly expected to use. How are the defining features of pedagogical interaction reorganized to orchestrate its progression with other means? This translation act, I shall argue, hinges on the ability to reconfigure existing classroom roles. With this assertion, I aim to complement the current literature on algorithmic management, which has so far understood this evolution as either a surge of digital surveillance or the unwanted interference of automatons that threaten to strip professional care of its humanity. In contrast, I highlight how teachers experiment with algorithmically driven instruction, hoping to expand the remits of what or who can be taught.
Christian Licoppe,Télécom Paris
Bypassing face-to-face interaction? The case of video communication
During and after the pandemics, video-mediated communication (VMC) has appeared as a resource to bypass face-to-face interaction when the possibility of convening in the latter mode were severely constrained. Using a particular type of interactional practice, noticing (both in its perceptual and verbal dimensions) as an entry point, we try to show how VMC is not a by-pass or a substitute, but a communicative ecology in its own right, with specific affordances. Eventually, we explore potential categorical trouble occurring at the articulations of the private and public domains which are enabled by VMC.
Camille Girard-Chanudet, EHESS Paris
Beyond automation. The impacts of algorithmic justice on expertise and responsibility chains
Since 2016, a wave of AI legal tech startups emerged in the French judicial sector. These startups develop tools that leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze case law data, raising numerous concerns within the legal community and beyond. Critics warn of the dangers of automating and disintermediating justice, often invoking the alarming concept of "robot judges." However, my fieldwork investigation into the production and use of legal AI reveals a more nuanced reality. By examining algorithms within their specific production and application contexts, this analysis presents AI as a catalyst for shifts in legitimacy and expertise. Rather than automating justice, "predictive" algorithms provide non-judicial actors, such as insurance companies, with a new form of legitimacy, which I term "algorithmic." This study suggests that AI might contribute to the de-judicialization of certain legal disputes, rather than simply automating judicial processes.
Ugo Corte, Univeristy of Stavanger
Fun as an Interaction Ritual
This talk starts by introducing Michael Farrell´s idea of collaborative circles (2001): groups that blend the informal dynamics of a friendship group with the instrumental aims of a workgroup. Next, furthering ideas on the “sociology of fun” by Fine and Corte (2017; 2022), and building on Randall Collins´work (2004), it conceptualizes fun as a specific kind of interaction ritual (Corte 2022). The presentation ends by questioning whether the usefulness of “bypassing interaction” may depend on different types of interactions and their expected outcome.
Pierre-Nicolas Oberhauser, University of Lausanne
Why medical practitioners would rather avoid some therapeutic interactions. Clues from Goffman
My contribution to this workshop will discuss why doctors may find their encounters with patients difficult or downright unbearable – and thus wish to bypass or skip therapeutic interactions. My approach will be mostly Goffmanian, with a few touches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. I will start by giving some context and describing the data I worked with. I will then present a general argument about what makes some interactions with patients so unpleasant for physicians, followed by two shorter empirical illustrations. This analysis will feature what I hope are “luminous descriptions” (Katz, 2001).
Dominik Hofmann, Bielefeld University
Streamlined interaction in Molecular Tumor Boards. The widening gap between medical research and care
The presentation explores the role of algorithmic procedures in the implementation of Precision Medicine (PM), guided by the exemplary case of Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs). Having emerged from the confluence of traditional hospital Tumor Boards and the increasing molecularization of medicine, these interdisciplinary expert panels issue treatment recommendations for cancer patients for whom baseline therapy has failed. Almost all their tasks implicitly rely on a range of advanced algorithmic tools. Yet the crucial contribution of algorithms in all stages of the processing of molecular data is neither acknowledged nor mentioned. While, on the one hand, the use of knowledgebases and algorithmic predictions for diagnosis and treatment preselection leads to a bypassing of traditional forms of medical interaction, on the other hand a new format for expert interaction is created in the form of MTB sessions. Drawing on our empirical observation of the deliberations in such sessions, combined with interviews conducted with MTB participants and administrators, it is argued that hiding the algorithmic aspects behind formal interaction is precisely a function these institutions fulfill. Instead of being the open negotiation between various fields of expertise as which it is commonly presented, the MTB session is highly streamlined and geared to confirming a pre-prepared recommendation. The mediation through flattened MTB interaction provides algorithmically processed data with the legitimacy required to be implemented in medical decisions. By arguing thus, a contribution is also made to the debate about the changing relationship between research and clinical in the realm of PM. Contrary to the widespread assumption of a blurring boundary between both fields, the claim is made that the intensification of contacts and exchanges among research endeavors and clinical operations makes the separation between the two fields increasingly sharp. As a consequence, there is a need for new forms of translation, which are accomplished by MTBs.
