Postural-facial-gestural positioning seeks to facilitate interactional synchrony including self-synchrony – “on the speaker’s side, the synergy of speech events and of the movements of various corporeal segments” (Condon and Ogston 1966, 338) – and hetero-synchrony: “on the interlocutor’s side, the synergy of segmentary synchronous activities of speech events produced by their partner-interlocutor” (Condon and Ogston 1966, 338).

Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1999, 45) introduces the notion of interactive bricolage insofar as every conversation is “a series of ‘mini-incidents’ that are immediately neutralised – hitches and hang-ups that are quickly repaired – and the interactants manage jointly to construct a more or less coherent text only at the cost of their incessant tinkering”. Interactional sequences of either negotiation or repair (of terms, contents, forms, etc.) then occur in order to make the conversation possible and fluid. The notion of conversational negotiation refers to

any interactional process that may appear when a disagreement arises between the interactants concerning some aspect of the functioning of the interaction and whose purpose is to absorb said disagreement in order to allow the exchange to continue (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005, 103).

Interactional repair occurs when a trouble source arises in the interaction. Repair is a phenomenon that occurs

after a responsive turn has displayed to a prior speaker that, and how, the prior turn has been misunderstood (Schegloff 1990, 68).

Users’ adaptation to digital bugs shows that this versatility or instability is henceforth an integral part of “the ontophanic culture with which we have learned to live for several decades now. Having become accustomed to the functional vagaries of our computers, we know now that ‘they can crash’” (2013, 213).

Living in the digital age and integrating the unstable matter that is digital technology into our everyday interactions with others implies that “we entrust it with everything, but without ever being able to trust it entirely. And we know this” (2013, 216).

In an onscreen dialogal interaction (with two interlocutors) or a polylogal interaction (with more than two interlocutors) involving several communication devices, the individual is not left to face the bugs alone; the interlocutors need to collaborate to repair a technical incident. In the chapter on “Artefacted intercorporeality, between reification and personification”, we identified several phases in the process of mediation in problematic situations: demediation, remediation and immediation.

In this process, interactants draw on the technobodily resources available to preserve communication despite the multiple space-time frameworks and the incidents that they inevitably induce. To this end, participants in the interaction coordinate and cooperate among themselves and with the artefacts, both explicitly and implicitly. Each of the interactants has the opportunity to contribute to the preservation of communication by way of significant gestures, no matter how small, which form part of a complex technobodily network.

Participants employ categories that allow them to identify members in order to ensure orderly interaction (Mondada 1999, 24). Harvey Sacks developed the concept of membership categorisation devices (MCDs): devices that are divided into collections of categories (e.g.: “gender” is a collection that encompasses categories such as “male”, “female”, etc.). The categorisation devices that participants mobilise are particularly “tied to embodied and visible practices of speakers, as well as to their cognitive and interpretative practices” (Mondada 2014, 88). Although an individual could be categorised using an infinite number of collections, just one is generally viewed as sufficient. All the more so if this category establishes a dichotomy (“native/non-native”, “rich/poor”, “young/old” and, in our data, “online/offline”, “on site/remote”, etc.). This rule of conceptual economy is based on the fact that categorisation does not amount to giving a referentially accurate description, but rather a description that is deemed relevant in light of the context of the ongoing activity (Sacks 1992, 47).

Collective intelligence:

• is “widely distributed” – no individual has total knowledge, but each individual contributes some knowledge.

• is “constantly being valued” – the key value is what is human, and each member of the collective contributes qualitatively to its wealth, making them unique and precious.

• is “coordinated in real time” – digital networks allow for large-scale communication and are a privileged interface for collective intelligence.

• “leads to an effective mobilisation of competencies” – inasmuch as it is based on concrete skills, knowledge and expertise, collective intelligence is not just a theoretical concept, but refers to an efficient mode of social structuration. It favours ability over power.

According to Bandura, the main mechanism at the heart of human action is situated in an individual’s perception of their own personal efficacy. In his view, believing in one’s efficacy constitutes the most fundamental resource of motivation, going beyond the interest one may have in an object or a field. This belief is also what allows us to “be an agent” and intentionally influence our own functioning and our life circumstances (Bandura 2003, 13). Of course, there can often be a discrepancy between real talent and capacity for action, on the one hand, and an individual’s SPE, on the other, due to different forms of exposure, reinforcement and experience depending on gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background.

In order to understand the strategies put in place by participants and to illustrate the asymmetry of perceptions, let us observe an interactional sequence that shows how participants manage a critical episode that occurred during the second session of the seminar (session 2 – The anthropologists’ lecture).

Right from the start of the lecture (1min24s), during the introduction of the guest lecturers, Prisca posts in the Adobe chat about a sound problem, which is then relayed orally by Joséphine, in order to alert the people on site. In doing so, she interrupts one of the guest speakers, thus giving rise to a first interactional fail.

