Social, Organizational, and Cultural
Alan John Dix, Steve Gill, Joanna Hare, Devina Ramduny-Ellis · 2022
Abstract This chapter looks at humans as social beings, and as a species how our social identity and interactions have been forged in the physical world. However, increasingly our communication, community, and identity is mediated digitally. The chapter shows that in some ways digital technology is merely an extension of previous forms of remote communication. However, digitally enabled physical artefacts are also enabling new ways of meeting and even achieving intimacy at a distance. Physical objects mediate many human activities; understanding this helps us to digitally augment existing artefacts or design new ones; and by recognizing that organizations perform computational functions we can see the ways the physical objects encode memory and processing. Culture itself is often seen through the lens of the artefacts it creates, and social identity in terms of geographic location or physical similarities. Increasingly both are becoming redefined digitally.