Visuality is a concept that crosses boundaries of practice and meaning, making it an ideal subject for interdisciplinary research. In this article, we discuss visuality using a fragment from a video ...meeting of television producers at Swedish Television’s group for programming in Swedish Sign Language. This example argues for the importance of recognizing the diversity of analytical and practice-derived visualities and their effect on the ways in which we interpret cultures. These different visualities have consequences for the methods and means with which we present scholarly research. The role of methods, methodology, and analysis of visual practices in an organizational and bilingual setting are key. We explore the challenges of incorporating deaf visualities, hearing visualities, and different paradigms of interdisciplinary research as necessary when visibility, invisibility, and their materialities are of concern. We conclude that in certain contexts, breaking with disciplinary traditions makes visible that which is otherwise invisible.
The authors in this special issue present case studies of socio-cultural responses to technologies in terms of their relationships with ‘ethics’ and ‘politics,’ to ecologies, and to the ways in which ...those technological processes are framed as empowering, alienating, dispossessing, transformative or destructive. This introduction elaborates some connections between the papers, focusing on the ways that technology both creates, and becomes part of, ethical and political struggles over visions of the future. Technology is frequently used to increase the extent and range of control, and to impose a politicised order upon others in villages, towns, environments and landscapes, although this control cannot be guaranteed. Technology can also become part of the rhetoric used to persuade people of the inevitability, validity and desirability of imagined futures, while leaving other factors to be ignored. Technology, ethics and politics are not always separable, and the results of their interaction may not always be predictable.
Phantasms collide Cupitt, Rebekah
Global media journal Australia,
2013, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Global telecommunications companies sell new technologies and services that aim to increase communication possibilities. This case study of one Swedish telecommunications company (‘the Company’), ...examines how employee notions of video-mediated communication are embedded social meanings. These social meanings are purposefully linked to notions of efficiency in the workplace, the environment, corporate social responsibility and economic gain. Through advertisements, slogans, in-house incentive programs and company policies, the Company has achieved what could be described as a shift in employee attitudes towards working using video-mediated communication (VMC) – so-called video meetings. The shift is however, far from comprehensive and this consciously constructed understanding of video-mediated communication co-exists and conflicts with multiple other meanings – explicit, implicit and purposefully ignored. Often moral dilemmas arise as personal wellbeing in the short-term conflicts with corporate sales targets, budget restrictions and environmental goals to ‘save the planet’. By detailing these different understandings and their inter-relations, the complex and purposed nature of video-mediated communication phantasms in a global telecommunications company emerges.
Video meetings are a regular part of work at Swedish television’s editorial for programming in Swedish Sign Language (SVT Teckenspråk). In the process of creating television programming in Swedish ...Sign Language, SVT employees communicate with and through technologies. This ethnographic exploration of video meetings at SVT Teckenspråk presents how deafness is reconfigured between hearing, interpreters, and video meeting technology within the context of a public service organisation. Concepts such as technology, meetings, organisations, and visuality are re-formulated from within the context of SVT Teckenspråk and interpreted using feminist and queer theory frameworks. These re-examined concepts are embedded in the history of SVT Teckenspråk and presented as part of the everyday way of holding video meetings. Technologies and people become intertwined and co-constitutive as moments of video meetings are subsequently understood not as human-technology ‘interactions’ but as intra-actions. Using empirical examples of video meetings collected during fieldwork, this thesis evinces how the materialities of video meeting technology relate to the ways in which deafness is or is not enacted, embodied, and co-constituted. Deafness is accordingly framed not as disability, but as a way of being - one that is founded on a different language, culture, and way of seeing. This emically-derived notion of being deaf impacts understandings and acts of video meetings at SVT Teckenspråk. Yet it is through people’s material intra-actions with technologies that notions of deafness emerge which run counter to ways of being deaf which SVT Teckenspråk employees’ (hearing and deaf alike) work hard to establish. Once technologies and the meanings co-created through people’s intra-actions with them are made visible, these same technologies disable rather than enable; making difference rather than making a difference.
Videomöten är en del av vardagsarbetet på SVT Teckenspråk där anställda kommunicerar via och med hjälp av teknologier i skapandet av television på teckenspråk. Denna etnografiska utforskning omkring videomöten på SVT Teckenspråk presenterar hur dövhet omkonfigureras i en sammanvävning mellan hörande, tolkar, samt videomötesteknik inom en public service organisation. Begrepp som teknologi, möten, organisationer, samt visualitet omformuleras med SVT Teckenspråk som sammanhang och tolkas sedan med hjälp av feministiska och queer teoretiska ramverk. Dessa begrepp analyseras ur ett historiskt perspektiv inom SVT Teckenspråk samt omanalyseras som en vardaglig del av videomöten. Teknologi och människa sammanvävs och omformar varandra i videomöteshändelser vilka därefter uppfattas som intra-aktioner snarare än människa-dator interaktioner. Genom empiriska uppslag på videomöten uppsamlade under fältarbete påvisar denna avhandling hur videomötesteknik och dess materialitet relaterar till de sätt som dövhet kan utövas, uttryckas, samt uppformas. Dövhet uppfattas som ett sätt att vara istället för som ett funktionshinder. Ett sätt som bygger på ett unikt språk, kultur, samt världssyn. Detta är SVT Teckenspråk anställdas sätt att förstå och vara i världen och kallas för ‘emic’. Utifrån ett emic perspektiv uppstår ett annat synsätt på dövhet och en ny förståelse av videomöten på SVT Teckenspråk. Trots detta uppstår genom materiella intra-aktioner med videomötesteknik uppfattningar omkring dövhet som strävar mot den syn som SVTs anställda (döva såsom hörande) medvetet etablerat. Istället för att införa jämställdhet och tillgänglighet framställer intra-aktioner med videomötesteknik olikheter mellan döva och hörande. De skapar skillnad istället för att göra skillnad.
QC 20161209
Drivers and Barriers for Mediated Meetings
Disabling Technology? Access and Inclusion in the Deaf/Hearing Workplace
Abstract How do we cope with technology today? We are surrounded by machines, computers and technological devices from mobile phones to automated check- outs. These types of machines are no longer ...exotic in Sweden where today the average person is usually fluent in their use. But do we really have an understanding of how these objects work, is understanding necessary and how do we cope when our knowledge is lacking? This thesis is intended as an introduction to an anthropological way of look- ing at strategies people develop for understanding, using and interacting with technological objects, specifically robots. Still an exotic object, robots are more widely known-about than experienced. Based on ethnographic data, primarily gathered in two distinct workplace environments as well as interviews and video documentation, my analysis aims to illustrate the implications of defining hu- mans and robots as equally significant agents within networks whilst disputing the traditional importance given to the dichotomy of technology (non-human) and human. Whilst robots are definitely less than we expect them to be, they are still so- cial artefacts, firmly situated within social networks and meaning which manifest through human–robot interactions. Perhaps little more than tools, an ambigu- ity exists in human–robot interactions which suggests that we form quasi-social relations that could, and have been exploited by designers and engineers to broaden the range of use for technological objects. Keywords: human-robot interaction, network theory, situated knowledges, agential realism, performativity, social contextualisation of technological objects
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