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People, Technology and Social Organization

Interactionist Studies of Everyday Life

edited by Dirk vom Lehn, Will Gibson and Natalia Ruiz-Junco

Table of Contents

1 Introduction by Dirk Vom Lehn, Will Gibson, and Natalia Ruiz-Junco

Abstract

The introduction explains the motivation for this book that is a continuation of a long-standing interactionist concern with the empirical exploration of the uses of technologies in people’s everyday lives. The chapter provides a brief overview of the current debates about technology in interactionist sociology. It discusses how technology supports the emergence of and features in, social relationships, how different members of the interactionist “family” – symbolic interactionists, social constructionists, and ethnomethodologists – explore the interweaving of technology with interaction, and how recent technological developments have encouraged studies of online identities, online communities, and online communication as well as the impact of the use of technology on issues such as power and social hierarchies and the formation and negotiations of identity. The chapter ends with a brief summary of the content of the book.

Part 1 Power and Control

2 Being Family and Friends to Abused Women – A Qualitative Study of Digital Media in Intimate Partner Violence by Susanne Boethius and Malin Åkerström

ABSTRACT In research on intimate partner violence, most studies focus on those who are abused. In thischapter, we focus on how families, friends, relatives, and employers of abuse victims interactthrough the use of smartphones, social media platforms, apps, and other internet-connecteddevices. We discuss how digital technology is integrated into the lives of domestic abusevictims and their social networks: friends, relatives, family, and coworkers. Digital technologyhas increased the reach of abuse in close relationships, extending the troubles beyond theborders of the couple immediately involved and providing new ways and opportunities forperpetrators to be present even when physically absent.

3 News, Sex, and the Fight Between Corporate Control and Human Communication Online by Michael Dellwing

Abstract

Centralization, decentralization, hobbyism and monetization have been in perpetual conflict over dominance on the internet for decades. Two domains stand in the center of this fight: news and sex. While sex was long a domain of hobbyist interaction, news was long a domain of centralized, corporate aggregation. Today, subversive use of existing monetized services blur the lines, like decentralized news content on youtube channels as well as nude content on hub sites or onlyfans, which retain decentralization at the expense of introducing monetization. 

These seemingly distant fields are connected: we are witnessing a fight over corporate and centralized control of online spaces, fought with weapons of moral panics. Corporate and state actors show increasing hostility against all forms of decentralized online spaces, using the narrative of “disinformation” to delegitimize and create moral panics over decentralized actors in news and using the narrative of “exploitation” to create moral panics over hobbyist sexual interaction. The former fight has led to demonetization and algorithmic hiding of decentralized news on YouTube; the latter has felled sex- and body-positive online nudity spaces, notably Tumblr in December 2018. In turn, remaining hobbyist corners of online sex spaces show increasing hostility against monetized online sex, which is in large parts infighting between different non-corporate actors, and acts as a diversion from the larger subversive power of online sex. Ground zero for this fight is the r/gonewild subreddit, a mainstay of informal nude self-presentation on reddit. The chapter reconstructs the topography of these conflicts by both reconstructing the moral panics.

4 Terminal Violence: Online Interactions and Infra-Humanization by Simon Gottschalk

Abstract

Combining hypermodern theory and symbolic interactionism, I use vignettes of routine interactions with terminals and with others through terminals to critically examine five of their interrelated features: (1) solicitations overload, (2) the mobilization for instantaneity, urgency, and visibility, (3) digital labor exploitation, (4) ontological disruptions, and (5) silencing. These features require users to adjust their emotional dispositions and mental habits, and those adjustments foster infra-humanization. Whereas infra-humanization is typically explained as an interpersonal process that originates in human agents, the vignettes illustrate that it can also be an intrapersonal experience that originates in non-human ones. In the conclusion, I suggest the need to develop the concept and experience of infra-humanization as a perspective that can help us to critically examine the effects of terminal interaction and resist them.          

5 Summing Up the Criminal Case Online David Wästerfors

Abstract

Online engagement with criminal cases is often interpreted in either punitive or crowdsourcing terms, but interactonist and ethnomethodological analyses can disclose other and more fundamental aspects. This chapter looks closely at a particular practice among posters on the Swedish platform Flashback: that of summing up the discussion ‘so far’. To sum up is a delicate and vulnerable act of rhetoric in this setting, often requested to create order but also criticized for resulting in errors, thereby seen as deflecting rather than reflecting what has been posted previously. By the help of Garfinkel and Sacks’ conceptualization of ‘formulations’ – a common way for conversationalists to comment on and demarcate their actions within an ongoing conversation – the chapter exemplifies the indexical, reflexive and accountable character of online summaries in the Flashback community. Even though summaries can be viewed as a cleansing and ordering device, they might as well expand rather than end the discussion. The author argues that interactions around summaries of crime cases illustrate the online sleuthing culture and how its internal social control as well as meaning production constitute an online setting.

