Scopic Media: Synthetic Actors, Institutions and Variations of Synthetic Situations

视觉媒体是一种显示和监控技术，它将遥远的事件和活动可视化地投射到社会情景中。它们在信息、认识论(它们允许进一步对信息进行科学处理)和互动(它们允许远距离互动)方面加强了情况。宏观媒体将社会学的一个基本概念，即面对面的情境，转变为一个由信息和通信技术成分丰富的“综合情境”。我们的中心问题是：i)基本社会学概念的这种调停形式如何跨域表达；ii)社会情境的概念如何适应其大规模的调停；iii)在这个过程中出现了哪些综合情境的理论和经验特征。拟议的研究项目将调查层面从面对面情况的微观层面转移到中观和机构层面。它考察了当宏观媒体使这些功能有可能被挑选并置于合成情境中时，相对于机构和演员职能的“裸体”面对面情境，合成情境是如何升级的。它询问1)社会情境是否可以成为制度实现的场所；2)合成行为者如何出现，他们的存在如何改变我们对互动秩序的概念；3)注意整合的概念是否可以被视为中介世界中整合的基本机制；以及4)我们可以从从各种领域收集的经验证据中系统地和理论上学到什么，以便为我们生活的日益全球化和日益中介的社会“更新”社会情境的社会学概念。

Scopic media are display and monitoring technologies which visually project distant events and activities into social situations. They enhance the situation informationally, epistemically (they allow further scientific processing of the information) and interactionally (they allow interaction at a distance). Scopic media transform a basic concept of sociology, the face-to-face situation, into a "synthetic situation" enriched by information and communication technology components. Our central questions are i) how this form of mediatization of a basic sociological concept becomes articulated across domains, ii) how the notion of the social situation can be adapted to its massive mediatization; iii) and which theoretical and empirical characteristics of synthetic situations emerge in the process. The proposed research project shifts the level of investigation from the micro-level of the face-to-face situation to the meso- and institutional level. It investigates how the synthetic situation becomes upgraded compared to the "naked" face-to-face situation for institutional and actorial functions when scopic media make it possible for these functions to be picked and placed into synthetic situations. It asks 1) if the social situation can become a locus of institutional realization; 2) how synthetic actors emerge and how their presence changes our concept of the interaction order; 3) if the notion of attentional integration can be seen as a basic mechanism of integration in a mediatized world; and finally 4) what we can learn systematically and theoretically from the empirical evidence collected in a variety of domains in order to "update" the sociological notion of the social situation for the increasingly global and increasingly mediatized societies in which we live.