Just some elements to show that the use of ICTs changes the way production is designed, and consequently the interactions between workers. In these strategic foresight studies, some hypotheses about the way innovation could weaken, workers' collectives could be destroyed, private and professional lives could be less separated, etc.

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I keyed in on your point that e-mail seems antiquated. I disagree, but I would point out that e-mail is just one mode of digital communication, and it was the first one used, between individuals. But for example, the very vast majority of all of my work communications are done with e-mail. We have team members all over the world, and using e-mail easily surpasses any other scheme we used before.

Digital social media sites have become the norm, but why? I think it's because they replace (or augment) social gatherings of previous times. E-mail replaces mail, mostly, even if more flexible in addressing large groups of recipients. But mail was never the only form of communications previously, right? People always found a need for gatherings, meetings, call them what you will, beyond just two individuals communicating with one another. That's what the social media sites provide.

I never bought all the doom and gloom about digital comms. but I do have to agree that people seem strangely addicted to social media, texting, and such. It has become almost an epidemic, for reasons that escape me. Just notice how many people can't resist their screens, even while driving.

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place," George Bernard Shaw is alleged to have said. (The source of this quote is disputed but all attributions precede the emergence of the Internet by several decades. And so, if they were comparatively more “efficient”, how comparatively more “effective” were our erstwhile modes of interaction?) Presentation Information Overload in the Attention Economy

Digital is fast and efficient communication but may not be effective, as for that you will have to have build common frames of reference and remove noises in the process of communication. Spoken and no verbal help you tailor your messages which work on the cognitive and affective levels. At the cognitive level, digital or internet based might help but emjois and icons cannot substitute for human emotions and empathy and thus at the affective level it would remain largely ineffective.

Let's not forget that "digital" does not mean text only, and that face to face communications are hardly ideal for everything. Even before "digital," we relied on a lot more than just speaking to each other.

Speaking directly has many drawbacks too. For one thing, people have to be in the same location. That's too restrictive, and too disruptive, to be efficient. People end up dedicating days for a face to face exchange that might last hours. So, with digital, we can do teleconferencing instead, which makes this instant exchange of ideas possible, with fewer obstacles.

And spoken communications are much too error prone. People only retain a small amount of what they hear, and people usually misinterpret what they hear. That's why we have had written communications to augment speech. And again, "digital" also supports this written form of communications, but far faster and more efficiently than previous methods. You can't beat the speed of light. Even overnight mail, used previously, can't match digital. Certainly, having to make multiple hard copies of everything, and then distribute them, can't match digital either.

Yes, our modes of interaction are changed, mostly for the better. It's only the addiction aspects that I find troubling, for the many who seem afflicted.

I definitely support the idea that digitalised communication tools (DCT) have changed our way of interactions as well as perceptions of the world. One quick example is that you can establish global network through DCT within which you can communicate on an everyday basis.

Dear all, thanks very much for your interesting comments. I agree that DCT offer the chance ubiquituos communication and i like Albert Manfredi notion that face-to-face interaction is not that easy for everyone as we suppose it to be. But i'm still thinking on how users are dealing with the translation of emotions, implicitness and paraverbal signs into digitalized communication. Do they adapt in a way or replace them with something different?

Ronald,

I think your question " ... to what extent the routine use of digital communication media changes our modes of interaction themselves" is incomplete. The answer depends on how we conceptualise interaction. We need to define the concept (in some theory-of-action frameword) and derive theoretically relevant properties of interaction from it. This is necessary to answer the question how specific processes of digitalisation affect particular properties of interaction in specific circumstances. General statements about "interaction" and "digitalisation" are likely to be of little help due to the vague concepts and their level of abstraction.

We are differentiating different types of communication based upon the functionality of the media. Email is still very useful for some kinds of communications. Platforms are also wonderful for other things. In scientific communications, digital communications have accelerated communications and distributed them much more widely. The connections reflect human network structures which emerge from the needs dictated by the tasks at hand. Most often, in research, people have met face-to-face and then continue communications via media. Humans still have limitations of attention and affiliation, but we have extended the geography of people with whom we connect, and, most likely, we have expanded the number of people we actually work with. So, yes, we have changed, but mostly based on the human needs rather than the technology.

Especially the face-to-face communication is affected by technology, we refer on the diachrone communication we had via whatsapp (for example) and even have to discuss misapprehansions because of missing non-verbal signs. We shorten our dialouges just to add a "I'll write you/send you [...] later...". Means, we proceed communication with the help of digital communication. We are able to embed other persons with the help of technology in acts of communication, indipendently from their residence. These aspects mostly have one thing in common: a flood of additional informations, which are to manage. They can clear the stream of thoughts or make it confusing. That depends on the quality of the given informations and the quality of the way it's given. To summon it up, digital communication brings along more information, the benefit lies in the qualities mentioned above.

I would like to add three aspects to this interesting debate:

In my view digital communication mirrors norms of face to face interaction. Changes in everyday interaction caused by digital communication should therefore be understood as re-entry phenomena, i.e. making explicit formely implicit or tacit norms of interaction (.e.g. non-verbal "Information" as Stefanie Zeitz mentioned above are made explicit (e.g. affirmation in the form of "likes" or the emotional meaning in the form of emojis; If it was up to me I wouldn't use the expression information in this context).

