Is Body-to-Body Communication Still the Prototype? - Semantic Scholar

The Information Society, 21: 53–61, 2005 c Taylor & Francis Inc. Copyright
ISSN: 0197-2243 print / 1087-6537 online DOI: 10.1080/01972240590895919

Is Body-to-Body Communication Still the Prototype? Leopoldina Fortunati University of Udine, Padova, Italy

expressions, body relaxation, etc.), and gestures and movement (kinaesthetics), as well as spatial position and posture (prozemics), the entity of the body itself (height, weight, and so on), clothing, information, consumption, advertising, and so on. (Argyle & Dean, 1965; Cappella, 1981; Fortunati, 2002a; Hall, 1989; Mehrabian, 1969; Patterson, 1991). Two, I challenge the concept of “communicative act” because of its conceptual ambiguity. Linguistics and especially pragmatics of communication have influenced the formulation of this concept in sociology, which includes several specifications, from locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts (Austin, 1962) to speech acts (Searle, 1969), and from communicative acts (Allwood & Andersson, 1976; Sadek, 1991; Airenti et al., 1993) to conversational acts (Traum & Hinkelman, 1992) and conversational moves (Carletta et al., 1997). Sociology has adopted this conceptual framework without adequately subjecting it to the scrutiny of its own interpretative categories, to the point that today it is very common for sociologists to consider communication as a kind of action, an act. But this view of communication leads to a minimalist concept that does not indicate within which context this “action” is situated and with what meaning. On the other hand, theories of social exchange (Roloff, 1981) have sought to analyze communication as a mode of social exchange, where individuals are seen as owners of commodities that they exchange in a free market. But even this approach is not convincing because communication is not a commodity. What is more convincing is Stuart Hall’s perspective that sees the act of communication as part of a process, a social process (Hall, 1989). But it is necessary to say more about this social process because otherwise this concept runs the risk of becoming too generic. If we contextualize communication activity in everyday life, it falls within the process of social reproduction (Dalla Costa & James, 1972; Dalla Costa & Dalla Costa, 1995; Federici, 1999). Communication in fact is an activity that takes on the form of a very true work supplied inside the reproductive process. Its characteristic is that it is an intermediate moment, because in order to become effective it depends

Body-to-body communication has widely been accepted as the prototype for mediated communication. This article interrogates the assumption that there is a dividing line between body-to-body and mediated communication. It shows that body-to-body communication intermingles profoundly with forms of mediated communication, to the point that it becomes very difficult to tell them apart. Starting from this framework, it analyzes the great imitative capacity of mediated communication with regard to body-to-body communication, and analyzes how this similarity is destined to grow in time. It concludes that because of these changes, body-to-body communication is an increasingly evanescent prototype.

Keywords

artificial, communicative act, copresence, face-to-face communication, mediated communication, prototype, the human body

I would like to begin by making three points. One, I challenge the custom of using the expression “face-to-face communication” instead of “body-to-body communication.” Body-to-body communication is a better term because it expresses more accurately all the richness of communication between copresent individuals (Contarello, 2003). In fact, the “communicative act” involves not just the face but the entire body, its gestures and postures. Extending Barry Wellman’s “human being as a portal” metaphor, I see the human body as a portal at which a very complex system of languages converges (Wellman, 2001). The body communicates not only by means of words but also via paralinguistic means, nonverbal language (facial Received 6 January 2003; accepted 12 June 2004. Special thanks to Ronald Day for patiently checking through this text and making suggestions. I am also very grateful to the four reviewers who dedicated their time to a careful reading of the text and giving a wealth of comments and criticism. Finally, a very special thanks to Harmeet Sawhney for his patience and wise guidance. Address correspondence to Leopoldina Fortunati, University of Udine, Via Savona 21, 35142 Padova, Italy. E-mail: fortunati.deluca @tin.it

53

54

L. FORTUNATI

on the consumption effected by the other partner. In this context, consumption is seen as a moment that is deeply integrated in the reproductive process, as in its conclusive phase it becomes part of the partner’s reproduction (Fortunati, 1995a). Three, communicative processes are generally analyzed in a vacuum, in a space that has been emptied out for the occasion. This expedient can be useful on the heuristic plane because it allows us to better analyze the communicative structure of individual episodes. But this procedure is not without its dangers, because it tends to give a distorted and reductionist view of communicative reality. It is with these premises well in mind that I move on to develop my thesis. My line of reasoning includes an examination of how body-to-body communication intermingles profoundly with forms of mediated communication, to the point that it becomes very difficult to tell them apart. Starting from this framework, I analyze the great imitative capacity of mediated communication with regard to body-to-body communication, and how this similarity is destined to grow in time. Finally, I consider whether body-to-body communication is an increasingly evanescent prototype. AIM AND METHODS The aim of this article is to answer the following question: Is body-to-body communication still the prototype of all forms of mediated communication? This question is an excellent guide for exploring the status of body-to-body and mediated communication and the dynamic existing between them. I base my reasoning on a body of quantitative and qualitative research on the social use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) conducted during the last decade in Italy and in Europe. These studies employed a variety of methods: from case studies to social representation, and from telephone surveys of representative samples of Italian and European populations to semistructured interviews.1 Social representation is a theory proposed by Moscovici (1961/1976) based on an old idea of Durkheim. It is defined as a form “of knowledge which is socially elaborated and shared, and which has the practical aim of constructing a common, social reality” (Jodelet, 1989, p. 36). Not every object of knowledge is a good candidate to become an object of social representation. There has to be an issue, framed in a specific context, and socially shared (Farr & Moscovici, 1984). Also, there must be polymorphism, with different features, voices, and values articulated by different groups (Moliner, 1993, 1996). With Anna Maria Manganelli and Alberta Contarello, we studied the social representations of ICTs in order to understand how the cognitive integration of these technological artifacts was taking place at the mass level.

