{"title":"Distributed agency in smart homecare interactions: A conversation analytic case study","authors":"Saul Albert, Lauren Hall","doi":"10.1177/17504813241267059","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The agent of action in Human-Computer Interaction is, as the hyphenated name of the field suggests, usually conceptualized as an contrastive binary of either human or computer. This study, informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, instead describes the interactional achievement of distributed agency in a ‘smart homecare’ setting where a homecare worker and a disabled person coordinate shared activities using a virtual assistant. We focus on the tacit criteria, attributions, and discourses of agency embedded in the interactional details of their everyday homecare routine. The analyses reveal how collaboration in everyday care tasks involves the distributed agency of all participants, irrespective of their ostensible ‘humanness’. Our findings (a) provide a critical perspective on the technological imaginary of expensive, high-tech robotic replacements for human care work; (b) advocate low-tech strategies for adapting consumer technology for smart homecare systems; and (c) suggest alternative approaches to agency in assistive technology design, grounded in detailed observation of the interactional infrastructure of real homecare settings.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse & Communication","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241267059","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The agent of action in Human-Computer Interaction is, as the hyphenated name of the field suggests, usually conceptualized as an contrastive binary of either human or computer. This study, informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, instead describes the interactional achievement of distributed agency in a ‘smart homecare’ setting where a homecare worker and a disabled person coordinate shared activities using a virtual assistant. We focus on the tacit criteria, attributions, and discourses of agency embedded in the interactional details of their everyday homecare routine. The analyses reveal how collaboration in everyday care tasks involves the distributed agency of all participants, irrespective of their ostensible ‘humanness’. Our findings (a) provide a critical perspective on the technological imaginary of expensive, high-tech robotic replacements for human care work; (b) advocate low-tech strategies for adapting consumer technology for smart homecare systems; and (c) suggest alternative approaches to agency in assistive technology design, grounded in detailed observation of the interactional infrastructure of real homecare settings.
期刊介绍:
Discourse & Communication is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles that pay specific attention to the qualitative, discourse analytical approach to issues in communication research. Besides the classical social scientific methods in communication research, such as content analysis and frame analysis, a more explicit study of the structures of discourse (text, talk, images or multimedia messages) allows unprecedented empirical insights into the many phenomena of communication. Since contemporary discourse study is not limited to the account of "texts" or "conversation" alone, but has extended its field to the study of the cognitive, interactional, social, cultural.