The lecturers first check if “Beam can hear”. Amélie confirms on the Beam that she can hear well. They then suggest getting closer to the microphone that is recording for the ex-situ participants. Several people move in order to put the microphone on their table, followed by the camera that is filming for the remote participants. Christine then says, “Let’s resume!”. The lecturers resume their presentation in a somewhat unfocused atmosphere: some participants are still standing, others are talking.

When Joséphine alerts the group about the problem flagged in the chat by Prisca, Christine writes in turn: “The remote participants can’t hear us”. The problem turns out not to be the microphone that has been moved to the speakers’ table, but rather a camera that is only filming, and not recording or transmitting sound. In moving closer to the camera mistaken for a microphone, the speakers also moved closer to the computer recording the sound, improving the sound for the remote participants after all. This strategy is thus validated in the chat, “it’s better”, and the talk resumes without the problem being fully resolved or anybody realising it for the moment.

The problem is thus brought up again a few minutes later in the chat, this time without interrupting the speakers orally:

Christelle, who is participating remotely: “We can’t hear the young woman as well [as the others].”
Caroline, who is in the room: “That’s strange, the microphone is next to her.” (The camera continues to be confused with the microphone).

Twenty minutes later:

Prisca: “It’s too bad, it’s very hard to hear the [female] lecturer.”
Christelle: “Yes.”

Ten minutes go by:

Liping, who is participating remotely: “I’m having trouble hearing the young woman.” Christelle: “Yes :(*”

Twenty minutes go by again and, in the chat, Christine suggests that the remote participants ask questions if they want, to which Christelle responds: “We can’t hear well”. How can they ask questions when they have had a very hard time hearing the lecture?

Christine would like to organise the discussion period and she wants to give the floor to the participants via Adobe. Her first strategy is to orally state the rules for asking questions. “Raise your hand and the same thing remotely, wave to me”. There is no response from the remote participants since they are not able to hear Christine. The questions start in the seminar room. A few minutes later, Christine, who is committed to giving time to the participants via Adobe, tries a second strategy and orally says: “We’re going to give the floor to those on Adobe if you like. Christelle? Tatiana? Liping? Prisca?”. There is no response. “Can you hear me?” Still no response. This second strategy also fails. She then writes in the chat: “if someone wants to speak, write to me please”, but again, none of them respond.

The discussion continues in the seminar room. A few minutes later, Christelle writes in the chat: “Are the rest of you managing to follow along?” The remote participants reply that they are not able to.

Christine then writes: “The problem is that I don’t see your responses if there are any.”
Christelle: “The main problem is that we can’t hear.”
Then: “It’s interesting but we don’t want to interrupt.”

This last exchange shows the extent to which each participant is consumed by their own constraints and interactional role (member of the audience who cannot follow the talk, on the one hand, and organiser-“conductor” who is not able to get all the participants involved, on the other). By writing “it’s interesting but we don’t want to interrupt”, Christelle also verbalises the dilemma faced by the remote participants: the desire to flag the technical problem openly, so that it can be identified and resolved, as opposed to the reluctance to cause a new interactional fail by interrupting the session and revealing the discomfort that the remote participants have been experiencing for more than one and half hours.

In the seminar room, as Jean-François is in the middle of formulating a question, Christelle, who has evidently identified the problem and the appropriate solution for resolving it, writes in the chat: “Turn on your microphone, Jean-François”. However, he does not seem to see the written message, and no one relays it to him orally. So Christelle speaks up, overlapping Jean-François’s question, the sound of her voice amplified by the loudspeakers: “turn on your microphone, Jean-François”, and then: “sorry eh but I wrote and you didn’t see it”.

Jean-François: “I just got scolded”, thus making the fail explicit.

Everyone in the seminar room laughs. Jean-François turns on the microphone on his computer. Finally, there is sound on Adobe.

Jean-François: “Is it okay now?”

There is a loud occurrence of audio feedback in the seminar room, causing an unpleasant echo. Christine turns off the microphone on the computer from which the sound is coming and the feedback effect stops. The guest lecturer reads in the chat and says: “I see a ‘super’ with three exclamation marks”. Everyone was surprised by the strategy, but it finally provided sound to the remote participants, thus resolving the technical problem.

The description of the occurrence of this critical episode up to its resolution by adopting the different points of view of the interlocutors illustrates several phenomena that we will elaborate upon below.

The following extract from the questionnaire, in which we have highlighted certain discursive elements, demonstrates the risk of disengagement during a critical episode:

How did you experience the communication situation?

