From Learning to Being: How Organizations Redefine Human-Machine Interaction Through Promotional Strategies

• In Event: Organizational Communication Research Escalator - Extended Session

Abstract

The proposed project aims to explore how organizations contribute to a social re-conceptualization of human-machine interaction through the ways that they promote technological devices in multimodal and written texts. The project investigates a) how promotional texts of devices have represented the space in which humans and machines interact since the early 1980s, and b) how these promotional strategies underlie a re-conceptualization of the human and the device as agents. The research is inspired by ideas from object-oriented ontology and narrative semiotics, which perceive objects as agents in the discursive structure of texts, and recognize the importance of human-object interactions in the creation of meaning and the construction of identity.

Author

• Sky Marsen, University of Southern California