Throughout human history, people have
generated almost all of their solidarity face-to-face, by physical co-presence.
This has been disrupted by a world-wide natural experiment: making people stay
home, avoid public gatherings, avoid interacting with strangers except when
wearing masks and staying six feet apart.
Since the publication of Interaction Ritual Chains (Collins
2004), the issue has been discussed whether mediated forms of interaction,
especially electronic communication in real time, substitute effectively for face-to-face (F2F)
interaction. On the whole, this literature has found that electronic media do
not substitute for it, but instead supplement it. Studying cell-phone use, Ling
(2008) found that persons tend to call the same people that they normally
interact with, and much of what they communicate is where they are and how they
can meet. He also found there is some feeling of social solidarity-- personal
belonging-- in talking over a mobile phone, but that it is a weaker feeling
than F2F. This may explain why cell-phone users spend much more time
telephoning than traditional land-line users did; in this respect similar to
drug addicts who increase their dose as its effects decline.
Are humans are infinitely malleable,
entirely determined by social construction, so that we become acclimated to
whatever is “the new normal” (perhaps with a measurable time-lag)? Or is it that technologies become
increasingly better at ferreting out what kinds of things happen in F2F
interaction, that can be mimicked electronically? My review of currently
available evidence is carried out with these questions in mind, along with a
third possibility: that some features of F2F interaction are deeply engrained in
the human genome, and that eliminating them leads to resistance and new forms
of social conflict.
The
Ingredients of Interaction Ritual (IR)
[1] Co-presence: people are physically near to each other
where they can see, hear, and otherwise sense which each other is doing.
[2] Mutual focus of attention: they focus
their attention on the same thing, and become aware that they are doing so.
[3] Shared mood or emotion: they feel the
same emotion, whether excitement, joy, fear, sadness, anger, boredom or any
other.
[4] Rhythmic entrainment: they get into
the same rhythm, with voice or body.
Feedback processes take place among these
ingredients. As people pay more attention to each other, they tend to converge
on a shared emotion and intensify it; conversely shared emotion intensifies
mutual focus. As these increase, rhythmic entrainment increases.
Successful interaction rituals (in
contrast to failed rituals where these ingredients are missing or weak) have
the following outcomes:
[5] Social solidarity. Individuals feel
like members of a group, and recognize others as co-members.
[6] Emotional energy (EE). Individuals
feel pumped up by a successful interaction ritual; persons with high EE are
confident, proactive, and enthusiastic. Persons with low EE are the opposite:
they are depressed, passive, alienated. These are the results of failed
interaction rituals.
[7] Collective symbols. Durkheim called
these “sacred objects”, referring to the emblems, places, books, etc. that are
the focus of religious worship; and he extended this to political symbols like
flags. Collective symbols include all our ideals and strong beliefs.
[8] Moralities of right and wrong. For
any group with successful rituals, the fundamental standard of morality is
whether people respect its rituals and sacred objects. The worst offense is
disrespect for its emblems; attacking its symbols creates moral outrage. This
results in the most heated forms of social conflict, and rituals of public
punishment for the enemy group and their symbols. We can see this process in
the conflicts that arose during the coronavirus emergency, and in the public
demonstrations that spread across the US in June 2020.
In sum, successful interaction rituals
are the micro-process that generates almost everything that we refer to as
“social order.” If we get rid of interaction rituals, or weaken them
considerably, what would happen?
How important is physical co-presence?
Co-presence [1], in the scheme as developed
by Durkheim and Goffman, is the point of departure. It is when people come
together that the other ritual ingredients [2-4] can be brought into action. Can we
say, though, that as media become more ubiquitous and mimic more aspects of F2F
interaction, social connections become increasingly transferred to media
connections while the bodily interactional basis fades away?
