About “technosocial situations”: “

Japanese academics (Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe) defines the concept of ‘technosocial situations’ to refer to technologically-mediated social orders (= Erving Goffmans’ theory of social situation : isomorphism between physical space and social situation).

This term is explained in Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use by Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe. Some excerpts that clarify:

In his review of Erving Goffman’s theories of social situation, Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) suggests that the presumed isomorphism between physical space and social situation needs to be questioned when we take into account the influence of electronic media. He sees the work of Goffman and other ‘situationists’ as presenting the essential insight that social identity and practice are embedded in and contingent on particular social situations. He suggests, however, that these theories fail to take into account how electronic media cross boundaries between situations previously held to be distinct.
(…)
We propose the term ‘technosocial situations’ as a way of incorporating the insights of situationist theory into a framework that takes into account technologically mediated social orders. As Meyrowitz proposes, more and more, social orders are built through the hybrid relation between physically co-located and electronically mediated information systems. (…) We believe that it is crucial to retain attentive to the local particulars of setting, context, and situation in the face of these translocal flows if we are to avoid a technical determinist argument that these technologies necessarily lead to a blurring of spatial and social boundaries. Electronic media have effects that break down certain prior social boundaries, as Myerowitz proposes, but they also have effects of constructing and reifying other social boundaries.

Why do I blog this? It’s been a while that I run across that term in different places and I am not that conformable using it because I found it very broad. That’s why I got back to the article in which I’ve seen it first. The authors describes mobile email use as a new technosocial situation (my notes about it here).

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(Via pasta and vinegar.)