Tracés (Oct 2022)
Microdéconnexions : discontinuités et ruptures du contact communicationnel. Entretien avec Laurence Allard et Edgar Mbanza
Abstract
TThe pandemic context has revealed societies concerned, in practice as well as in theory, about organising the proxemics of social distance. However, the digital resources developed on this occasion are rather suggestive of a hyperconnected society ready to do things remotely in the context of a crisis: directly “contactless”, the Covid citizen nevertheless actively communicates thanks to digital mediations, which have become a health issue. In fact, the communication field postulates that there is always some kind of contact happening through mediated senses or technical means, something which becomes a system through the generalisation of transmission and feedback processes. Tracés wondered, within the framework of this special issue, how communication can be “contactless”: that is to say, beyond the technical reasons behind information transmission (a bank card interacts in a “contactless” manner with the payment terminal), what happens when the current no longer flows, literally and figuratively, when communication systems fail, are interrupted, disappear,... or even are never really implemented or made available. This other concern, regarding supposed communicational excesses as well as regarding their failure, goes so far as to open up new research fields in Media studies: Disconnection studies, which look at the applications, uses and systems of ways to break away, temporarily or more radically, from the all-digital. We invited two sociologists of uses and communication, Laurence Allard and Edgar Mbanza, who, through their interest in practices, have had to deal very concretely with these breakdowns in communication –micro-disconnections– in their fields. Our two guests help us, first of all, to break away from the use/non-use dualism which predominates in digital connections thought today. Furthermore, this interview invites us to see the fact of being unconnected as a plurality of these phenomena –this on several scales of observation– hence the idea of micro-disconnections which sheds light on the diversity of practices while signaling the existing norm of hyperconnection. It also broadens our outlook on the territories of disruptive communication, from the individual who incorporates technology to the strengthening of collectives; from the local contexts of everyday resourcefulness to public and even supranational policies for the digital equipment of countries and their populations, from applications to infrastructures. In this respect, this conversation reveals the difficulty of thinking about non-use in the context of communication, as well as the aporias of an overly binary distinction from the notion of use. The idea of “contactless communication” would thus be based on the attention to non-normative practices of digital connections and their devices, to a social geography of communication systems that would not be entirely caught up in the convergence of technologies but would reveal its scale and fragmentation effects, and to the critical eye facing the injunctive discourse on the “need to communicate”.
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