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

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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.