Part 2 Identity and Community

6 Organizing Subcultural Identities on Social Media: Instagram Infrastructures and User Actions by J. Patrick Williams and Samuel Judah

Abstract

This chapter contributes to interactionist scholarship on the intersection of social media and identity through exploring aspects of contemporary subcultural identification on Instagram. Focusing on the straightedge subculture, we pay close attention to users’ productive and consumptive behaviors as embodied in vernacular visual culture. Our particular interest is in how the subcultural and the technological are intertwined in people’s everyday practices. To study this, we focus on the observable vernacular practices through which subcultural identities are made recognizable and intelligible by others through interactions on Instagram. We first describe how Instagram’s infrastructure affords users’ identity expressions, as well as researchers’ analysis of them, through metapictures. We then look at posts as actions that portray subcultural identities visually through photos, narratively through captions, and hypertextually through hashtags. Our focus on action highlights the discursive and constructed nature of subcultural identities.        

7 A Queer Kind of Stigma by Christopher T. Conner and Sarah Ann Sullivan

Abstract

Using a multi-sited multiple methods qualitative research design (including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and analysis of dating profiles) we explore the popular gay dating app “Grindr.” This paper examines how users engage in stigma management techniques in the online world, and how some members reproduce the stigmatization process through their interactions. We also find new forms of stigma that exist within the app through the use of blocking and non-responses—users who were found undesirable preferred being blocked rather than ignored, due to the lack of information provided by those who chose not to respond.  Moreover, while Goffman’s (1963) concept of stigma calls for us to consider how groups manage their stigmatized identities, his analysis of the concept does not explore in-group stigma of those already stigmatized. This paper extends the concepts of homonormativity showing how users reify the concept through a cultural system erected on hierarchies of sexual capital. As other scholars have argued, this process also exemplifies how toxic techno cultures are produced in digital environments through a complex relationship between user interactions and app structure (Massanari 2015). Finally, this paper extends Goffman’s theory of stigma by showing how users make sense of the structural constraints of the app and navigate stigma in the digital world.

8 Symbolic Separation: The Amish and 21st-Century Technologies by Corey J. Colyer, Rachel E. Stein, and Katie E. Corcoran

Abstract

America’s strict Anabaptist communities (such as the Amish) remain a curiosity in the twenty-first century. Their commitments to modesty and technological simplicity mark them counter-cultural, drawing curious onlookers. This chapter considers how members of these strict Anabaptist communities use, reject, and adapt certain technologies to conform with cultural expectations. By regulating technological practice, these communities establish “cultural fences” (Kraybill 2004; Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt 2013). This chapter examines how Amish (and members of other Plain Anabaptist communities) embrace or reject technology. We argue that these dynamics follow the principles of negotiated order (Strauss 1978; Maines 1982). Drawing on Donald Kraybill’s (2001) suggestion that The Amish “negotiate with modernity,” we show how adopting, rejecting, and adapting technology establish symbolic boundaries of Amish identity.

Part 3 Practices and Technology

9 Receiving Phone Calls During Medical Consultations: The Production of Interactional Space for Technology Use by Aleksandr Shirokov, Iuliia Avgustis, and Andrei Korbut

Abstract

Receiving and making calls requires participants to coordinate phone’s use with different ongoing activities. This is especially relevant in institutional settings such as doctor–patient interaction since the participants have a particular task at hand. Upon hearing a call or feeling the mobile phone’s vibration, neither patients nor doctors pick up the phone immediately. They systematically wait for the end of the turn or use various methods depending on the interactional environment to finish their or other’s turn and only then answer the call. In this chapter, we explore how doctors and patients are jointly producing slots for answering the incoming call. Our data consists of 151 video recordings of consultations with various medical professionals collected at a private clinic in Moscow, Russia, in 2018–2019. Data are analyzed using the method of Conversation Analysis. We outline a certain pattern in the way phone calls are handled in medical consultations: doctors tend to initiate the suspension of the conversation with patients and transition to the telephone conversation during their turns.