Co-presence
is important because it facilitates mutual focus, shared emotion, and rhythmic
entrainment. By
seeing another person’s eyes and face, and the orientation of their body, you
know what they are paying attention to. An exchange of glances communicates,
I-see-you-seeing-me, and also I-recognize-what-we-are-both-looking-at. Looking
at the other person’s facial expressions and bodily gestures, as well as
hearing their tone of voice and its loudness or softness, communicates what
emotions are being felt. The James-Lange principle applies here: moving the
muscles of one’s face, eyes, and body intensify the felt emotion; also it is
triggered and intensified by closely monitoring the other person’s emotional
expressions. Not only does running away with the rest of a crowd make you feel
more afraid, but shouting happily, or angrily, with others makes one more happy
or angry. Rhythmic entrainment is most strongly felt when it is in all bodily
channels: not only seeing and hearing, but the proprioceptive feelings in
muscles, breathing, heart rate, and bodily chemicals that make an emotional
mood a felt experience, not merely a detached cognition. These kinds of
embodied experiences are the glue that creates moments of social solidarity.
What happens when people are prevented
from bodily F2F encounters, or are restricted to a small number of sensory
channels?
Masked
social distancing in public
Here we have a partial restriction of the
ingredients of IR: people are bodily co-present, but the F2F aspect is greatly
reduced. Masks cover the mouth and lower face, making it harder to recognize
emotions, as well as harder to hear what the other person is saying. Thus we
would expect shared emotion and mutual focus of attention would be harder to
attain, IRs would weaken, and solidarity decline.
Nevertheless, what we find in observing
people on the streets was the opposite, at least for a period of time. Simmel’s
theory of solidarity through conflict says that when a group is shocked by a
enemy-- we can widen this to a natural disaster or other shared emergency--
solidarity goes up. I tested this immediately after the 9.11.2001 attacks
[Collins 2004a], and found that it has a time-pattern: using the display of
American flags as an indicator, the pattern looked like this. After the first
few days of hushed uncertainty, people started putting up flags on windows and
cars; this reached its maximum within two weeks. It stayed at a plateau for 3
months, a period during which there were also repeated displays of flags and
ceremonies honoring police and firefighters killed in the attacks. After 3
months, articles starting appearing discussing “can we take our flags down
now?” Political controversy, which was almost entirely stifled during this
period, started up again. By 6 months, the level of flag-display had declined
by more than half, with a long diminishing tail thereafter.
In the US, public alarm over the
coronavirus surged about March 16, when schools and gyms were shut down. By
March 20, many states had ordered people to stay indoors. Wearing masks away
from home became a requirement in the next two weeks, delayed because of
shortage of supplies and controversies over effectiveness. Effective or not,
wearing masks now became a social marker of joining the effort against the
epidemic, along with keeping 6 feet away from other people. I anticipated that
this period of solidarity would last no more than 3 months. Since the period
after 9.11.01 had many public assemblies, often highly emotional, honoring the
heroes of the attacks, whereas in 2020 public assemblies were prohibited as
dangerous incubators of the epidemic, I expected the period of public
solidarity would be shorter, probably 1 or 2 months.
For several years I was in the habit of
walking or running for a half hour or more almost daily in my neighbourhood or
public parks, and thus have a baseline for normal street behavior. By early
April (about 2 weeks after the lockdown began), I noted that the number of
people out walking was up by a factor of two or three from the pre-epidemic
period; people deprived of exercise had found something they could do. Soon
almost all walkers were now wearing masks, and when meeting others on the
sidewalk, one or the other would step out into the street to maintain distance.
When doing so, almost everyone waved or called out a friendly greeting. The
main motivation would be that deliberately avoiding someone would be a mark of
fear or an insult; so we countered that by a friendly wave or greeting. This is
also Simmelian solidarity. It is clearly related to the onset of the shared
emergency; in my walks in previous months and years, I would estimate the proportion
of F2F encounters on the street where there was a greeting was less than 20%
(chiefly among older people; noticeably absent among the young).
The time-pattern of decline in Simmelian
solidarity was the following: By late April (one month after the lockdown), the
number of people out walking had noticeably increased. The proportion of people
greeting each other declined; this was particularly true in areas along the
harbor or ocean-front (the beaches and parks being closed and patrolled by
guards); perhaps there was the beginning of a tone of defiance. Younger adults
in particular were ignoring social distancing; and friendly waves or greetings
were absent (including towards each other).
