| Sociology remains reluctant to treat technological devices and systems as participants in social life, yet much of what sociology takes to be human-to-human interaction today is---in fact---human-to-device interaction. The sensory experience of social interaction is now often the sensory experience of interactive machines, its expressive gestures now often the physical manipulation of sensing machines; the machines in question, meanwhile, now shape social-interactive processes in active, elaborate, and contextually-inflected ways, relying on a large and growing body of social data as they do so.;The increasingly social natures of recent technologies are not merely accidents of history. Literature from technology and sociology---in particular, works in the field of human-computer interaction and the sociological oeuvre of Harold Garfinkel---draw a direct line from sociology to the properties of today's computing systems. The design of practically social machines and the very need for such design are not the naive conceits that they are often taken to be. Rather, they result from technologists' appropriation of sociological thought---in the first instance to understand observed technological problems, and in the second to develop practical solutions to them.;As a result, recent technologies seem increasingly to inhabit the social world alongside human counterparts. These are ever-more present to and part of a wide range of everyday social-interactive processes and situations. Each generation of such devices and systems seems ever-more embodied, able to sense the world around it and to respond to and participate in this world in practical, contextually-appropriate, and meaningful ways. Even as sociologists wonder what is to be done with the "big data" that the operation of such devices and systems engenders, the world's populations generate this data---indeed, live it---in increasingly unimaginable quantities.;When this state of affairs is examined in relation to social-theoretical work by Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, it is clear that sociology remains key to understanding not only society, but technology as well. At the same time, it also becomes clear that empirical and theoretical innovation is needed to properly account for and understand contemporary social- technological society. One such innovation is proposed: the social interface, an analytical construct that echoes but supersedes that of the user interface. This construct seeks to identify the site at and through which social phenomena and technological phenomena become inseparable from and immanent to one another, then takes this site to be a key object and geography for future empirical research. |