Christelle, 18 November 2016, participant on Adobe: “It was difficult, because the sound problem prevented us from understanding the lecture properly (especially when the young woman was speaking), the same thing for the discussion part, so sometimes I disengaged from the seminar. I also had to deal with the pdf and it was hard since I wasn’t with the lecturers, so I had to follow on the background of the screen of the little video of the lecturers to see when they were changing their slides.”

The on-site participants also felt a form of discomfort, as the following example illustrates:

How did you experience the communication situation?

Joséphine, 18 November 2016, participant physically present in the seminar room: “It was good, but I felt bad for those who were remote since they couldn’t hear well.”

Were you able to participate in the way you wanted?

Joséphine, 18 November 2016, participant physically present in the seminar room: “Yes, but since I didn’t have a laptop, I didn’t have Adobe Connect, so I was reluctant to speak, because I knew that remote participants would have trouble hearing me.”

Were you able to participate as in the way you wanted?

Christelle, 18 November 2016, participant on Adobe): “Somewhat, as I explained above. I couldn’t take notes outside of the Adobe space, too complicated, difficult sound, and without the image I would have completely lost the thread. However, other people’s note-taking allowed me to pick up the thread sometimes.”

We see in this example that the group’s effort gives a “lifeline” to participants who find themselves momentarily in difficulty, allowing them to stay in touch with what is happening and not completely disengage from the seminar.

It could thus be expected that over time, fewer problems would be flagged since such problems could be anticipated and should occur less frequently.

In fact, the data shows that the number of reported critical episodes remains stable. Effective techniques were established to anticipate a certain number of problems: the speaker turned on their microphone and the others turned theirs off; as many of the on-site participants as possible used Adobe Connect; everyone paid attention to the chat; the slides were sent to everyone by email and provided as pdfs on Adobe; the guest lecturers used Adobe instead of PowerPoint to show their presentation, etc. However, these multiple strategies did not prevent the occasional occurrence of bugs that are inherent to digital tools, such as the connection or the hardware slowing down, regardless of the participants’ skills.

Insofar as each session had a specific context (with or without guest lecturer(s), in French or English, which can reduce the number of people wanting to speak, different types of activities), it is difficult to compare them quantitatively in a scientifically adequate way. Nonetheless, we found that problems were flagged and dealt with in the sessions with the following forms of resolution:

The critical episodes that gave rise to interactional failures and digital bugs were studied by the team in an interdisciplinary approach as part of our collective, ethological and reflexive research project. Each of the axis – attention, politeness, and corporeality – highlights the key properties of the co-construction of presence during a hybrid experience. In this section, we provide a transdisciplinary synthesis of the theorisations developed from these analyses. They show us, from multiple angles, both the intrinsic nature of interactional failures and digital bugs on the one hand, and the significance that these incidents have for the construction of collective intelligence on the other.

The development of inter-attention

Attention is reclassified within the seminar, which is shown to be a dual attentional set-up: in its material construction of space and in its relational construction. The co-construction of attention emerges within the specific horizon of expectations of the seminar, which is itself modified by the technological equipment. The hybrid physical-digital apparatus creates a disruption of intersubjective attention due to the non-reciprocity of perspectives. In spite of this disruption, the group works together to enact a form of interattention which entails a sort of co-responsibility towards oneself and others. For example, if there is a false affordance, the group intervenes to give the misunderstanding visibility and to make the interaction possible and fluid.

The occurrence of interactional failures is not only connected to the emergence of digital bugs but is related to the principle of membership inasmuch as the attention towards each of the members comprising the collective is a sine qua non for interactional felicity. Inter-attention implies making each participant’s activities accountable by way of ethnomethods of meta-vigilance that allow the invisible or misinterpreted elements of the complex spatio-temporal network configuration to be perceived. The aim is to construct the collective in a network of individual attention to both the organic and the technological members of the network, which is thus maintained by a growing confidence in the group and its competencies.

Enaction of a polyartefacted intercorporeality

The need to achieve a form of mutual and shared perception of the hybrid and reticular environment also becomes apparent in the analyses of the corporeality axis. Participants structure their actions during the seminar in such a way as to achieve a common ecological perception for all members, but from multiple angles – a perception that is maintained by way of the different states of technobodily mediation (demediation, remediation, and immediation). These actions do not emanate from particular roles or positions, but from the functions of procurator, witness and sentinel that participants embody according to a group mechanism: a chain of distributed agency that is organised by way of multimodal and polyartefacted communication.

The subjects and objects of the interactional network thus find themselves hybridised to the point that a dual process of personification and reification emerges in the technobodily, polyartefacted mediation. On the one hand, a vocal-gestural attribution of artefactual characteristics is given to the living subject by others – reification – and, on the other, the vocal-gestural attribution of human characteristics is given to the subject’s artefact by others: personification.