I began to make systematic counts of how
many people were wearing face masks, distancing, and greeting. My focus was on
adults who were walking on sidewalks or streets (children at this point rarely
wore masks). I did not count runners or bicyclists, since they almost never
wore masks-- a constant pattern from this point onwards. This may be due partly
to decreased lateral visibility, but especially to difficulty breathing when
doing heavy exercise. I did not count gardeners or other outdoor workers or
delivery persons: the latter usually wore masks (as they worked for bureaucratic
organizations that demanded it); manual workers usually did not, nor did they
practice social distancing among themselves. One can see here a social class
divide in the observance of social distancing etiquette. For walkers, the
height of symbolic solidarity (mask-wearing and greetings) was in April; during
May the proportion wearing masks gradually declined, as did greetings when
social distancing (very noticeable around May 22-23). For this period, a Gallup poll reported 1/3
each said they always, sometimes, or never work masks outdoors (New York Times
June 3, 2020); given the desirability bias in surveys, the mask-compliant
numbers are probably exaggerated.
A sharp break occurred in the first week
of June, as Black Lives Matter protests and marches broke out. This was 10
weeks after the lockdown began. During the most militant period (the first 4-5
days), when many protest demonstrations were accompanied by burning,
property destruction, or violence, photos indicate that few protestors wore
masks, and participants massed close together. This happened despite official
warnings that big assemblies, especially when shouting and chanting together,
broadcast the virus. A rival source of Simmelian solidarity had been created,
and it overrode the already-declining solidarity rituals of the social
distancing etiquette. Most of the participants in the protests were young (as
one can see in news photos); young people already were largely ignoring social
distancing, and signs of solidarity among the young in ordinary public street
behavior had been low. They were further IR-starved by the banning of sports
and concert participation as audiences, or even as performers. The predominant
participation of white youth in the protests (in most photos far outnumbering
minority participants) were at least in part the response to the sudden
opportunity to regain experiences of mass solidarity. Police violence and other
grievances have been long-standing [https://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2020/06/seven-reasons-why-police-are-disliked.html], but why have protests mushroomed now? The timing of these unprecedentedly widespread
protests throughout the youth cohort is also connected to their intensified
alienation in the social distancing regime, as I will document in the next
section.
In subsequent weeks, as protests became
smaller, photos show participants more often spread out, maintaining social distancing
(also no big crowds) and at least half wearing masks. This is probably the
effect of being more deliberately organized rather than spontaneous, with
organizers and (mostly white middle-class) participants making a conscious
effort to present a good appearance by following official coronavirus
etiquette.
In California, parks and beaches were
opened up again around June 10, along with reiterated regulations on masking
and social distancing. My observations for pedestrians June 10-27:
Totals for public parks: 54 of 267 wore
masks (20%); 3 greetings (6% of mask-wearers, 0% of unmasked).
for neighbourhoods: 23 of 91 wore masks
(25%); 15 greetings (43% of mask-wearers, 9% of unmasked).
Those who continued to wear masks showed
some solidarity (although declining over time) by greetings; this was more
likely in residential neighborhoods (at least middle class) than in public
parks, where greetings had largely disappeared.
Occasional conflicts were observed, in
the following pattern (mid-June):
middle-aged woman says to an unmasked woman approaching her closely:
“Could you please stand back? Where is your mask?” Reply: “Don’t be rude!” It appears that both sides felt collective
morality is on their side: a formula for intense social conflict. News reports
a month earlier noted an upsurge of
confrontations between maskless shoppers who grew angry when retail store
employees who told them to wear masks; violent incidents however were rare.
(Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2020) We have no trend data on conflicts over
masking, so we don’t know whether this was just a transitional pattern.
When everyone is wearing masks, it
becomes more difficult to hear what people are saying; also some of the cues
that we use to fill in likely words are missing because we cannot see their
mouth and facial gestures, nor can one use facial feedback from the listener to
correct one’s articulation. Thus masked interactions even in ordinary
utilitarian situations give rise to misunderstandings, raised voices usually
associated with anger, and sometimes gestures of annoyance. I have observed
this frequently in grocery stories. Anything that limits multi-modal
interaction takes it toll, even in situations where solidarity mainly takes the
form of routine civility.