BODY-TO-BODY COMMUNICATION AS PARADIGM To answer the question of whether body-to-body communication is still the prototype of all forms of mediated communication, let us start with Berger and Luckmann (1966). According to them, the most important social experiences take place in body-to-body interaction with others. This mode is the prototype, the central pattern, of social interaction, from which all other cases derive. Communication scholars have in a certain sense extended this assertion to communication, affirming that the basic communicative experience is that which takes place from body to body (Cicourel, 1980; Palmer, 1995; Rafaeli, 1988; Schudson, 1978). According to them, body-to-body communication is the inspiration behind all the various forms of mediated communication. The question is, however, more complex than it appears. Is it possible to continue to consider body-to-body communication as the prototype of all forms of mediated communication when the artificial bears the stamp of the human nature that creates it? This notion of body-to-body communication as a prototype must be dealt with further, in the light of the difficulty in marking a dividing line between body-to-body and mediated communication. In fact, mediated communication is an emanation of bodyto-body communication and swings between innovation and imitation of the latter. It is a field where body-tobody communication externalizes, reflects, experiences, and knows itself, as we show later. The same difficulty that we encounter in marking a dividing line between nature and culture (Moscovici, 1972) arises when we try to delineate body-to-body from mediated communication. To really understand this difficulty, we have to go back to the earliest imaginations, in which there is a conception of the human body as a machine (which will then develop in time from automaton to golem, to android, to robot, etc.). This conception is a reflection of the fact that the body is the first and most immediate technological instrument of humankind (Fortunati, 2003a, 2003b). This equivalence between the human body and the machine has developed in two directions, with humankind on one hand conceiving and attempting in practice to build a human body that resembles a machine, and on the other hand trying to construct a machine that reproduces the human being. This conception and experimentation explain the “technological” metaphors used for the human body (such as the one that sees the brain as a computer) and also the human metaphors used for technology (such as the one that sees the computer as an electronic brain). This conception also explains the passion for technology that does not hesitate to sacrifice the quality of communication for seductive convenience and efficiency offered by latest technological means of communication (Simmel, 1900).

BODY-TO-BODY COMMUNICATION

Levinson (1979) observed that individuals use media not so much to create virtuality as to re-create communicative conditions that are as “natural” and “human” as possible, while going beyond the limitations of body-tobody communication. Ten years later, Ciampa (1989) presented all media as vain attempts to recover the immediacy of body-to-body communication. More recently, Heim (1993) has seen the prototype of body-to-body communication in the notion of interface. This fusion of mediated and body-to-body communication, also observed by Marvin (1988), has grown over the years. Think, for instance, of the emergence of formats that incorporate direct phone calls from the audience (Fortunati & Manganelli, 1995)2 and the appearance and spread of reality shows. Through these new formats, radio and television have acquired both a greater “spontaneity” and “naturalness,” generated by the interpersonal dimension of the conversations, and a “greater adherence to the social.”3 This imitation by mediated communication of body-to-body communication is not perfect, because it embodies a version that is at the same time impoverished and enriched. Mediated communication surmounts the spatial–temporal limitations of body-to-body communication at the cost of a drastic reduction of the range of languages that it activates and thereby the quality of the communication itself. But the innovation present in mediated communication often has positive impact (Fortunati, in press). By experiencing and knowing oneself, as we are reminded by Heidegger (1959), Maldonado (1992, 1997, 1998), and Latour and Woolgar (1979), in the production and use of technologies, humankind is also discovering and activating latent possibilities of technological objects themselves and mediated communication as well (Oksman & Rautiainen, 2003a, 2003b; Wyatt, 2003; Haddon, 2003; Harper, 2003, Katz, 2003a, 2003b). One example will suffice: that of the car used as a bedroom by many car owners, when they have no house to sleep in. This is why in the various forms of mediated communication we discover possibilities and opportunities that body-to-body communication cannot offer. Mediated communication can be very attractive to human beings, because it amplifies what human language in itself already is: artifice (Moravia, 1985). In the light of this, mediated communication has the same capacity of attraction as that great mass of tricks, games, magic spells, expedients, and simulations that humankind has produced in the course of its history. While it is very difficult to understand the essence of body-to-body communication, mediated communication subordinates the body to technology in ways that lead us to discover its unknown aspects. It is indeed this interaction between body-to-body and mediated communication that perhaps explains what led Shannon (1948) to consider mediated communication as prototypical.4 Hopper (1999, p. 31), citing De Saussure, Mark Twain, and Shannon,

