Does Social Presence Increase Perceived Competence?

Conversational agents (CA) have drawn increasing interest from HCI research. They have become popular in different aspects of our lives, for example, in the form of chatbots as the primary point of contact when interacting with an insurance company online. Additionally, CA find their way into collaborative settings in education, at work, or financial advisory. Researchers and practitioners are searching for ways to enhance the customer's experience in service encounters by deploying CA. Since competence is an important treat of a financial advisor, they only accept CA in their interaction with clients if it does not harm their impression on the client. However, we do not know how the social presence of the CA affects this perceived competence. We explore this by evaluating three prototypes with different social presences. For this, we conducted a video-based online survey. In contrast to prior studies focusing on single human-computer interaction, our study explores CA in a dyadic setting of two humans and one CA. First, our results support the Computers-Are-Social-Actors paradigm as the CA with a strong social presence was perceived as more competent than the other two designs. Second, our data show a positive correlation between CA's and advisor's competence. This implies a positive impact of the CA on the service encounter as the CA and advisor can be seen as a competent team.

Heroes and villains: multimodal identity construction in children’s wartime visual narratives

The article investigates the Self and Other binaries in wartime visual literature published in Bengali-language children’s periodicals in West Bengal, India during the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle 1971. The study applies a critical multimodal framework using the Social Actors Approach and Social Semiotics within the Discourse-Historical Approach. The binaries are defined by the representation and subsequent differentiation of physical, linguistic, and cultural features of the Bengali and non-Bengali social actors and through their actions in the plots. The representation of social actors in the texts conforms to as well as deviates from typical wartime propaganda.

Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica Childhoods

Research on pre-Columbian childhood refers to all those studies that consider the different evidence and expressions of children in Mesoamerica, prior to the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. Archaeology, understandably by its very focus, has been one of the most prolific disciplines that has approached this subject of study. Currently, archaeological research focuses on highlighting the different social experiences of the past (or multi-vocality) of social identities, such as gender and childhood, and its relationship with material culture. In addition, archaeologists recognize a modern stereotype that considers children as passive or dependent beings and therefore biases childhood research in the past. Consequently, it is necessary to critically evaluate the cultural specificity of past childhood since each culture has its own way of considering that stage of the life cycle. Another problem, in the archaeological study of childhood, is to consider that children are not socially important individuals. It has been said that their activities are not significant for the economy or the social realm of communities and societies of the past. From archaeology, there exists a general perception that children are virtually unrecognizable from the archaeological record because their behavior leaves few material traces, apart from child burials. It has been since feminist critiques within the discipline that the study of childhood became of vital importance in archaeology to understand the process of gender acquisition through enculturation. This process refers to the way children learn about their gender identity through the material world that surrounds them and the various rituals that prepare them to become persons. Thus, the intent of recent studies on childhood has been to call upon archaeologists to consider children as social actors capable of making meaningful decisions on their own behalf and that they make substantial contributions to their families and their communities. In this sense, studies on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures have focused at the most basic sense on identifying the presence of children in the archaeological record or ethnohistoric sources. Its aim has been to document the different social ages that make up childhood, the ritual importance of Mesoamerican children, funerary practices, and health conditions marked in children’s bones as well as the different material and identity expressions of childhood through art and its associated material culture.

‘Without white people, the animals will go!’: COVID-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation

This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the “interregnum” between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as “kernels of truth” in discursive struggles on social media.

Interdependence as the key for an ethical artificial autonomy

Currently, the autonomy of artificial systems, robotic systems in particular, is certainly one of the most debated issues, both from the perspective of technological development and its social impact and ethical repercussions. While theoretical considerations often focus on scenarios far beyond what can be concretely hypothesized from the current state of the art, the term autonomy is still used in a vague or too general way. This reduces the possibilities of a punctual analysis of such an important issue, thus leading to often polarized positions (naive optimism or unfounded defeatism). The intent of this paper is to clarify what is meant by artificial autonomy, and what are the prerequisites that can allow the attribution of this characteristic to a robotic system. Starting from some concrete examples, we will try to indicate a way towards artificial autonomy that can hold together the advantages of developing adaptive and versatile systems with the management of the inevitable problems that this technology poses both from the viewpoint of safety and ethics. Our proposal is that a real artificial autonomy, especially if expressed in the social context, can only be achieved through interdependence with other social actors (human and otherwise), through continuous exchanges and interactions which, while allowing robots to explore the environment, guarantee the emergence of shared practices, behaviors, and ethical principles, which otherwise could not be imposed with a top-down approach, if not at the price of giving up the same artificial autonomy.

A Study on Hot Topics in Social Media of Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games

During the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Sina Weibo, as a high-frequency platform, has a wide range of topics and a large number of participants, and is the main channel for Internet users to obtain information. "People's Daily" is the media with high influence on social hot events in the wave microblog, from the opening day of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games to the end of the closing ceremony, among all the Olympic Games-related topics released by People's Daily, there were 343 topics with more than 50,000 likes, and 343 topics were used as hot topics for research. Among the 343 hot topics, 64 were table tennis-related topics, and table tennis was the sport with the highest attention among the hot topics. The social network method was used to quantify the People's Daily hot topics, establish a 2-mode network, study social actors as well as social structure from the perspective of relationships, and explain the structure of the 2-mode network and the influence of the macro-level structure on actors.

