Start Date: 08/01/2010
End Date: 08/31/2013

A stranger is approaching you and talking.  He looks towards you, but you can’t quite make out what he is saying. You lean forward and draw your eyebrows down in a puzzled way.  There is no acknowledgement.  His gaze moves over you and his utterances fail to change their tone.  He fails to step aside as much as you expect.  You realize that he is talking on the phone and has not even really seen you. If he thinks that this is rude, you will never know. 

Is this a trivial matter or a failure of civility?  How do people see one another and themselves in relationship to the presence of technology? In Generation Me (2006), Twenge argues that, for all the benefits of being a digital native, belonging to the current generation of youth is associated with feelings of solitude, depression and anxiety. In general, being ignored by another is rude and disturbing. In this proposal, we focus on young adults, their experience of micro-coordination and social negotiation on one hand, and technology on the other.  We examine the emotional, personal, interpersonal and behavioral effects that the technology design and use practices have on young adults in the context of solving micro-coordinational problems in social agency, interpersonal attention, conflict, and establishing the moral order. The work is driven out of observations about the nature of children’s playground games as sites of learning about sociality and social negotiation; however, we abstract those qualities to work with undergraduate and graduate students. 

We create situations that pose interpersonal dilemmas in our areas of interest. In our work, we have shown that college and young adult populations, deprived of sustained, significant playground and street experiences, exhibit some unexpected behaviors, such as failing to take charge of creating meaningful coordinative experiences when the computer does not give them guidance.  We explore this in the laboratory in experiments in problem-solving interactional dilemmas in distributed environments that create models for effective computer-mediated human-human interaction that support and enhance social interaction. Specifically, we create situations that artificially highlight a particular kind of interpersonal issue based on the larger theory, rather than relying on in situ occurrences alone. We examine the communicative situation drawing primarily on interaction and conversation analytic methods that focus on ethnomethodological analyses; that is, seeing how people from a particular culture solve the interactional dilemmas. In three of the four cases, preparatory work to this proposal has helped us develop a base paradigm for examining the issue at hand, and in some cases helped us identify particular behavioral puzzles in participant interpretation of the situation vis-à-vis the technology and other people. We examine changes to technologies that influence their behaviors by making the interactional challenges a direct focus, that is, a “seam” in the technology.  

The philosophical foundation of this work is analogous to the approach to food that Pollan takes in “The Eater’s Manifesto”.  Pollan points out that our society has assumed that food is the sum of the nutrients that we as scientists have identified, named, and traced. He argues that, because food is complex and we really do not know what is important about it, this approach has led us to catastrophic eating practices.  Analogously, we argue here that, as a society, we do not actually know what is important about social contact. Just as modern science creates foods in which ingredients are present in ways not found in nature, we are creating social technologies with connection and coordination mechanisms not found in nature. Just as babies died from inadequate formulas, some of our social capacities may be suffering from lack of use.  Therefore, even when pursuing specific hypotheses in the examination of human micro-coordination in relationship to technology, we must premiate the identification and careful description of phenomena.

Grant Institution: NSF

Amount: $499,276

People associated with this grant:

Deborah Tatar
Steve Harrison