Social Displays. On the Accountability of Embodied Digital Technologies in Everyday Life

Projekt im Forschungsverbund “Hybrid Societies”, DFG 2020-2023, SFB 1410, Teilprojekt D04

Summary

The project investigates the communicative integration of embodied digital technologies (EDTs) such as driverless cars or artificial companions into the social world’s routines of action and cooperation. The micro-sociological hypothesis of the project is that a reliable cooperation of humans and EDTs, in which EDTs have to decide and act autonomously to some degree, presumes the human cooperation partners to be informed clearly about the EDTs’ alignment in the situation and the EDTs’ overall accountability. In its empirical design, the envisaged research project therefore aims to analyze different anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, fictional, and purely functional displays used in the development of EDTs to inform human cooperation partners about an EDT’s specific cooperative features and capabilities. The project systematically asks about the (meta-)communicative constitution of accountability seeking to reconstruct different social types and taxonomies of (non-human) accountable others. In the course of highly contrasting single case studies, a formal theory on EDTs’ social displays of accountability will be developed. As part of a joint work-package (D04/E02) the project also makes the EDTs’ performance of social responsibility a subject of research.