55

points out, for instance, how “the telephone has been immensely generative of models for human interaction that show a message traveling from point A to point B.” This observation is in keeping with research in Italy on children that showed that the toy telephone (which often looks like a mobile today) was very common in early childhood and that the majority of children interviewed loved playing “on the phone,” with the help or without a toy that looked like one (Fortunati, 1995b).5 Body-to-body communication is in turn contaminated by mediated communication and permeated by artificiality. Can we still speak of body-to-body communication after five centuries of print, more than a century of the telephone, a century of the radio, half a century of television, and a couple of decades of personal computers and mobile phones (Flichy, 1991; Fischer, 1992; Baldini, 1995)? Can individuals whose bodies are increasingly being penetrated by therapeutic and communicative technologies (a microchip under the skin or a pacemaker, for instance) (Fortunati et al., 2003), and who are increasingly becoming a mixture of the “natural” and technological, produce nonmediated communication? So much so, we are “mediated” even in situations in which we are in copresence with another person—watching TV together, discussing newspaper stories, listening to radio while driving together, and so on. The use of mediated communication to avoid facing relational problems is also becoming increasingly frequent (Fortunati, 1998a).6 For example, we often fill heavy silences by talking about the TV news. The use of ICTs has produced a structural change in our way of thinking and acting, our relations with others and communication with others (Ong, 1977, 1982; Meyrowitz, 1985; DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach, 1989; Wolf, 1992; Turkle, 1995). The tangle of modes of communication through which an individual navigates daily can only lead to their hybridization. But the difficulty of marking a clear-cut dividing line between body-to-body and mediated communication does not mean that the latter has already lost its capacity to serve as a prototype. Obviously nothing has remained completely natural, not even, it has been said, our bodies and norms of expression. However, a human being in the presence of another human being continues to remain the most suitable condition for expressing the greatest degree of communicative possibilities. Body-to-body communication, while subject to various pressures and influences from mediated communication, still remains the model that inspires and shapes the various forms of mediated communication (Contarello et al., 2003). What is more, we might say that the prototypical capacity of bodyto-body communication consists not only in inspiring and modeling mediated communication, but also in being constantly able to naturalize all forms of mediated communication. This process seems to illustrate that early intuition of Barthes (1957, Italian trans. 1974, p. 210), which

56

L. FORTUNATI

saw what was culturally elaborated re-transformed into the natural. Despite the fact that body-to-body communication is still the primary mode, it is on the retreat (Lorente, 2004). This devaluation of the human body and, by extension, also body-to-body communication cannot be stopped simply by celebrating body-to-body communication. The underlying reality is that our increasingly complex society is weakening the possibility for the modern-day individual to communicate body-to-body with others. We are surrounded by a great number of people who remain strangers to us, because we find it difficult to get to know them and then to sustain relations with them.

BODY-TO-BODY COMMUNICATION: AN INCREASINGLY EVANESCENT PROTOTYPE Recently Meyrovitz has written (2003, p. 96): “With a greater proportion of our interactions taking place via electronic media, physical co-presence is diminishing as a determinant of the nature of interactions.” But why does mediated communication, even if it is a modality born from body-to-body communication, have such a great ability to erode spaces covered by the latter? In other words, why are ICTs able to undermine body-to-body communication as the prototype? Let us examine this issue by considering the following points. One, if it is true that communicative technologies are attractive because they overcome certain structural limitations of body-to-body communication (basically the need for copresence of partners in time and space), it is equally true that once adopted, communication technologies have highlighted copresence as a limitation of body-to-body communication. Copresence is not a limitation in itself, because the need for the two partners to be “within earshot” is a phenomenological aspect of “natural” communication. We could conceive of it as a limitation, only after the appearance of the telephone made it possible to lengthen out ad libitum the distance between the conversation partners and to separate (through the answering machine) the moment of hearing the message from the moment in which it was sent. Obviously, this exhibition of the spatial and temporal limitations of body-to-body communication has had the effect of automatically redimensioning the prestige of body-to-body communication. Two, several communication theories, such as that of social presence (Short et al., 1976), media richness (Daft & Lengel, 1984), and the hyperpersonal perspective (Walther, 1996), suggest that mediated communication represents a general worsening of the quality of communication. There are monitoring points for the quality of the air we breathe or the water we drink, but not for the quality of this extraordinary “natural” force of social work that is

