Mediated Interactions and Situated Action

"The aim of this article is to show the current relevance of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. It provides three different examples : a) how these approaches enhance our understanding of ordinary situations involving complaints which do not necessarily become general or publicized; situations which constitute a blind spot, in a sense, for critical and pragmatic sociologies; b) conversation analysis’ real ability to make interactional phenomena visible and intelligible, particularly in environments saturated with digital mediations; c) how ethnomethodology, particularly with respect to its concern with describing the lived experience of producing an activity amidst descriptions thereof (for example performing an activity equipped with instructions to produce this activity) can constitute a fundamental resource to describe what it means to act as a “Quantified Self” or, more generally, acting in environments populated with infrastructure processing personal data – a perspective that currently receives too little attention from the “digital humanities”."