Review of Cooperative health in the COVID-19 era

The governance of migratory flows, understood as a system of co-management co-responsibility between institutional and private, political and social actors with respect to their identity and occupational health is addressed in the present non-experimental, exploratory and cross-sectional work with a non-probabilistic sample selection of 100 former migrants from central Mexico. From a structural model seven factors were established regarding framing, demands, resources, risks, opportunities, capabilities and employment. Based on the literature consulted, the limits, scope and lines of research aimed at deepening the effects of the variables and factors in an intercultural scenario are noticed.

Wacana Bukan Muhrim Pada Tayangan Video Cokro TV (Sebuah Analisis Wacana Kritis)

The speaker on Cokro TV's Youtube video, Ade Armando, expressed his opinion about the discourse of non-mahram which has invited controversy. The discourse of non-muhrim has sparked debate because it is associated with social problems that occur in society, namely choosing a doctor who is adjusted to the gender of the patient. This research emphasizes more on the ideology that the speaker wants to convey and the strategies used by the speaker to express his ideology. The critical analysis model used in this research is Van Leeuwen's critical analysis model. This research model is used to determine the social actors supported and marginalized by the speaker. This research uses a qualitative research approach with content analysis method. The results showed that the speakers used exclusion and inclusion strategies. The exclusion strategy used by the speaker leads to a passive discourse strategy, while the inclusion strategy used by the speaker leads to an identification discourse strategy.

Urban mobility and the impacts caused by Covid-19

This pandemic portrayed the country's social and economic inequality in terms of health services, work and social distancing. It was found that the spread of Covid-19 on a global scale is favored by the circulation of infected people and/or objects; changing the circulation in many land and air borders that needed to have restricted and/or closed accesses, including, the reduction and even the suspension of travels inside and outside countries, whose displacements are by road, rail, river and sea. In view of this, the search for measures to face the pandemic within the various socio-economic contexts, such as in this case of urban mobility, for example, the occupancy limit of 50% of seats in intercity transport and the mandatory use of masks. Urban mobility permeates as a social right and essential service, which needs to continue to function with due health care. It is necessary to maintain social distance and take due care. For the country to remain in this confrontation, it is necessary to guarantee democratic access to the city, together with measures to protect social actors from contamination by the New Coronavirus.

The Cult of the Martyr: The Symbol of Stanisław Wacławski and Rituals of Violence in the Warsaw Student Milieu of the 1930s

The Cult of the Martyr: The Symbol of Stanisław Wacławski and Rituals of Violence in the Warsaw Student Milieu of the 1930sViolence was a key element of the interwar radical habitus and was particularly affirmed in far-right movements, which found fertile ground for their ideas among students. However, the influence of the systems of ideas advocated by ideologues on student masses seems limited and indirect. Student support for antisemitism and extremism cannot be explained only by cultural conditions, ideology or political engineering. What is needed here are intermediate stages, linking radical ideology with the actions of social actors. I argue that the intermediary function was performed by the symbol of Stanisław Wacławski, a student and member of the Camp of Great Poland (Obóz Wielkiej Polski) who was killed during the antisemitic riots in Vilnius in 1931. The figure of Wacławski was a key element of antisemitic discourse in far-right press and was used by academic societies to construct the annual ritual of violence in the 1930s. I employ the micro-sociological approach and draw on Randall Collins’ theory of “interaction ritual chains” to show that the factors behind the mobilization of ordinary students for collective violence and a chauvinistic agenda included also emotions and personal relations, and not only political identification and advertising. Kult męczennika. Symbol Stanisława Wacławskiego i rytuały przemocy w warszawskim środowisku studenckim lat trzydziestych XX wiekuW habitusie międzywojennych radykałów przemoc grała kluczową rolę i była szczególnie afirmowana w ruchach skrajnie prawicowych, które znajdowały podatny grunt dla swoich idei w środowiskach studenckich. Jednak wpływ systemów idei głoszonych przez ideologów na masy studenckie wydaje się ograniczony i pośredni. Poparcia studentów dla antysemityzmu i ekstremizmu nie można tłumaczyć jedynie uwarunkowaniami kulturowymi, ideologią czy inżynierią polityczną. Potrzebne są tu etapy pośrednie, łączące radykalną ideologię z działaniami aktorów społecznych. W niniejszym tekście dowodzę, że funkcję taką pełnił w środowisku akademickim symbol w postaci Stanisława Wacławskiego, studenta i członka Obozu Wielkiej Polski, który zginął podczas antysemickich zamieszek w Wilnie w 1931 roku. Jego postać stanowiła kluczowy element antysemickiego dyskursu prasy skrajnej prawicy i była wykorzystywana przez stowarzyszenia akademickie do konstruowania corocznego rytuału przemocy w latach 30. Aby pokazać, że czynnikami, które wyjaśniają, w jaki sposób zwykli studenci byli mobilizowani do zbiorowej przemocy i pozyskiwani dla szowinistycznego programu, były również emocje i osobiste relacje, a nie tylko identyfikacja polityczna i agitacja, stosuję podejście mikrosocjologiczne i czerpię z teorii „łańcuchów rytuałów interakcji” Randalla Collinsa.