communication. The main problem is that communication does not lend itself to measurement.7 However, the lack of monitoring of the quality of communication has a serious consequence, in that a phenomenon that cannot be measured risks gradual disappearance. We are in fact losing awareness at a social level that mediated modes of communication are generally more limited than body-to-body communication. Three, penetration of mediated communication into the spheres of body-to-body communication is evident in the complexity of choices, pacts, and strategies involved in the communicative context. The problem here is that this range of choices is intimately connected to management of complexity of everyday life. This complexity makes it increasingly necessary for us to resort to artificiality and to underdeveloped “naturalness” of mediated communication. When we choose mediated communication instead of body-to-body, we do not just choose between a low-quality and a high-quality mode of communication, but rather we choose on the basis of the degree of compatibility of the two communicative modes with a whole host of factors: the type of relationships, time, money, the purpose of our communication, and so on (Orletti, 1983). This means that there are many situations in everyday life where possibly one aspect, an element of one or another mode of communication, assumes central importance. When, for example, we need to protect ourselves from contact that we fear might be aggressive or dangerous, or when we have to act swiftly, then the “best” solution is mediated communication. Or if we have to simply fix an appointment, we might prefer to use the telephone. In that case, we choose to do without all the extra advantages of a body-to-body encounter with the other person because of the efficiencies gained in time and transportation costs. Consider another example: The multitude of symbolic signals that body-tobody communication can place in the communicative field is valuable only if the object is to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity (to the maximum degree possible) in the dialogue with our partner. But this level of communication is not always necessary. In fact, in some situations, we may actually want to be ambiguous and unclear in the messages we send.8 However, this economic and instrumental approach toward sociality and communication makes us forget the importance of social ties in flesh and blood for our health and well being (Contarello, 2003). We are becoming increasingly insensitive to the faults and design limits of mediated communication. We need to pause and reflect on Baudrillard’s question of whether in such moments we are using communicative technologies or the other way around (Baudrillard, 1999). Agreement with Baudrillard on this score does not imply indifference towards the problems of technological determinism. Together with many scholars (Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Maldonado, 1997), I also think

BODY-TO-BODY COMMUNICATION

that society and technology are built up together. But this claim does not preclude the observation that the continuous negotiation between these two entities is not always balanced: Sometimes it goes one way, toward technology, and sometimes the other, toward society. Finally, body-to-body communication is becoming an evanescent prototype because we are strongly pushed to use ICTs by the growing fragmentation of sociality (Gergen, 1991). So-called sociality outside one’s most intimate circle creates increasingly separate paths: The schoolmates we are with in the morning are different from those with whom we play football in the afternoon or our friends with whom we go to dancing lessons. Work companions are different from the friends with whom we go and play bridge, or the neighbors with whom we occasionally go to a pizzeria on a Saturday night. Any continuity in one’s social network, even on an episodic basis, is becoming difficult. The result is that body-to-body communication is increasingly an event that has to be planned, instead of being spontaneous. Even the most “internal” sociality, the family, is being eroded from the outside; in many families it is now increasingly difficult to even have meals together. To use Gergen’s words (2003, p. 105), “In large measure, each family member lives a psychologically separate life.” Complex societies seem to have the perverse effect of continually breaking up the social networks that individuals construct on both a diachronic and synchronic plane around them. We are in fact losing the social memory of these processes. It will only take a few generations to pass for the qualities of copresence in communication to be forgotten. Mediated communication has started to encroach heavily on the supremacy of body-to-body communication as a convenient substitute. This is a substitute that has not always turned out to be positive, as shown by emerging social and psychological problems (Kraut et al., 1998) and Internet loneliness (Franzen, 2000), and, in the case of the mobile phone, communication mediated by it is becoming more rapid and hypodermic (Fortunati, 2002b), and interruptive of body-to-body communication among copresent individuals (De Gournay, 2002). As Gergen (1991) observed, ICTs function “corrosively” on human relationships. It is, however, very difficult to foresee the moment when mediated communication will overtake body-to-body communication, because such changes involve a whole host of factors, not all of which are clear yet. Among these still unclear factors is the varying degree of propensity or resistance on the part of the various relationships to let themselves be mediated by ICTs. Research shows that while relations between friends are very easily mediated by the phone/mobile, those with family members and relatives are much less so, even less than those with one’s partner (Fortunati, 1995b, 1998a). Ling et al. (2003, p. 370), on the other hand, in an important European “e-living” research

57

project that involved a survey of 10,534 persons in 6 countries in 2001 (Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Israel), found that the intense nature of close relationships “to some degree excludes mediated communication.” However, what is certain is that the concrete and material possibilities of practising mediated and nonmediated communication have changed. Also, the division of the respective spheres of competence is flexible and in continual renegotiation (Haraway, 1991). CONCLUSION Ironically, the current dynamic between body-to-body and mediated communication has led to an impoverishment of the first order, but also a certain degree of enrichment of the second order (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). This first-order impoverishment is due to the fact that mediated communication in itself is certainly more limited, more second-rate, than body-to-body communication, even though it does have positive features (Fortunati, in press). Second-order enrichment is to be understood in the sense that we can use ICTs to patch up the rips and holes in the net of our social relations—“a poor substitute is better than nothing” syndrome. Now paradoxically we would have less frequent body-to-body communication without the help of communicative technologies. We have been forced to use every mode of artificial communication to make possible, keep alive, develop, or initiate our moments of “body-to-body” communication. I would like to conclude with two methodological observations that might be useful for future research. One, it is dangerous to limit ourselves to studying communication in itself, because in order to understand communication, we need to understand how the communicative sphere works as a whole, with its synergies, convergences, hybridizations between technologies, and its forms of communicative sociality. But in order to understand the communicative environment, we must also understand sociality and how the sphere of reproduction of individuals works. All this continual shifting and broadening of the context makes analysis very difficult and complex, but no less necessary. Studies of mediated communication not only illustrate the characteristic workings of technological communication in the communicative pact existing between partners in an artificial environment, but also give a better understanding of the dynamics of body-to-body communication. These studies, furthermore, have given us a greater understanding of how complex and articulated communicative pacts are at work today between partners in communication. Thus sociological studies on body-to-body communication have found fertile ground for research in the study of ICTs. Two, as scholars, we must here, even more than before, carry out continual and attentive surveillance over ourselves as observers and researchers. Even great scholars

