XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 13-19, 2014)

July 13 - 19, 2014

445

Online Interaction: The Changing Meanings of Social Context

RC25 Language and Society (host committee)

Language: English

Our understanding of communication and social interaction is to a great degree founded on physical proximity – indeed the sociological meaning of situations where people meet assumes face-to-face interaction. One example is the system requirements that Goffman formulated regarding talk as a communication system in his article “Replies and Responses” (1976). Not surprisingly physical proximity is more or less taken for granted in this article. A lot of today’s communication and interaction are however conducted in absence of physical proximity. Of course this holds for older media such as the telephone, but it is an increasingly pervasive condition given the rise of “new media” (e.g. Facebook and Twitter), as well as in electronic environments such as e-learning, e-working, e-gaming, e-dating and comes with social consequences that include e-bullying and e-hatred. In these contexts individuals communicate and interact in total and/or partial absence of physical proximity. This session seeks papers that take up a broad range of debates on this topic including but not limited to the following questions. Are there corresponding theoretical developments in fields of communication and social interaction that can take into consideration the absence of physical proximity? Similarly what are the corresponding methodological developments that are needed to study communication and social interaction in absence of physical proximity? How can we understand this phenomenon as part of a special kind of “linguistic turn”? Does it hold specific consequences for traditional axes of inequality such as age, gender, ethnicity and class? And which substitutes for physical proximity can be observed and how do they influence our understanding of social interaction? This session is open to all theoretical, analytical and methodological approaches as far as they focus on communication and social interaction in absence of physical proximity.