Dynamical, situated, wild: Attempts to capture the glorious mess of social interaction
Alexandra Paxton, University of Connecticut
April 12, 5pm
Social interaction is a glorious mess of multimodal communication embedded within an equally multifaceted cultural, temporal, and interpersonal context. Most people effortlessly manage that mess to connect, work, and even fight with others every day, but it poses a host of problems for the scholars interested in studying it, especially for those in traditional empirical approaches. In this talk, I present a brief overview of some ways to quantify the interconnectedness of social interaction, including both naturally occurring and experimentally derived data. In doing so, I argue that taking a complex systems approach provides methodological, analytical, and theoretical advantages to understanding social phenomena as they truly are—messiness and all.