Family
Solidarity
Also on the positive side, it appears
that at first solidarity increased, at least for some family members. Children
of elementary school age and younger seemed happy, as they had more time with
parents and attention from them. I observed a large increase in families
bicycling together on neighbourhood streets (seldom seen before the epidemic);
since bicyclists rarely wear masks, and children at this time never did, one
could see that their expressions were on the whole happy. It is unlikely that
teenagers were similarly affected; I almost never saw them bicycling or walking
with adults in neighbourhoods or parks. Not surprisingly, as teen culture is
mostly concerned with being independent of adults, and being seen with parents
is a status loss except on formal occasions (Milner 2016). Given that teens
were prevented from gathering (I only occasionally saw teens out together, and
hardly any male-female young couples other than parents), I would predict that
data on the level of alienation and anxiety among teenagers would increase for
this period. Even though teens are the most media-connected and media-obsessed
of all age groups, they are the ones least likely to find it a compensation for
a further drop in F2F experience.
On the negative side, doctors report an
increase in child-abuse cases, although official statistics show a decline (all
attention being focused on COVID-19). [San Diego Union-Tribune June 5, 2020] A
national child-abuse hotline reported a 20% increase in calls and 440% increase
in text messages over the prior year [Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2020] The stay-at-home situation is favourable to
some, perhaps most families with adequate space and resources; where there is
family tension, isolation increases abuse, as has long been established [Collins
2008: 137]. Psychiatrists interviewed
generally regard remote video counseling as less effective than F2F, especially
the difficulty in reading emotions and conveying empathy [San Diego
Union-Tribune May 18, 2020]. A national survey carried out in May found that
reports of clinical symptoms of depression had doubled (compared to a 2014
baseline) to 24% of the US population; depression was especially high among
young adults and women, even though they were less vulnerable to COVID-19
[Washington Post, May 27, 2020]. But embodied social interaction in the
smartphone generation was already in decline, especially among teenage girls
[Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2019]. By 2018, American teens were spending
6-to-9 hours daily on-line. Since 2007, time spent on seeing friends or going
out in public had fallen sharply, as did dating. In 2019, 36% of girls said they were extremely anxious
every day.
We have no data on sexual behavior during
this period. Likely the birth rate will spike 9 months after the onset of the
epidemic. On the other hand, monthly marriage rates must surely drop, as will
the frequency of sexual behavior among couples of all kinds; casual hookups as
well as commercial sex likely will be found to drop drastically. (I have very
occasionally seen an unmasked male/female couple necking in the park; formerly
active gay pick-up areas look deserted.) Sexual activity had already declined
in the Internet generation; in 2018, 23% of Americans age 18-29 had no sex in
the previous year, doubling the percentage of sex-less lives in the
pre-social-media 1990s [Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2019]. Looking for a
bright side in the coronavirus shutdown, The Wall Street Journal (May 30, 2020)
touted “Distancing Revives Courtship,” an interview-based story of how dating
has gone on-line, returning to almost Victorian manners, at best watching each
other on-line drinking a glass of wine (definitely no touching). If sex is a
form of solidarity, it must surely decline among those who do not already have
intimate live-in partners. The same would be true of ordinary fun involving any
kind of physical activity together. Research may well find that social
distancing makes little difference to upper-middle class professionals whose
social gatherings consist entirely of conversation or playing cards, but more
active persons would likely feel deprived. This is one reason why after bars
re-opened in late June 2020, these suddenly crowded venues (photos showed an
absence of social distancing and mask-wearing) became hotspots for coronavirus
infections. In the tradeoff between lively sociability and risk of sickness,
many choose the former.
Remote
Schooling
By all accounts, this has not been very
successful. Leaving aside issues such as the extent of the school population
who lack internet access; and schools adopting a no-grading policy; we find
that on-line schooling has a negative effect on student motivation. On-line daily absences of students who don’t
log in are 30% or more; surveys find there is little interaction with teachers;
50% of students said they don’t feel motivated to complete on-line assignments.
[Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2020] Teachers complain they can’t read the body
language of students and can’t pick out cues for whom to engage with at what opportune
moment. I have watched my 8-year-old grandson during on-line classes; these
usually last less than half an hour, while the teacher goes over the assignment
in a pleasant voice, talking to no one in particular. He spent the time playing
with a slinky held beneath the level of the screen. Posts on Reddit by college students showed:
students complained about noise from parents or siblings while they were trying
to hear a lecture or take an exam. [San Diego Union-Tribune May 23, 2020] Some
students said they liked not having to go to campus, since they did not need to
find a place to hang around between classes; apparently these were students who
did not live near campus, or who had jobs. One student said he liked being able
to watch a lecture while doing his homework in bed; on-line viewing reduced the
need to pay attention. But we have no baseline of how much students normally
pay attention in class (usually they pretend to, but often their laptops are
not being used for taking notes, as any teacher can observe by walking around
the classroom). We cannot assume that F2F classrooms are automatically
successful Interaction Rituals.
