Social Interaction

Considerable scholarly discussion has been given to the idea that we are moving toward a state of “posthumanism.” This essay examines some possible implications of a posthuman existence, specifically as it relates to that most basic of human needs—sexuality. I explore the spiritual aspects of sexuality to see what is lost and what is gained in technologically mediated forms of sexuality. To that end, I consider the interplay between sexual behavior and our conceptions of the sacred, how technologies are changing our views of—and realities concerning—our bodies, and the potential for a sacred posthuman sexuality.

""Wo immer das "Paradigma der Kausalität" verlassen wird, scheint der Abschied von Wissenschaft nahe und lyrische und metaphorische Sprechweisen erreicht. Unterschlagen wird dabei, dass der Begriff der "Kausalität" auch in akademischen Verwendungen der Form nach zumeist noch eine Hyponoia darstellt. Bis heute wird Kausalität dogmatisch verbunden mit der spezifischen Episteme, wie sie die sozio- technischen Logiken des mechanisch-industriellen Zeitalters kennzeichnet; sie meint in gängigen kulturwissenschaftlichen Beschreibungen immer noch einseitige, determinierende und hierachisch- lineare Verursachung: die aristotelische Logik, wie McLuhan in "Das resonierende Intervall" kritisch vermerkt. Als Alternative erscheint vielen nur der Ansatz "systemischer" Verursachung, welcher immer von einer vorausgesetzten, externen Kontrolle (Beobachtung) ausgeht.
Dagegen greifen neuere Ansätze der STS in ihren Annäherungen an Aktuer-Netzwerke und sozio- technische Räume systematisch auf die Idee resonierender Verhältnisse zurück. Sie schliessen so an einen oft vergessenen Ausgangsimpuls der Medientheorie an, der vor allem in der Entdeckung der elektrifizierten, "lebendigen" Raumlogiken der techno-medialen Moderne bestand, und sich von mechanisch-industriellen und linear-textuellen Logiken weg und zu offen interagierenden, dynamischen und bi-direktionalen Verhältnissen orientierte. Konzepte wie Ubiquitious Interactive Computing und Ambient Technology sind, wie sich leicht zeigen läßt, technoforme, aber aktuell hoch wirksame Marken im Zusammenhang mit diesen neuen, greifbar gewordenen Räumen der "digitalen Kultur". Doch wo die Ersetzung einer alten Doxa von Kausalität durch eine neue, nicht weniger technik-affirmative droht ("interaktivität!"), gilt es genauer auf kritische Potentiale für die Auffassung lebensweltlicher Raum- und Handlungsordnungen zu achten. So wie für McLuhan der "Witz" einer neuen, die öffnenden Fluchtlinien mediatisierter Zustände aufgreifenden Theorie-Perspektive darin lag, den Menschen ebenso wie die "information environments" zu einer "Umwelt" werden zu lassen, so beschreiben auch viele aktuelle Theorieansätze die Möglichkeiten eines "positiven Feedbacks" der menschlichen Akteure auf extensive und invasive Techno-Logiken. Während etwa Douglas Engelbart, der nonkonforme Comuterpionier, auf kritische Rückkoppelungseffekte reflexiver und problemorientierter User auf die neuen Computerarchitekturen setzte, so untersuchen neuere STS-Ansätze Mensch-Technik-Interaktion "in terms of dialogic and material practices of everyday life" (Anne Galloway). All diese Ansätze verstehen den "mobilen Menschen" - ganz gegen alle konformen Verklärungen - auch im Sinne gänzlich neuer, aktiver und eigenmächtiger (Re-)Positionierungspotenziale (s. Donna Haraway). In diesen Reflexionen auf das "Second Media Age", verstanden als reale Zunahme offener Wechselwirkungen, liegt eine Gegentendenz zur Vertiefung der kybernetischen (gesteuerten wie steuernden) Prozesse der "post- industriellen Kontrollgesellschaften". Es handelt sich um die Möglichkeit einer nicht-technikaffirmative Theorie-Eröffnung: von passiver Situiertheit hin zu aktiver Positionierung, vom Operationalen anonymer Systeme hin zum Explorativen im Rahmen techno-sozialer Umwelten, und von vermeintlich "authentischer", naturlaisierter Repräsentation hin zu Dimensionen strategischen Handelns.""

