Social Interaction and the New Media The Construction of Communicative Contexts

New communication technologies set off new contexts for communication in very different ways from both print media and electronic mass media. In this essay, I shall compare different media with emphasis on the ways they assist in the construction of contexts of interaction. It investigates the relationships between media technologies, social interaction and forms of social context. I shall attempt to draw some ideal-typical lines between forms of communication and their corresponding contexts. The comparisons should be partly read here as hypothesis for further empirical analysis. In relation to media technologies, contexts pose several complicated questions. For instance, what is the ’context’ when watching television or engaged in computer-mediated communication? How should we characterise communicative practices when material and communicative contexts overlap and blend into new ones? Such questions indicate how difficult it is to understand the communicative experiences of the modern individual with the wide range of modes of mediation at hand which reproduce and disintegrate the lifeworld. For clarification, we should distinguish a) between communication and body, or between meaning and place, which suggests different types of context, b) between distinct media technologies according to their contextualization abilities, and c) between types of communication. First, so as to specify the role of communication technologies in contextualization, I shall distinguish between a) locale as the bodily-material place of one or several communicating agents, b) dual context as the contextual relationship consisting of the present locale and a mediated ’there’ in unidirectional interaction, (mediating what I shall call pseudo-communication), and c) virtual context emerging from ’absent’ agents involved in communication. With ’contextualization’, I refer to the mediation of context – the ways communication technologies take part in the construction and reproduction of contexts of symbolic action. In contrasting the contextual significance of communication technologies with electronic (mass) media, I shall expose significant aspects of the dynamics of communication technologies in the contextual constitution of agency. Communication technologies do not ’decontextualise’ communication (Feenberg, 1991: 99), they recontextualise them.