58

L. FORTUNATI

can lose their way in such situations by resorting to mystifying strategies to cover the shortfall between complexities of the phenomenon that is the object of their study and the explanatory power of their theories (Festinger, 1957). As we are still a long way from a complete understanding of the role and social significance of mediated communication, we are often tempted to gloss over the unknowns by singing hymns in praise of technology, or even setting up technology as the last great ideology (Maldonado, 1997). NOTES 1. Cf. Fortunati and Manganelli (1999a, 1999b), Fortunati (1995b, 1998a, 1998b, 2001, 2002a), Fortunati et al. (1999), and Fortunati and Contarello (2002a). 2. These calls have been the object of important research sponsored by Telecom Italia. This research, which was composed of two parts, was conducted in Italy in 1994. The first part consisted of a national representative telephone survey (4130 respondents) and was aimed at investigating the use of the telephone in interaction with TV and radio by viewers/listeners. The second part involved a content analysis of the programs of the 7 most important TV networks for a week (from 17 to 24 October) and the programs of three public radio networks (from 23 to 30 October) from 7 in the morning to 11 at night (Fortunati & Manganelli, 1995). 3. Let us use the term “greater adhesion to the social” to summarize the different aspects of a single process that have been called “social realism” (Dorr et al., 1980), “perceived realism” (Potter, 1988), “verisimilitude” (Barker, 1988), “plausibility” (Elliott et al., 1983), “authenticity and believability,” and so on. The fictional representation of the social has, however, been a design change of the media induced by users who, in the continuing process of domestication, integrated and appropriated these technologies in daily life and domestic routines (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996) and decided to rediscuss the pact that existed between them and those responsible for television and radio programs. The audiences of the respective media, instead of continuing to offer themselves as model first- and second-level TV viewers of television and radio narration insisted on being direct protagonists on the fictional plane. Let us remember that according to Eco (1994) there are two ways of reading a narrative text, which correspond to the firstand second-level model reader. The first approach is to want to know how the story finishes; the second is to try to understand how the author would like us to read the text and thereby collaborate with the author’s design of narration. 4. I do not share this provocative assertion of the prototypicality of mediated communication, if anything I observe that mediated communication is also able to inspire body-to-body communication. 5. The toy telephone is linked to the magical dimension of the telephone. The cord of the fixed phone is like a “long umbelical cord” that connects us with a distant partner, whose voice appears and vanishes as if by magic. The toy telephone leads us back to the favorite children’s game of appearing and vanishing (Freud, 1920), which is connected to the development of the notion of the object and especially the scheme of the permanent object. “The universe initially,” state Piaget and Inhelder (1970, p. 21), “is in fact a world without objects, made up only of shifting and fleeting ‘pictures’, which appear to have then been completely re-absorbed. Weeping or dismay for the vanished

object becomes joy and satisfaction when it reappears.” The toy telephone forms part of toys of imitation and socialization in the world of adults, and the proper expression of the world of childhood takes on at times anthropomorphic characteristics: the telephone becomes a face, more often than not smiling. The telephone game is play-acting, which is generally the most important manifestation of “symbolic thought” in the child (Piaget, 1974, p. 249). 6. It is interesting to note this use of ICTs to avoid undesired body-tobody communication because it is a much more frequent phenomenon than it would seem. For example, in the domestic realm, men, who earlier hid behind the pages of a newspaper, now hide in front of a computer screen. It is also evident in the absent presence that has been observed in the uncommunicative use of the mobile phone (Gergen, 2002; Fortunati, 2002b). 7. Empirical research on the use of the landline phone, for example, suggests that the more intense is its use, more frequent is the sociability with friends and relatives (Fortunati, 1998a). Quantitative studies, particularly studies on the Internet, show a positive correlation between the use of the e-mail and a higher number of friends (Anderson & Tracey, 2001). A more nuanced understanding is provided by Ling et al. (2003, p. 371), who found that ICTs facilitate body-to-body communication only “where there is already a core upon which to build.” So, “the rich get richer” type of dynamic works here—that is, “the net in itself does not generate social capital; it only facilitates already existing tendencies” (p. 361). The problem is that due to the lack of institutional studies we know nothing about the preexisting social context of our respondents. So, we cannot really know if the use of any one technology has increased or diminished social interaction over a given period. Moreover, even if we had this data, we would not know how many social relations that individual could have had in the same amount of time if ICTs did not exist. With regard to “quality” itself, the construct is difficult to operationalize let alone measure. 8. It is only through the process of knowledge and domestication of the means of communication (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; Haddon & Silverstone, 1996), also at a sociocognitive level (Fortunati & Manganelli, 1999a; Fortunati & Contarello, 2002a, 2002b), that we manage to understand what it is best to say over the phone. But not by chance, as Lambert acutely observes (1999, p. 112), domestication is a typical artificializing process. Consequently, even the communicative pacts that we establish become ever more pliable and complex.