We explain metacognition as a management of cognitive resources that does not necessitate algorithmic strategies or metarepresentation. When pragmatic, world-directed actions cannot reduce the distance to the goal, agents engage in epistemic action directed at cognition. Such actions often are physical and involve other people, and so are open to observation. Taking a dynamic systems approach to development, we suggest that implicit and perceptual metacognition emerges from dyadic reciprocal interaction. Early intersubjectivity allows infants to internalize and construct rudimentary strategies for monitoring and control of their own and others' cognitions by emotion and attention. The functions of initiating, maintaining, and achieving turns make proto-conversation a productive platform for developing metacognition. It enables caregiver and infant to create shared routines for epistemic actions that permit training of metacognitive skills. The adult is of double epistemic use to the infant—as a teacher that comments on and corrects the infant's efforts, and as the infant's cognitive resource in its own right.

Research on ensemble interaction has extensively focused on the paradigm of communication, drawing upon both its process of encoding, transmitting, and decoding information and its associated linguistic terms (‘non-verbal communication’ (King and Ginsborg 2011), ‘communicative gestures’ (Dahl et al. 2010), ‘modes of communication’ (Seddon and Biasutti 2009), ‘visual communication’ (Kokotsaki 2007), etc.). However, this approach has not yet been extensively critiqued from the perspective of a performing ensemble musician. Coming from this standpoint, in this paper I interrogate the notion of communication within musical ensembles, proposing an alternative conceptual model based upon interaction. Through the use of reflective practice and informed observation within the framework of action research, I propose that ensemble interaction relies upon ‘ecological’ knowledge (as described by Godøy 2010) applied within the process of co- performer attunement (see Sawyer 2005).

"The purpose of the present study was to analyse how the social interactional approach of computer-supported collaborative learning meshes with the Finnish school environment. Our aim is to discuss what aspects of Finnish educational culture, and particularly communication culture, support or hinder the restructuring of educational practices according to cognitive principles of learning and technology-based learning environments. We claim that social interaction which supports students' learning cannot be
explained by mainstream theories on collaboration, but cultural, contextual, and individual differences make collaboration more complicated. We report on three experimental studies where the communication culture of computer-supported collaborative learning was analysed. These analyses revealed that Finnish students do not typically get involved with intensive interaction about partially formed ideas. Differing opinions and interpretations expressed in discussion often cause cognitive conflicts that an agent tries to solve internally before going back to the social plane. This culturally typical pattern of interaction seems to be more closely related with the Piagetian (socio-cognitive conflict) theoretical framework and differs from that of the Vygotsky and the neo-Vygotskians (intersubjective cotruction).
Furthermore, the studies reported here suggest that patterns of interaction described above may be closely related to maladaptive socioemotional coping strategies and a fact-oriented educational epistemology. Nevertheless, technology-based learning environments and participation in corresponding research-like learning tasks seem to foster productive interaction between students."

"Given the ubiquity of social media, we capitalized
on interest-based relevance as a key component to enhance
user experience. Interest-based relevance modeling was extracted
from user interaction in a cross-platform social media Big Data
repository. The goal of this study was twofold: first we addressed
theoretical dilemmas of a cross-platform user experience;
second, we implemented an android-based mobile application
and designed a cloud architecture to account for theoretical
parameters of Big Data User-centric approach and interactivity.
To address cross-platform Big Data challenges, we relied on cloud
computing to perform computationally intensive operations such
as searching, data mining, and data processing at large scale.
Our use case was based on a cross-platform interest-based
navigation and content filtering across multiple radio content
streams. The streams consisted of tags from radio stations’ programming
and social media content through a discovery process.
User interaction was geared to enable preferred topic filtering,
flexibly shifting participation roles, notifications, and navigation
through external data sources. We tested our application on a list
of popular radio stations and their social media content streams
(including Facebook, Twitter, Google+) to generate a Big Data
scenario. Even if diverse and nature, data stream traffic generated
through a mobile application KASU has proven to be a robust
Big Data source with a list of ad hoc user-centric applications."

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) embed computer technology in graspable objects. This study assessed the potential of Topobo, a construction toy with programmable movement, to support social interaction in children with autism. Groups of either typically-developing or autistic children had group play sessions with Topobo and with Lego. We recorded the extent and sequence of different categories of play. For both participant groups, there were more social forms of play with Topobo than with Lego. More solitary play occurred for Lego and more parallel play occurred with Topobo. Topobo was associated with more time in onlooker and cooperative play. Sequences of play differed for typically developing and autistic children. We discuss how different play materials might produce specific patterns of play in autism and differences from play sequences in typical development.

Life history shaped language as, cascading in time, social strategies became more verbal. Although the insight is important, Locke and Bogin (L&B) also advocate a code model of language, Rejecting any such input-output view, i emphasise the interpersonal dynamics of dialogue. From this perspective childish minds as well as language could be derived from the selective advantages of a total interactional history.