The communicative affordances and the positioning of the bodies and the artefacts in space mean that participants need to cooperate, insofar as they cannot individually undertake the physical-digital mediation, but have to depend on each other’s complementarity and develop confidence in this complementarity of knowledge and skills. This extension of action and perception, involves intercorporeality which allows for the co-construction of a shared world, or interworld (Merleau-Ponty 1988, 317).

Digital interactional maxims

In order to construct this interworld, it remains essential to prevent the contours of bodies and artefacts from becoming so fluid that they dissolve individuals’ own identities. As the research conducted on politeness shows, this is a matter of respecting and valuing participants’ personalities as they are known and acknowledged off-screen. This need for acknowledgment is particularly key in the choice of nominal forms of address.

Analysis of the forms of address used by on-site participants to address one another or to refer to participants in the light of membership categorisation devices (Sacks 1992) highlights three categorisation collections (Sacks 1992) of the remote participants.

1. Group categorisation: group effect of the remote participants.

2. Object categorisation: artefact used to attend the seminar remotely.

3. Person categorisation: identity of the remote participant.

Studying these categorisations diachronically reveals significant attenuation of the group effect (category 1) between the first and the last session, over a period of six months, and an evolution of the terms employed, with a designation mainly by the artefact (category 2) giving way to participants being called by their first name (category 3). What is at stake in these ethnomethods is finding a balance between the construction of the collective and respecting individuality, reducing the effects of reification of the animate, and avoiding the group being divided into subgroups based solely on geographical location.

From the perspective of a digital literacy that integrates interactional failures and digital bugs, the subgroup for research on politeness drafted digital interactional maxims for a “hybrid culture of interaction” such as the polyartefacted seminar: the maxim of interactional opening, the maxim of communication, the maxim of movements, the maxim of address, the maxim of platform, the maxim of interactional closing.

These recommendations are also found in the comments of the participants who filled out questionnaires after the seminar sessions. The participants were able to provide the most explicit account of their experience in these questionnaires, where we found conscious traces of the construction of a collective intelligence. In this section, we relate the questionnaires to the theoretical and analytical elements that have been discussed thus far.

Christelle underscores the fact that she tested all the modalities of presence (Adobe, Kubi, Beam, but also in-situ) and could thus compare them. Amélie contrasts the logistical advantage that using the Beam robot provided her – namely, the freedom and technical quality – with the socio-affective handicap created by this same independence to the extent that she does not believe that she created a bond with the in-situ participants. Samira highlights the construction of small communities attached to each mode of presence. Finally, Liping recalls the difficulties she encountered in being present through a screen, in particular, with respect to the poor quality of her internet connection and the problem of the time difference between China and France.

Caroline describes how she enjoyed participating in this auto-ethnographic co-construction relationally and intellectually due to its multidisciplinarity, as did Jean-François who describes his experience as dense and captivating. Jean-François emphasises the novelty and complexity of the socio-technical apparatus (both of the seminar and of the data collection). Both Jean-François and Joséphine identify the points that the subgroups have in common and their divergences. Joséphine also notes that it was interesting to be part of an experiment both as a “guinea pig” and as a metacognitive subject, thus revealing a post-dualism embodied in the hybridity of the apparatus and that depends on the group’s benevolence.

Christine, in particular, held this role; she notes a contrast between the insecurity of the early days and the ultimate construction of an increasingly solid collective. This solidity originates from the complementarity of the participants’ skills and resources, but also from the work accomplished, from maintaining motivation, from the good quality of the interpersonal relationships and from shared values. The same is true for Dorothée, who stresses the diachronic construction of the group, as well as the responsibility and pressure entailed by the data collection and, at the same time, the existence of another group in absentia of individuals who would be accessing the data a posteriori. Both Dorothée and Morgane note the learning process and the acquisition of technical and scientific expertise that the experience made possible. Morgane also considers the richness of her experience as a “mediator” in setting up the hybrid apparatus and in its evolution.

Mabrouka highlights the notion of self-reflexivity on the work of the researcher and their (epistemological, methodological, technical) research environment, as well as the need to address utility and technological determinism while taking a certain distance. Yigong describes the role of technology in the deconstruction-reconstruction of the modalities of speaking turns during the seminar, in that the relationships turned out to be more horizontal, with exchanges between participants who were no longer just simple attendees at conferences, but members of a collective.

This balance between pleasure (helping one another, facing a challenge, satisfaction in finding a solution) and frustration (pressure, cognitive overload, failures, bugs) recalls the balancing principle (Schell 2008) used in the development of games to maintain the player’s engagement over time. Maintaining engagement requires a level of difficulty that is sufficient to ensure that players are trying, but also that the game is fair (fairness principle, Schell 2008), so that players do not lose interest. This is also true in the seminar, in which participants navigate between feelings of difficulty and pleasure.