REFERENCES Airenti, Gabriella, Bara, Bruno G., and Colombetti, Marco. 1993. Conversation and behavior games in the pragmatics of dialogue. Cognitive Science 17(2):197–256. Allwood, Jens, and Andersson, Lars-Gunnar. 1976. Semantik. Report from the Department of Linguistics. G¨oteborg: University of G¨oteborg. Anderson, B., and Tracey, Karina. 2001. Digital living: The impact (or otherwise) of the Internet on everyday life. American Behavioral Scientist 45(3):456–475. Argyle, Michael, and Dean, Janet. 1965. Eye-contact distance and affiliation. Sociometry XXVIII:289–304. Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldini, Massimo. 1995. Storia della comunicazione. Roma: Newton Compton. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.

BODY-TO-BODY COMMUNICATION Barker, David. 1988. “It’s been real”: Forms of television representation. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5:42–45. Baudrillard, Jean. 1999. L’Echange impossible. Paris: Editions Galil´ee. Berger, Peter L., and Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The social construction of reality. New York: Doubleday. Cappella, Joseph N. 1981. Mutual influence in expressive behavior: Adult–adult and infant–adult dyadic interaction. Psychological Bulletin 89:101–132. Carletta, Jean, Isard, Amy, Isard, Stephen, Kowtko, Jacqueline, Doherty-Sneddon, Gwyneth, and Anderson, Anne. 1997. The reliability of a dialogue structure coding scheme. Computational Linguistics 23(1):13–31. Ciampa, John A. 1989. Communication: The living end. New York: Philosophical Library. Cicourel, Aaron V. 1980. Language and social interaction: Philosophical and empirical issues. Working Paper, 96a. Universit`a degli Studi di Urbino. Contarello, Alberta. 2003. Body to body: Copresence in communication. In Mediating the human body. Technology, communication, and fashion, eds. L. Fortunati, K. Katz, and R. Riccini, pp. 123–132. Mahwah: Erlbaum. Contarello, Alberta, Fortunati, Leopoldina, Fernandez, Pedro Gomez, Mante, Enid, Versinskaya, Olga, and Volovici, Daniel. 2003. Social representations of ICTs and the human body. A comparative study in five countries. In The good, the bad and the irrelevant: The user and the future of information and communication technologies, eds. L. Haddon et al., pp. 56–62. Helsinki: Media Lab UIAH. Daft, Richard L., and Lengel, Robert H. 1984. Information richness: A new approach to managerial behavior and organizational design. In Research in organizational behavior, vol. 6, eds. L. L. Cummings and B. M. Staw, pp. 191–233. Homewood: IL: JAI Press. Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Dalla Costa, Giovanna F. 1995. Paying the price: Women and the politics of international economic strategy. New York: Zed Books. Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and James, Selma. 1972. The power of women and the subversion of the community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. DeFleur, Melvin, and Ball-Rokeach, Sadra J. 1989. Theories of mass communication. New York: Longman. De Gournay, Chantal. 2002. Pretense of intimacy in France. In Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance, eds. J. Katz and M. Aakhus, pp. 193–205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorr, Aim´ee, Graves, B. Sue, and Phelps, Edwin. 1980. Television literacy for young children. Journal of Communication 30(3):71–83. Eco, Umberto. 1994. Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi. Milano: Bompiani. Elliot, Williams, Rudd, Robert, and Good, L. 1983. Measuring perceived reality of television: Perceived plausability, perceived superficiality, and the degree of personal utility. Paper presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference, Corvallis, OR. Farr, Robert and Moscovici, Serge, eds. 1984. Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Federici, Silvia. 1999. Reproduction and feminist struggle in the new international division of labor. In Women, development and the labor of reproduction, eds. M. R. Dalla Costa and G. Dalla Costa, pp. 47– 82. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