10 Non-Talking Heads: How Architectures of Digital Copresence Shape Question-Silence-Answer-Sequences in University Teaching by Kenan Hochuli and Johanna Jud

Abstract

This chapter focuses on question-answer sequences in online university teaching. We analyze how lecturers and students organize both individual and interactional conduct after a question has been asked but no answer has been given yet for two different configurations of interaction on digital videoconferencing platforms: One is the “face wall” of Zoom, where participants find themselves in a situation of polyexponation, i.e., a technically increased possibility of mutual perception. The other is Adobe Connect, a platform on which the lecturer communicates auditorily while students use the “chat” function to communicate. The analysis demonstrates how the ways in which participants establish and negotiate copresence within these environments create a different kind of conditional relevance for responding to each other’s contribution. Whereas silent students remain invisible on Adobe Connect, participants on Zoom become noticeable as non-talking heads on the face wall. This chapter’s analysis of short video sequences offers a detailed insight into the unfolding of what has become everyday human interaction in online environments. The data are in German with an English Translation.

11 The Role of Cursor Movements in a Screen-Based Video Game Interaction by Lydia Heiden, Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre, and Matthieu Quignard

Abstract

In a computer-mediated interaction, when participants are not physically co-present, certain resources are no longer available for interaction while others appear, according to the affordances of the technological environment. In this study, we investigate one particular digital tool, the cursor, in the context of a shared interface where cursor movements are visible to one co-participant. We show that the cursor is not only used to “interact” with the digital environment (via clicks) but that cursor movements, which cannot be interpreted by the machine, are oriented towards the co-participants and may have interactional functions. We describe three different kinds of these movements (straight pointing movement, swaying/circling movement and “moving away”) which, depending on who is doing them and in which sequential position they occur, contribute to the sequential organization of the interaction: as a display of attention, as a device for turn-holding/turn-claiming/leaving the floor or as a particular resource in argumentation.

12 Problems with the Digital Public Encounter by Daniela Boehringer

Abstract

The “public encounter” (Goodsell 1981) in the welfare state has massively changed over the past decades. In many cases, it is unnecessary to meet face-to-face with ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980) to manage social matters such as unemployment, because self-service applications are ready to hand. How citizens use these applications and how they are “made at home” in the everyday (Sacks 1992) still needs to be uncovered. This question will be considered from a conversation-analytic perspective. The website with job offers run by the German Public Employment Service (PES) is an example in this regard. After describing the website and the features of its use, the paper analyses real-time video data of members searching for a job on that site. The main focus of analysis are the moments of irritation and how the users manage them, are the paper concludes with reflections on the (new?) nature of the digital public encounter.

13 Smartphone Tooling: Achieving Perception by Positioning a Smartphone for Object Scanning by Louise Lüchow, Brian L. Due, and Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen

Abstract

People have been using tools for thousands of years. These practices of “tooling” have been described as having a “mechanical effect” on an object (e.g., chopping wood). In this chapter we propose that tooling may also have an “informational effect”. To make this argument we explore how visually impaired people (VIP) carry out physical shopping in grocery stores using their smartphones and the SeeingAI application (app). Using a smartphone for scanning means using it as a tool, hence the chapter title “smartphone tooling”. The data consists of a collection of cases in which a VIP is using the smartphone and app to scan products, and the app then provides audible information. The chapter is based on video ethnographic methodology and ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis. The chapter contributes to studies of tools and object-centred sequences by showing how VIPs achieve perception of relevant object information in and through a practice we suggest calling “positioning for object scanning”. This is configured by three distinct actions: 1) aligning, 2) adjusting, and 3) inspecting. Studying the practices of VIPs enables us to establish new understandings about the accomplishment of spatial relations between body, object, and technology in situ, without visual perception. This research contributes to EM/CA studies of perception as practical action, visual impairment, and object-centred sequences. 

Part 4 Reflections on Interactionist Studies of Technologies

14 Where Next for Interactionist Studies of Technology? by Dirk Vom Lehn, Will Gibson, and Natalia Ruiz-Junco

Abstract

In the concluding chapter, the editors of the book reflect on the chapters and their contribution to interactionist theory and method, and provide some suggestions for future directions of interactionist research. They highlight that the studies reported in this book continue the traditions of enquiry and critique regarding established views of technology and its relationship

to society. They also point out that the studies make use of novel, often image-based and video-based research methods to explore technology in everyday life. In summary, they argue that interactionism continues to provide a critical set of approaches for the study of technology in everyday life.