Some college students complained about
the anti-cheating protocol during a virtual exam, where they were required to
keep their face and hands visible on the webcam at all times. Other Reddit
posts said they felt isolated at home, missed their school friends, and were
generally apathetic and unmotivated. This suggests a divide between students
who are entirely utilitarian in their orientation, and those for whom school is
a social experience. Hypothesis: grinds like on-line learning, party animals
don’t; those who value networks, whether intellectual or career, also miss
personal contact even though it consists in more than fun.
Besides passive feelings of alienation
and deprivation, some students actively took the opportunity to counter-attack.
Some coordinated on-line pranks with fellow-students, such as simultaneously
switching off their cameras so that the teacher finds oneself suddenly alone
surrounded by blank rectangles. Others organized campaigns to destroy the
ratings of apps such as Google Classroom. [Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2020]
Others hacked into Zoom conference calls, playing loud pop music, shouting
insults and obscenities, or inserting pornographic images on the screen.
[Washington Post April 5, 2020; Associated Press April 8, 2020] Mass rebellions
by students in classrooms against unpopular teachers are not unknown in the
past; but they were rare. On-line hacking may be a mixture of pranks, fun,
alienation, or hostility. The comparison shows that interactions in person
result in more conformity, a Goffmanian
front-stage show of respect for the situation, and thus at least a mild form of
solidarity. This social pressure or entrainment disappears at a distance;
violence, too, is difficult to carry out F2F, and much easier at a distance,
above all when there is no reciprocal view of each others’ eyes. (See Collins
2008, especially pp. 381-87 on snipers, whose mode of killing hinges on seeing
their target through a telescopic lens but cannot be seen by them.) It is
reciprocal eye contact that generates intersubjectivity and its constraints.
Working
Remotely
There is disagreement whether working
remotely is effective. Some people prefer working from home. What they like
about it are: no commuting; reduced meetings which they feel are a waste of
time; and fewer distractions in the workplace. Some dislike working at home;
what they dislike are more distractions in the household; less team cohesion;
and technical and communication difficulties. (Wall Street Journal, May 28,
2020: based on a survey of hiring managers) Similar points were made by the
head of a state judicial unit, who emphasized that much additional time by
management personnel was now spent on meetings, and attempts to keep up morale
by remote contact; meetings were often frustrating because considerable time
was wasted trying to get the communications technology working for all
participants. (repeated interviews during March-June 2020) She sometimes went to her office in order to use secure
communications, and found it refreshing whenever encountering a colleague in
person. Efforts to re-open court business, with social distancing and masking
precautions, were welcomed by part of the staff and opposed by others. The
characteristics of one group or the other are unknown; a hypothesis is that the
those more committed to their career and professional identity want to return
to their customary work setting; those for whom work is more of a routine
prefer to stay home.
Hollywood film professionals said they
liked spending less time on planes flying around the country; and less
high-level meetings which they considered more habitual than necessary. [Los Angeles
Times May 3, 2020] One producer said: “I don’t think video conferencing is a
substitute for being in a room with someone, but it is better than just talking
on the phone. There are so many ways you communicate with your expression...
when it’s delayed and small, you just lose all that. My feeling is it’s 50% as
good as an in-person meeting.” [p.E6] In the actual work of making movies, most
emphasized that it is a collective process, and some insisted that spontaneous
adjustments on-set were the key site for creativity. They also reiterated the
point that live audiences are the only way to reliably tell whether a film is
coming across, and larger audiences amplify both comedy and drama (i.e. via
emotional contagion).
Some businesses have tried to compensate
by having “virtual water-cooler” sessions several times a week, where any
employee can log in and chat. It is unclear what proportion took part, how enthusiastically, or with what pattern
over time. Some managers reported that company-wide “town-hall meetings” to
reassure employees lost interest over time [Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2020].
