|
Michaela Meinert

Lunchtime Seminar - Virtual relationships as patterns of intercorporeal engagements

Dienstag, 20. November 2018 - 12:00 bis Donnerstag, 28. März 2024 - 21:18, Leonardo-Campus 18
Speaker:    Dr. Simeon Vidolov
Abstract:   Technological advances and increased pervasiveness of ICTs have afforded the emergence of distributed and virtual forms of organizing and collaborating. It has been suggested that research on virtual interactions is still missing appropriate understanding of the processes of developing intersubjective relations and social bonding in virtual context. Research in the area has been dominated by polar stances. On one hand, there have been claims for the superiority of the face-to-face interactions for developing rich social relationships, deemed as the ‘gold standard’ and ‘richest’ medium, which cannot be replicated in virtual settings. On the other hand, other authors have argued that physical presence is not important, and have advocated a vision of virtual disembodiment that is premised on the idea that digital text can successfully replace face-to-face interactions. Central to these arguments is how bodily presence is theorized and what is its role in developing and maintaining intersubjective relationships. This work offers theoretical advances in this area by reconceptualizing the relationship between intersubjectivity, human body and technology. These insights are developed and illustrated in relation to an in-depth, exploratory case study of an exclusively-mediated, virtual relationship between two companies. 
 
Short Bio:  Simeon Vidolov is a Post-doc in the Inter-organisational Information Systems Group. Previously, he was a Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellow at LaSalle-Barcelona (Spain). Prior to this, he worked as a post-doc in University College Dublin (Ireland), where he also finished his PhD as an Ad Astra Scholar. His research interests are broadly framed in the area of  critical technology and organisation studies.