In social interaction, gaze behavior provides important signals that have a significant impact on our perception of others. Previous investigations, however, have relied on paradigms in which participants are passive observers of other persons’ gazes and do not adjust their gaze behavior as is the case in real-life social encounters. We used an interactive eye-tracking paradigm that allows participants to interact with an anthropomorphic virtual character whose gaze behavior is responsive to where the participant looks on the stimulus screen in real time. The character’s gaze reactions were systematically varied along a continuum from a maximal probability of gaze aversion to a maximal probability of gaze-following during brief interactions, thereby varying contingency and congruency of the reactions. We investigated how these variations influenced whether participants believed that the character was controlled by another person (i.e., a confederate) or a computer program. In a series of experiments, the human confederate was either introduced as naïve to the task, cooperative, or competitive. Results demonstrate that the ascription of humanness increases with higher congruency of gaze reactions when participants are interacting with a naïve partner. In contrast, humanness ascription is driven by the degree of contingency irrespective of congruency when the confederate was introduced as cooperative. Conversely, during interaction with a competitive confederate, judgments were neither based on congruency nor on contingency. These results offer important insights into what renders the experience of an interaction truly social: Humans appear to have a default expectation of reciprocation that can be influenced drastically by the presumed disposition of the interactor to either cooperate or compete.

""The Crack Smokers Theater. Staging Emotions and Self Exposure

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork in the neighborhood of la Goutte-d'Or in Paris, this article examines the social uses of emotions of drug addicts in crack houses. Behind the appearance of an irrational discourse, emotions give meaning to social interaction in everyday life and allow the re-articulation of heterogeneous experiences in the continuity of life courses.
Keywords
Drug Addiction, Crack, Poverty, Emotions, Social Inequality

Le théâtre des fumeurs de « crack ». Mise en scène émotionnelle et voilement/dévoilement de soi

À partir d'une enquête ethnographique dans le quartier de la Goutte-d'Or à Paris, cet article interroge le jeu des émotions durant les scènes collectives de consommation de crack. Derrière les apparences du discours irrationnel, la mise en scène des émotions et le voilement/dévoilement de soi participent à construire du sens à ces interactions « sous influence » à l'intérieur des squats précaires, réarticulant des expériences hétérogènes dans la continuité de parcours de vie.
Mots clés
Toxicomanie, Crack, Pauvreté, Émotions, Inégalités sociales

Das Theater der Crack-Raucher - Emotionale Inszenierung und Verschleierung/Enthüllung des eigenen Selbst

Auf Grundlage einer ethnographischen Untersuchung im Pariser Viertel Goutte-d'Or hinterfragt der vorliegende Beitrag die Emotionalität des gemeinsamen Crackrauchens. Denn hinter den scheinbar irrationalen Diskursen, hinter der Inszenierung von Emotionen sowie hinter der Verschleierung und Enthüllung des eigenen Selbst, die man in den besetzten Häuser des sozialschwachen Stadtviertels findet, verbirgt sich die Konstruktion von Sinnhaftigkeit, von Interaktionen, von gleichartigen Erfahrungen und somit von Kontinuität.

Schlagwörter
Rauschgiftsucht, Crack, Armut, Emotionen, Soziale Ungleichheiten""

The primary purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between Facebook usage and the corresponding impact on travel relationships within the hostel and backpacker community. An online survey was administered to backpackers which were both hostel and Facebook users by way of travel-centric online communities. The impact of Facebook on backpacker behaviors, decision making, and relationships was examined. Analysis indicates that Facebook is shaping the evolution of social, behavioral, and communicative norms within the backpacker hostel environment and that there is still a gap in the research that examines the impact of social networking websites on the hostel experience.

"This paper reports on interactions between administrative staff and students at an International Office help desk, situated at a Danish university. Here, staff and student cohorts are made up of both local and ‘international’ members, with the help desk service providing support for both incoming and outgoing students. Specifically, this paper demonstrates a number of practices through which culturally and linguistically diverse members are able to settle upon a medium-of-interaction as they move into and institutionally-oriented service encounter (see Mortensen & Hazel, in review). I show how the opening sequences have built-in mechanisms for avoiding language misalignment and subsequent medium repair (Gafaranga, 2000). One of these mechanisms relates to the use of language ambiguity, where linguistic items are utilized that can be from one of a number of relevant languages.
This paper is part of a larger study of interactional competence in the multilingual setting of an internationalizing university (Hazel, 2012). The project investigates the range of competencies that come into play in participants’ co-construction of situated social practices. Included in these is “the flexibility to navigate in dynamic language scenarios, and to be able to make the most of what the latent linguistic diversity of internationalized universities has to offer” (Hazel & Mortensen, 2013). "