DiMaggio et al. (2019) however, found that on-line “brainstorming events” for
employees in a huge international company were consonant with some patterns of
interaction rituals; this research was carried out in 2003-4, long before the
epidemic. The degree of involvement and solidarity in town-hall meetings is a
matter of scale; the court administrator reported that feedback about morale
was positive after on-line sessions involving group of around 10; but in larger
groups it was hard to get a Q&A discussion going. This is similar to what
any speaker can observe in ordinary lecture presentations and panel
discussions; even with physical presence, most people are reluctant to “break
the ice” after the speakers have been the sole center of attention; but once
someone (usually a high-status person in the audience) sizes up the situation
and says something, it turns out that many others find they also have comments
to make. This is a process of micro-interactional attention, which is
especially difficult to handle on remote media.
Many managers said that innovativeness
was lost without serendipitous, unscheduled encounters among individuals. [Wall
Street Journal, June 6, 2020] In a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey, half of
employers reported a dip in productivity with on-line work. Longer trends,
going back before the coronavirus epidemic, indicate that the promise of
on-line work was not highly successful. During 2005-15, the era of the
high-speed Internet, the percentage of persons in the US regularly working from
home increased slowly; those working
from home at least half-time reached a pre-epidemic peak of only 4%.
[www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/04/28/846671375/why-remote-work-sucks]
During this period several big
corporations, initially enthusiastic, tried to shift to primarily on-line work
but abandoned it after concluding it was less effective. In the
market-dominating I-T companies, the trend instead was to provide more break
rooms, food, play and gym services to keep their workers happy on site. This
was abruptly reversed in the coronavirus period.
Zoom
fatigue
Popular video-conferencing tools such as
Zoom attempt to reproduce F2F interaction by showing an array of participants’
faces on the screen, along with one’s own face for feedback in positioning the
camera. Reports on how well it works in generating IR-type rhythm and
solidarity are mixed. CEOs of high-tech companies tend to claim that it works
well. Among rank-and-file participants, however, complaints are widespread and
it even acquired a slang term, ‘Zoom fatigue.’ [Wall Street Journal, May 28 and
June 17, 2020] Achieving synchrony with
others is hard to do with a screen full of faces, delayed real-time feedback,
and lack of full body language. Since there is a limit to how many individual
faces can be shown, in larger meetings some persons are seen only occasionally,
and leaders looking for responses often find they get none. Some of the
ingredients of IR (not necessarily under that name) are now being recognized by
communications specialists; these include fine-grained synchrony and eye
movements. In ordinary F2F conversation, persons do not stare continuously at
others’ eyes, but look and look away (Tom Scheff made this point to me in a
personal communication during the 1980s; for detailed transcripts of
multi-modal interaction see Scheff and Retzinger 1991). Thus seeing a row of
faces staring directly at you is artificial or even disconcerting. Some readers
responded with advice: cut off the video to reduce zoom fatigue, go audio-only.
Some found hidden benefits in zoom conferencing: once the round of social
greetings is over, turn off the video and your mic and do your own work while
the boss goes through their agenda.
Continuously seeing one’s own face on the
screen is another source of strain. Of course, as Goffman pointed out, everyone
is concerned with the presentation of their self, in terms of status as well as
appropriateness for the situation. But one does not have one’s image constantly
in a mirror; and when interaction starts to flow, one loses self-consciousness
and throws oneself into the activity, focusing more on others’ reactions than
on oneself. Those who cannot do this find social interaction embarassing and
painful. But enforced viewing of one's
own image feels unnatural.
Prolonged video conferencing as a whole
seems to have about the same effects as telephone conference calls. In my
experience on the national board of a professional association, our mid-year
meeting was canceled by a snowstorm, and a 2-day conference call was
substituted. The next time I saw the board in person, I polled everyone as to
whether they liked the conference call: 18 of 20 did not. Lack of shared emotion
was apparent during the event; for example, when it was announced that we had
received a large grant, there was no response. No wonder: applause and cheers
are coordinated by looking at others, and it is embarrassing to be the only
person applauding. [Clayman 1993] Work gets done remotely, after a fashion; it
just lacks moments of shared enthusiasm.