59

Festinger, Leon. 1957. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fischer, Claude S. 1992. America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. Flichy, Patrice. 1991. Une histoire de la communication moderne. Paris: La D´ecouverte. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 1995a. The arcane of reproduction. New York: Autonomedia. Fortunati, Leopoldina, ed. 1995b. Gli Italiani al telefono. Milano: Angeli. Fortunati, Leopoldina, ed. 1998a. Telecomunicando in Europa. Milano: Angeli. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 1998b. The ambiguous image of the mobile phone. In Communications on the move: The experience of mobile telephony in the 1990s, ed. L. Haddon, pp. 121–138. Telia: Stockholm. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2001. The mobile phone: An identity on the move. Personal and Ubiguitous Computing 5(2):85–98. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2002a. Italy. Stereotypes: True or false. In Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance, eds. J. Katz and M. Aakhus, pp. 42–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2002b. The mobile phone: Towards new categories and social relations. Information, Communication & Society 5(4):513–528. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2003a.The human body: Natural and artificial technology. In Machines that become us, ed. J. Katz, pp. 71–87. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2003b. Real people, artificial bodies. In Mediating the human body: Technology, communication and fashion, eds. L. Fortunati, J. Katz and R. Riccini, pp. 61–74. New Brunswick, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fortunati, Leopoldina. In press. Telephone and body-to-body communication: A comparison. Fortunati, Leopoldina and Contarello, Alberta. 2002a. Internet–mobile convergence: Via similarity or complementarity? Trends in Communication 9:81–98. Fortunati, Leopoldina and Contarello, Alberta. 2002b. Social representation of the mobile: An Italian study. In The social and cultural impact/meaning of mobile communication, pp. Doosan Resort, Chunchon, Korea. Fortunati, Leopoldina and Manganelli, Anna Maria. 1995. Le telefonate in diretta. Vol. I La televisione; vol. II. La radio. Roma: Telecom Italia. Fortunati, Leopoldina and Manganelli, Anna Maria. 1999a. La rappresentazione sociale delle telecomunicazioni. Roma: Telecom Italia. Fortunati, Leopoldina and Manganelli, Anna Maria. 1999b. La competenza d’uso delle Nuove Tecnologie. Roma: Telecom Italia. Fortunati, Leopoldina, De Luca, Roberto, and Fortunati, Guido. 1999. Cyber workers. In Usages & services des t´el´ecommunications a` l’heure de Internet, 7–9 June 1999, pp. 420–428. Bordeaux: France Telecom. Fortunati, L., Katz, J., and Riccini, R., eds. 2003. Mediating the human body: Technology, communication and fashion. New Brunswick, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Franzen, Axel. 2000. Does the Internet make us lonely? European Sociological Review 16:427–438.

