Social Interaction a The Construction of Co

New communication technologies set off new con-texts for communication in very different ways from both print media and electronic mass media. In this essay, I shall compare different media with emphasis on the ways they assist in the construction of con-texts of interaction. It investigates the relationships between media technologies, social interaction and forms of social context. I shall attempt to draw some ideal-typical lines between forms of communication and their corresponding contexts. The comparisons should be partly read here as hypothesis for further empirical analysis.1 In relation to media technologies, contexts pose several complicated questions. For instance, what is the ‘context ’ when watching television or engaged in computer-mediated communication? How should we characterise communicative practices when material and communicative contexts overlap and blend into new ones? Such questions indicate how difficult it is to understand the communicative experiences of the modern individual with the wide range of modes of mediation at hand which reproduce and disintegrate the lifeworld. For clarification, we should distin-guish a) between communication and body, or be-tween meaning and place, which suggests different types of context, b) between distinct media techno-logies according to their contextualization abilities,