I strongly disagree with the thesis that communication follows human needs. Why should that be the case? There is vast empirical evidence that people use all sorts of digital platforms and social media not because they need something but because their social milieus, their professional environment or social isntitutions implement these techniques. We might focus on the structure of social relations as a source of using different media of communication and interaction (e.g. a school class using a classroom chat or a company and an internal system of microblogging).

Last but not least one interesting thing of digital communication is its integration into communicative practices and normative discourses. Transformations and changes via digitalization are a topic of their use both within digital communication and beyond it. That is why we do not need to answer Ronald's question in theoretical terms alone but can also turn our attention to the way of societal reflection on digitalization.

Matthias Hello - Interesting discussion. I am working on a piece about how digitalization impacts Prosocial Behavior. I believe that the distance that is part and parcel of the digitalization of many work processes, for instance, contributes to an equally distancing from a sense of shared experience and shared fortune.

every facet of life that once was extremely hands-on has been reduced to a series of keystrokes.

• text messages populated with emojis to represent genuine emotions once expressed in words.
• dating via Skype with a smartphone screen replacing a restaurant table.
• use email, Slack or Facebook to notify a boss when we’re feeling too sick to come into work.

Thank you very much for the exciting suggestions and comments.

It's a little difficult to summarize the different voices, but I'll try.

For one thing, we have a theoretical problem. One that relates less to the question of 'digitalisation' than to the forms of linguistic, symbol-based interaction (where the time dimension remains an open question) that depends on imagination without the physical balancing dimension.

If this is a re-entry of communication into communication - probably. However, this does not say anything about whether "digital interaction" has a quality of its own compared to the physically co-existent 'analogue'.

Does not the machine, the digital processing, require its own translation processes in order to be able to interact in the digital medium?

On the other hand, we have an empirical problem of social relationships and their interdependencies. Where, in my view, the question clearly arises as to whether the common or even remote variations of digital communication platforms and their surfaces take up and process human or social needs. At the crossroads of both sets of questions lies Avi's topic, which is on the trail of the resonance possibilities of digital communication or the lack thereof.

Hopefully, these rough thoughts help to keep the discussion going. I guess, there is still a long way to go.

Well, it's some years ago that I used a group dynamics perspective to have a look at the phenomenon of DTC. Maybe it's of your interest?!

Walpuski, Volker Jörn (2015): Ubiquitous Computing und Gruppendynamik. Überlegungen zu Smart Devices als gruppendynamisches Phänomen. In: Gruppendynamik und Organisationsberatung 46 (3-4), S. 313–325. DOI: 10.1007/s11612-015-0283-5.

My hypothesis is, that by accelarated DTC e.g. via instant messaging the "quality" of communications decreases: more misunderstandings, conflicts, discontinuations and so on. I would like to research on that!

Hi,

Email is not considered outdated. This is the main tool of business communication, according to statistics. Digital communication tools today only reflect the development in different areas of life.

Mamia Tetvadze

Dear Avy, Dear Ronald, Dear All,

I think Avy's remark highlights an important dimension of digital interatcion: sharing a communicative space (be it digital or not) and using sets of habitualized symbols (representing ways of expressing thougths, feelings etc.) is not only about the (functional) interchange of ideas or the coordination of action but also and at the same time a way of symbolizing community. I think it is an empirical question whether digital spaces of communication allow for a rather strong or a rather weak sense of shared experiences and belonging. Maybe different digital media spaces offer different opportunitiesfor building "ligatures" (Dahrendorf) - e.g. facebook groups as against collaborative teams in other programes.

Thrilling idea Matthias Peter Klemm ! Should we then ask are these 'ligatures' transformed analogue ones or can we observe the emergence of genuine digital ligatures?

Am happy to take part in this important discussion. I think that the Corona crisis and its consequences has both allowed us a "fast-forward" to a situation that we may have assumed may play out in some (more) distant future. The comments of Mamia Tatvadze, and the further response by both Ronald Staples and Matthias Peter Klemm point to the challenge of understanding what this glimpse of regarding the promise and possibilities of "virtual" interaction and it also may very well also accentuate the LIMITATIONS of the above. While many (including myself) have taken the advantage of the ability to communicate, collaborate and even commiserate (making "consolation calls" on Zoom to mourners per the Jewish tradition of "shiva") - the idea that this may be the "new reality" generally only highlighted a yearning to be able to CHOOSE how to engage in all of those activities. That is to say, that the very act of substitution of the former pattern made its absence more intense. I thank Matthias for referencing Dahrendorf - with whom I sadly had not been familiar (may say something about all of our "circles of knowledge" - I am deeply connected to the Anglo circle - and that clearly may leave me blind to other important individuals and ideas. As Matthias suggested - different medias may afford different experiences and feelings - and that may be different for different types of interactions that we have. As a closing note, I will note that two colleagues and myself surveyed a large number of Americans and Israelis about the impact of corona on a number of matters - including whether their idea of to what degree various groups: family, friends, Social Media contacts, fellow employees etc. constitute "community" for them may have been impacted by the sudden central role taken by Social Media and other non-frontal contacts. As we analyze the data - I will update.

We recently published the following research on the research question at hand:

Zizek, Boris (2020, im Erscheinen). Cultivating a self-centered sociality? - A reconstruction of the structural features of everyday digital interaction between young people. In: Beijing International Review of Education 3

Zizek, Boris & Andermann, Hendrik-Zoltán (2020). Analysis of Youth-Oriented Websites. An Introduction to the Qualitative Image-Analytical Methods of Objective Hermeneutics. In: Beijing International Review of Education 2 (S. 1-25)