Face-to-Face or interface ?
Face-to-face interaction, as explored in sociology, is the first form of communication for every participant and exists in all societies, but now it is not necessarily the primary form of communication. This contribution addresses its peculiarities and discusses its advantages and limitations comparing them with the notion of interface as point of interaction between human users and computer systems. Should interface be considered social interaction, i.e., communication? Although recent developments in digital information processing can be described as an unprecedented form of “artificial communication”, this communication is different from face-to-face interaction for some fundamental shortcomings and some relevant advantages. Artificial communication is not artificial interaction.
Jack Katz, UCLA
The life and times of the digital self
Billions of people now routinely express themselves in digitized forms, through using cell and smart phones, engaging with social media, making purchases and investments through the internet, creating written and photographic representations of themselves, working via computer-mediated actions, reproducing and commenting upon others’ digitized expressions, etc. How should researchers try to identify the social consequences of the many varied activities in which people produce a digitized (bitstream) self? The common approach has been to draw on pre-existing substantive social theories (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Bourdieu) and to organize inquiry around moral/political issues, such as economic exploitation, threats to privacy, and damage to the quality of personal and interpersonal life. Given the myriad ways that the digital self has changed social life across the globe, we might consider the lines of inquiry that would grow from taking a more open intellectual strategy based on social ontology, or the three processes that people engage as they live any moment of social life: interaction; sequencing; and the aesthetic and emotional embodiment of situated action in which people sense how the immediate situation of action here and now is meaningful in their ongoing relationships with others elsewhere and at other times. I will illustrate how various concepts and distinctions in the interactionist and phenomenological histories of sociology enable us to specify a range of changes in the self as people have shifted to relating to others in digitized forms.
Giancarlo Corsi, UNIMORE
Interactional structure resolution through the public sphere. Historical cases and contemporary problems
Sociology and historiography have demonstrated for several decades that some fundamental structures in traditional societies, which were based on physical presence, have been dismantled during the period of transition to modernity. The most evident examples can be seen in the political sphere, where the introduction of the printing press led to a shift in the centrality of the court and the interactions that took place there. This resulted in a shift from dealing with a select, physically present audience to engaging with a broader, more anonymous public, since then called public opinion. This also meant a shift away from the classical forms of rivalry, such as the courtier and the friend/enemy scheme. Some scholars, starting from the seminal work of J. Habermas, showed the dissolution of traditional forms of interaction and their recombination in new forms, both in administrative institutions and in the public sphere. Similar developments can also be observed in other areas, such as the economy. The question now is what will happen when new forms of communication, such as social media and digital platforms, emerge after the advent of print and television? What are the consequences for public opinion if communication takes place mostly on digital media and only residually in interactions?
Mathieu Berger, University of Louvain
Interaction fatigue in democratic practices
The exhaustion of participatory democracy, which has been tried everywhere over the last thirty years with varying degrees of conviction and commitment, reveals among other things an interaction fatigue. I have proposed the term "demophobia" to denote this progressive aversion, on the part of elected officials and public servants, to the organization of public meetings, to face-to-face encounters with citizens, to their speaking out. Based on the ethnography of city councils and town meetings in Europe and the USA, I will show how this aversion emerges and expresses itself, first in its milder form, through a slight distortion of interactional expectations in public exchanges with citizen participants ; but also in its much more severe, or extreme, forms. Finally, we will look at the methodological, technological or legal strategies used by government officials and facilitators to implement a democratic process while alleviating, mitigating, or simply bypassing democratic interaction.
David Stark, Columbia University
Megachurch: Belong before you believe
With 3 large outdoor-movie-size screens, 5 cameras, a darkened space, strobe lights, and loud music it seems we are in a nightclub. But it’s Sunday morning and we’re not in Berlin. The setting is Life Church, the largest megachurch in Oklahoma City and the fifth largest in the United States. The senior minister’s message has just been simulcast to more than 15,000 congregants on the screens of seven other Life Church “campuses” and perhaps to as many more on their monitors or smart phone screens in the online simulcast. Prayers are in PowerPoint. Worship, like other forms of ritual, involves the synchronization of bodies, motions, and emotions. Does megachurch worship bypass interaction? Perhaps worship is not interactive. But what about other aspects of church membership and the church experience?
