Rethinking Communicative Interaction

Book excerpt: From government eavesdropping to Internet crime, reality TV to computer-mediated communication and mobile telephones, the face of communication has fundamentally changed. The contingencies and complexities of communication can be witnessed in old and new media, in changing patterns of face-to-face interactions and the pluralization of the self and blurring of the distinction between the real and virtual. To date, theories of interaction have been slow to conceptualize communication in terms of its instabilities. Social communication models remain heavily indebted to an interaction paradigm which is often intuitive, epistemologically conservative and even a-critical. By contrast, an interdisciplinary programme in communication covers a complex field which requires the broadest possible range of approaches beyond current disciplinary confines. This collection seeks to examine some of the implications for our understanding of interaction when communication is conceptualized as a complex uncertainty.