50% Seminar - Rebekah Cupitt

Opponent: Anna Croon-Fors , Department of Informatics, Umeå University.

Supervisors: Ann Lantz, Per-Anders Forstorp & Minna Räsänen.

Working Title: Perspectives and social aspects of video mediated communication in the Swedish workplace and their expressions in human-non-human intra-actions.

Abstract

That video communication technologies and people in the workplace interact in various ways cannot be argued. This variety is apparent in the Swedish workplace where people meet/greet and mis/dis/ab/use video communication technologies in both intended and unintended ways.  Using interview material collected from employees of global telecommunications company, TeliaSonera and empirical data gathered through fieldwork at Swedish Television's Editorial for Swedish Sign Language programming, I discuss video mediated communication as a symbolically laden, socio-technical phenomenon. Employee perceptions, their informal mythologies and partially articulated shared imaginings provide a starting point for this study. These social phenomena are then situated within their contexts. These networked contexts include the global telecommunications market, discourse on environmental sustainability, deaf identities, issues of disability, and the dialectics of centre versus peripheries, global versus local, regional versus urban. Commingling with everyday practices of video mediated communication, immaterial and material contexts; actors - individual and collective, human and non-human; and technological assemblages become complex instances of socio-technical intra-action. In this specific study, video mediated communication's "socio-technological becoming" is set within the broader perspectives of organisational structures, organisational change and reconfigurations of human-computer intra-actions lending a multidimensional understanding to the phenomenon that is video mediated communication in the Swedish workplace.

Keywords: organisational change, video mediated communication, shared imaginings, intra-action, material semiotics, human-computer interaction, socio-technical phenomena.