Socio (Apr 2015)
Les interactions publiques à l’épreuve des technologies de participation à distance
Abstract
This article analyses the introduction of the video-conference as a test of the normative ideal of a “physical” appearance at a court hearing and, more generally, as symbolic of a weakening of the normative ideal of the co-presence in institutional meetings, in the name of a growing awareness of the costs, in particular the economic cost of the organisation of meetings of this type. We show how this arrangement for remote participation can have two opposing interpretations. In the first, the ideal of the joint presence is weakened as a paramount form of sociability (institutional or other) and renders the framing of social situations vulnerable to all sorts of harmful digital inroads. In the second, these technologies constitute a positive resource enabling the re-assertion of the need to deal with people, users and citizens in the context of an interaction where the expectation is that they will be heard and therefore that something will happen, and they contribute to conserving this possibility.
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