60

L. FORTUNATI

Freud, Sigmund. 1920. Beyond the pleasure principle. (Trans. into Italian, 1975, Al di l`a del principio del piacere. Torino: Boringhieri. Gergen, Kenneth J. 1991. The satured self. New York: Basic Books. Gergen, Kenneth J. 2002. The challenge of absent presence. In Perpetual contact. Mobile communication, private talk, public performance, eds. James Katz and Mark Aakhus, pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gergen, Kenneth J. 2003. Self and community in the new floating worlds.In Mobile democracy. Essays on society, self and politics, ed. K. Nyiri, pp. Wien: Passagen. Haddon, Leslie. 2003. Domestication and mobile telephony. In Machines that become us, ed. James E. Katz, pp. 43–56. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Haddon, Leslie and Silverstone, Roger. 1996. Information and communication technologies and the young elderly. SPRU/CICT Report Series No. 13. Falmer: University of Sussex. Hall, Stuart. 1989. Ideology and communication theory. In Rethinking communication theory, vol. 1, eds. B. Dervin, L. Grossberg, B. O’Keefe, and E. Wartella, pp. 40–52. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women. The reinvention of nature. New York, Routledge: Free Association Books. Harper, Richard. 2003. Are mobiles good or bad for society? In Mobile democracy. Essays on society, self and politics, ed. K. Nyiri, pp. 185– 214. Wien: Passagen. Heidegger, Martin. 1959. Gelassenheit. Translated into Italian, 1983. L’abbandono. Genova: Il Melangolo. Heim, Michael. 1993. The metaphysics of virtual reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Hopper, Robert. 1999. What do we know about telephone conversation? In Progress in communication sciences, vol. XV, Advances in telecommunications, eds. H. Sawhney and G. Barnett, pp. 29–44. Stamford, CT: Alex. Jodelet, Denise. 1989. Les repr´esentations Sociales. Paris: P.U.F. Katz, James E., ed. 2003a. Machines that become us. New Brunswick: Transaction. Katz, James E. 2003b. A nation of ghosts? Choreography of mobile communication in public spaces. In Mobile democracy. Essays on society, self and politics, ed. K. Nyiri, pp. 21–32. Wien: Passagen. Kraut, Robert, et al. 1988. Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? American Psychologist 53(9):1017–1031. Lambert, C´edric. 1999. Nature et artifice: Essai sur quelques formes de leurs rapports dans la culture urbaine. Espaces et Soci´et´es “La Nature et l’Artifice” 99:105–122. Latour, Bruno, and Woolgar, Steve. 1979. Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts. Los Angeles: Sage. Levinson, Stephen C. 1979. Activity types. Linguistics 17:365–99. Ling, Richard, Yttri, Birgitte, Anderson, Ben, and DiDuca, Deborah, 2003. Mobile communication and social capital in Europe. In Mobile democracy. Essays on society, self and politics, ed. K. Nyiri, pp. 359– 374. Wien: Passagen. Lorente, Santiago. 2004. Assessment of the virtual brotherhood hypothesis. Paper presented at the conference “Studiare il cambiamento sociale Problemi metodologici e strumenti per la ricerca empirica,” AIS, Salerno, 28–29 January. Maldonado, Tom´as. 1992. Reale e Virtuale. Milano: Feltrinelli. Maldonado, Tom´as. 1997. Critica della ragione informatica. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Maldonado, Tom´as. 1998. Ancora la tecnica. Un tour d’horizon. In Oggetti d’uso quotidiano. Rivoluzioni tecnologiche nella vita d’oggi, ed. M. Nacci. Venezia: Marsilio. http://www.eurescom.de/public/ projects/P900-series/p903/default.asp Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press. Mehrabian, Albert. 1969. Significance of posture and position in the communication of attitude and status relationships. Psychological Bulletin 71:359–372. Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No sense of place. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyrowitz, Joshua. 2003. Global nomads in the digital veldt. In Mobile democracy. Essays on society, self and politics, ed. K. Nyiri, pp. 91– 102. Wien: Passagen. Moliner, Pascal. 1993. Cingguestions a` propos des representations sociales. Cahiers Internationaux de Psychologie Sociale 20:5–14. Moravia, Sergio. 1985. Dal monologo alla conversazione. Immagini della comunicazione umana nel pensiero contemporaneo. In La comunicazione umana, ed. U. Curi, pp. 41–66. Milano: Angeli. Moscovici, Serge. 1961/76. La psychanalyse, son image et son public. Paris: P.U.F. Moscovici, Serge. 1972. La soci´et´e contre nature. Paris: UGE 10/18. Oksman, Virpi and Rautiainen, Pirjo. 2003a. Extension of the hand: Children’s and teennagers’ relationship with the mobile phone in Finland. In Mediating the human body: Technology, communication and fashion, eds. L. Fortunati, J. Katz, and R. Riccini, pp. 103–112. New Brunswick, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Oksman, Virpi, and Rautiainen, Pirjo. 2003a. “Perhaps it is a body part”: How the mobile phone became an organic part of the everyday lives of Finnish children and teenagers. In Machines that become us, ed. J. Katz, pp. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Ong, Walter, J. 1977. Interfaces of the word. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ong, Walter, J. 1982. Orality and literacy. The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen. Orletti, Franca, ed. 1983. Comunicare nella vita quotidiana. Bologna: Il Mulino. Palmer, Mark T. 1995. Interpersonal communication and virtual reality: Mediating interpersonal relationship. In Communication in the age of virtual reality, eds. F. Biocca and M. Levy, pp. 277–299. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Patterson, Miles L. 1991. A functional approach to nonverbal exchange. In Fundamentals of nonverbal behaviour, eds. R. S. Feldman and B. Rim´e, pp. 485–495. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piaget, Jean. 1974. La formazione del simbolo nel bambino. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Piaget, Jean and Inhelder, B¨arbel. 1970. La psicologia del bambino. Torino. Einaudi. Potter, James W.1988. Perceived reality in television effects research. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 32(1)23–41. Rafaeli, Sheizaf. 1988. Interactivity: From new media to communication, Sage Annual Review of Communication Research 16:110–134. Roloff, Michael E. 1981. Interpersonal communication: The social exchange approach. London, CA: Sage. Sadek, David. 2000. Dialogue acts are rational plans. In The structure of mutimodal dialogue, eds. M. Taylor, F. N´eel, and D. Bouwhuis,

BODY-TO-BODY COMMUNICATION pp. 167–187. Benjamins. From ESCA/ETRW, Workshop on the Structure of Multimodal Dialogue (Venaco II), 1991. Schudson, Michael. 1978. The idea of conversation in the study of mass media. Communication Research 12(5):320–329. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shannon, Claude E. 1948. A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27:379–423. Short, John, Ederyn, William, and Bruce, Christie. 1976. The social psychology of telecommunications. London: Wiley. Silverstone, Roger and Haddon, Leslie. 1996. Design and the domestication of information and communication technologies: Technical change and everyday life. In Communication by design: The politics of information and communication technologies, eds. R. Silverstone and R. Mansell, pp. 44–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1900. Die Herrschaft der Tecknik In Philosophie des Geldes, pp. 520–535. Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot.

61

Traum, David R., and Hinkelman, Elisabeth A. 1992. Conversation acts in task orientated spoken dialogue, Technical Report No. 425. Computer Science Department, University of Rochester, Rochester, Also in Computational Intelligence 8(3), August 1992. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the screen: Identity in the age of Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. Walther, Joseph B. 1996. Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research 23(1):S3–43. Wellman, Barry. 2001. Physical place and cyberplace: The rise of personalized networking. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25(2):227–252. Wolf, Mario. 1992. Gli effetti sociali dei media. Milano: Bompiani. Wyatt, Sally. 2003. Non-users also matter: The construction of users and non-users of the Internet. In How users matter: The co-construction of users and technology, eds. N. Oudshoorn and T. Pinch, pp. 67–69. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.