Augmented Communication by Richard S. Pinner

Author:Richard S. Pinner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030020804
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Such is the power of SNS that it is now possible to see examples of what could be called ‘meta news’, where established newspapers report on what is currently trending online ; in effect making news out of the news. The BBC website has a section entitled ‘trending’, which covers items currently being discussed . Forbes magazine also has a social media section, which provides updates and analysis about what is being covered in social media. In fact, a great many major news providers feature regular stories reporting on trending topics under discussion in social media .

Aside from trending topics being a talking point which will often lead to augmented communication as people use their digital devices to provide immediate authenticity for topics under discussion, social media is also a part of embodied conversations as friendships evolve in face-to-face interactions. I noticed several examples of this during my observations. When I visited Singapore in May 2016, I met and became friends with several new people who lived in different parts of the world. One of the first things we did during a social gathering for dinner and drinks was to add each other as ‘friends ’ on Facebook . I noted at the time that I felt this was actually a good way of ensuring that everyone knew each other’s names. During the conference we had all been wearing lanyards with our names and affiliations on them. When we left the campus where the conference was being held, we naturally took them off. Adding people on social media meant that we had a good reason for confirming that everyone knew who everybody else was. It did not feel awkward or like an invasion of privacy to be in a situation where we all added one another. Furthermore, once added, we noticed that some of us had mutual friends , which we would not have known otherwise. The world became a lot smaller through this simple act, and our group bonded very closely during those few days and we have all remained in fairly regular contact, although I have not seen any of those people again in person since.

Similarly, the year before, when I had visited Hong Kong , I was recognised by someone who I was connected to through the academically oriented SNS academia.​edu. Also, when I registered for the conference and collected my lanyard and conference programme, I was again recognised as one of the few people who had ‘like d’ many of the pre-conference posts which had been put on the conference’s Facebook page. In this way, our online interactions are expanding our face-to-face ones asynchronously , making social interactions possibly smoother through the creation of familiarity and shared conversational topics. In a way, this provides a schema of potential talking points for face-to-face interactions. Although it has been noted that new technologies have the potential to make people more socially anxious through decreased eye-contact and actual in-person interaction (Reece and Danforth 2017; Lup et al. 2015), it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.