Assemblies
and Audiences
Participating in large audiences or
collective-action groups is intrinsically appealing, when it amplifies shared
emotions around a mutual focus of attention. This is a main attraction of
sports and other spectacles, concerts, and religious congregations; and it is
what creates and sustains enthusiasm in political groups and social movements.
Thus the ban on large participatory gatherings should be expected to reduce
commitment. Especially vulnerable is the
practice of singing together, because it spreads aerial germs more than any
other form of social contact. We lack current data on these effects; but the
prediction of Durkheimian theory is that religious commitment and belief will
fall off as the group is prevented from assembling. How long will this take?
Judging from patterns of religious conversion, my hypothesis is that beliefs
fall off drastically if there is no participation for 1-to-2 years. When the
epidemic finally ends, the level of church attendance will give an answer;
during the epidemic, surveys of religious belief on a monthly basis should show
a trend-- although allowing for desirability bias (which makes religious surveys
overstate religious practice) [Hardaway et al. 1998].
Can technology substitute for collective
practices like singing together in a congregation? Some Christian organizations
have created virtual choirs, where individuals sing their parts alone and their
recordings are compiled by sound engineers; the resulting performance is
presented on-line, either showing a series of faces of individual singers, or
several faces simultaneously on screen. [interview with international religious
organization staff] Such videos have
been widely viewed, and convey the singers’ enthusiasm. It remains to be seen,
over a period of time beyond the onset of the world epidemic, whether
participation and commitment levels change.
Similar techniques have been attempted
for performances of operas and orchestras. [Wall Street Journal, April 27,
2020] Achieving good sound quality is
difficult, since this depends on minute timing and adjustments of volume.
(Sound quality of amateur efforts by church congregations is admittedly poor.)
Making music together works best when there is a strong beat and repeated
musical motifs--- i.e. when there is a pronounced rhythmic coordination, as in
successful conversational IRs. More complex music is more difficult to produce
by remote coordination. No doubt it will be possible to compare such recordings
with conventionally produced ones over the coming year.
When sports events are played without
live audiences, can crowd enthusiasm be supplied by canned cheers? There is, in
fact, considerable experience over the years with TV broadcasts, including the
long-standing practice of laugh tracks in comedy shows. Most listeners find
these artificial; research is needed, however, comparing the sounds and laughs
audiences make when they are at a live show or when watching it with a sound
track. We also know that important games attract enthusiastic fans even when
ticket prices are high-- and here TV viewers can actually hear the sound of a
live crowd reacting to the action.
What is the extra ingredient of group
emotional contagion needed? A natural experiment occurred in March 2013 when a
Tunisian soccer match banned fans because of political tensions. [Wall Street
Journal, May 27, 2020] Fans were able to
download an app that connected to loudspeakers in the stadium, producing
recorded cheering that got louder as more people tapped on their smart phones
more frequently. Fans could thus could hear the effect of their own remote
“cheering”, and presumably so could the players on the field (although there
are no interviews about the players’ experiences). Audience enthusiasm was
high, and much local publicity was given to the experiment. The key ingredient
is feedback, from one individual fan to another; they were able to monitor how
their own action fit into the dynamics of making collective sounds. This
feeling of collective participation should be highest, not when sound is kept
at a maximum, but when participants can perceive rising and falling levels in
accordance with their own actions. This is what happens in real audiences, who
can monitor each other in all perceptual channels (such as recognizing when
doing the wave is going around the stadium and when it is fading out). If
remote-communications technology is to generate the solidarity and energy of
embodied gatherings, it is such details of the IR mechanism that must be
reproduced.
Summing
Up
We can now provisionally answer the
questions posed at the outset. Theory of interaction rituals does not
disappear; we do not need to invent a new sociology and psychology for the IT
era (at least not until robots start replacing human beings entirely, and even
then the issue remains to what degree such autonomous robots would incorporate
current human qualities). As far as human beings are concerned, political authorities
and technological developments may force people to forego much embodied
interaction. People are culturally quite malleable, but if that means that
after a period of acclimation, we can get used to anything, it does not follow
that we can do so without paying a price. If people are deprived of embodied
interactions, it is a likely hypothesis that they will be more depressed, less
energetic, feel less solidarity with other people, become more anxious,
distrustful, and perhaps hostile.
From the grandson of Randall Collins:
References
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