Pieter Vanden Broeck, Columbia University & UNIMORE
Algorithms in the classroom
Ever since education moved into schools, instruction has been considered the purview of teachers and their pupils. This contribution examines how their role complementarity holds up when algorithms enter the classroom. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in elementary schools, I study how teachers relate to the digital tools they are increasingly expected to use. How are the defining features of pedagogical interaction reorganized to orchestrate its progression with other means? This translation act, I shall argue, hinges on the ability to reconfigure existing classroom roles. With this assertion, I aim to complement the current literature on algorithmic management, which has so far understood this evolution as either a surge of digital surveillance or the unwanted interference of automatons that threaten to strip professional care of its humanity. In contrast, I highlight how teachers experiment with algorithmically driven instruction, hoping to expand the remits of what or who can be taught.
Christian Licoppe,Télécom Paris
Bypassing face-to-face interaction? The case of video communication
During and after the pandemics, video-mediated communication (VMC) has appeared as a resource to bypass face-to-face interaction when the possibility of convening in the latter mode were severely constrained. Using a particular type of interactional practice, noticing (both in its perceptual and verbal dimensions) as an entry point, we try to show how VMC is not a by-pass or a substitute, but a communicative ecology in its own right, with specific affordances. Eventually, we explore potential categorical trouble occurring at the articulations of the private and public domains which are enabled by VMC.
Camille Girard-Chanudet, EHESS Paris
Beyond automation. The impacts of algorithmic justice on expertise and responsibility chains
Since 2016, a wave of AI legal tech startups emerged in the French judicial sector. These startups develop tools that leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze case law data, raising numerous concerns within the legal community and beyond. Critics warn of the dangers of automating and disintermediating justice, often invoking the alarming concept of "robot judges." However, my fieldwork investigation into the production and use of legal AI reveals a more nuanced reality. By examining algorithms within their specific production and application contexts, this analysis presents AI as a catalyst for shifts in legitimacy and expertise. Rather than automating justice, "predictive" algorithms provide non-judicial actors, such as insurance companies, with a new form of legitimacy, which I term "algorithmic." This study suggests that AI might contribute to the de-judicialization of certain legal disputes, rather than simply automating judicial processes.
Ugo Corte, Univeristy of Stavanger
Fun as an Interaction Ritual
This talk starts by introducing Michael Farrell´s idea of collaborative circles (2001): groups that blend the informal dynamics of a friendship group with the instrumental aims of a workgroup. Next, furthering ideas on the “sociology of fun” by Fine and Corte (2017; 2022), and building on Randall Collins´work (2004), it conceptualizes fun as a specific kind of interaction ritual (Corte 2022). The presentation ends by questioning whether the usefulness of “bypassing interaction” may depend on different types of interactions and their expected outcome.
Pierre-Nicolas Oberhauser, University of Lausanne
Why medical practitioners would rather avoid some therapeutic interactions. Clues from Goffman
My contribution to this workshop will discuss why doctors may find their encounters with patients difficult or downright unbearable – and thus wish to bypass or skip therapeutic interactions. My approach will be mostly Goffmanian, with a few touches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. I will start by giving some context and describing the data I worked with. I will then present a general argument about what makes some interactions with patients so unpleasant for physicians, followed by two shorter empirical illustrations. This analysis will feature what I hope are “luminous descriptions” (Katz, 2001).
Dominik Hofmann, Bielefeld University
Streamlined interaction in Molecular Tumor Boards. The widening gap between medical research and care
The presentation explores the role of algorithmic procedures in the implementation of Precision Medicine (PM), guided by the exemplary case of Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs). Having emerged from the confluence of traditional hospital Tumor Boards and the increasing molecularization of medicine, these interdisciplinary expert panels issue treatment recommendations for cancer patients for whom baseline therapy has failed. Almost all their tasks implicitly rely on a range of advanced algorithmic tools. Yet the crucial contribution of algorithms in all stages of the processing of molecular data is neither acknowledged nor mentioned. While, on the one hand, the use of knowledgebases and algorithmic predictions for diagnosis and treatment preselection leads to a bypassing of traditional forms of medical interaction, on the other hand a new format for expert interaction is created in the form of MTB sessions. Drawing on our empirical observation of the deliberations in such sessions, combined with interviews conducted with MTB participants and administrators, it is argued that hiding the algorithmic aspects behind formal interaction is precisely a function these institutions fulfill. Instead of being the open negotiation between various fields of expertise as which it is commonly presented, the MTB session is highly streamlined and geared to confirming a pre-prepared recommendation. The mediation through flattened MTB interaction provides algorithmically processed data with the legitimacy required to be implemented in medical decisions. By arguing thus, a contribution is also made to the debate about the changing relationship between research and clinical in the realm of PM. Contrary to the widespread assumption of a blurring boundary between both fields, the claim is made that the intensification of contacts and exchanges among research endeavors and clinical operations makes the separation between the two fields increasingly sharp. As a consequence, there is a need for new forms of translation, which are accomplished by MTBs.