Nils Oliver Klowait

• Master of Arts in Sociology
• Research Fellow at Paderborn University

This study investigates the potential of using advanced conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to help people understand complex AI systems. In line with conversation-analytic research, we view the participatory role of AI as dynamically unfolding in a situation rather than being predetermined by its architecture. To study user sensemaking of...

We investigate how people with atypical bodily capabilities interact within virtual reality (VR) and the way they overcome interactional challenges in these emerging social environments. Based on a videographic multimodal single case analysis, we demonstrate how non-speaking VR participants furnish their bodies, at-hand instruments, and their inter...

In virtual reality (VR), participants may not always have hands, bodies, eyes, or even voices—using VR helmets and two controllers, participants control an avatar through virtual worlds that do not necessarily obey familiar laws of physics; moreover, the avatar’s bodily characteristics may not neatly match our bodies in the physical world. Despite...

While thinkers of the material turn offer new conceptual resources for talking about non-human ontologies, interaction researchers are trying to reassemble the social situation fragmented by telecommunication. Conversation analysts tend to see technical objects in their situation-constitutive role, but they can also disrupt the current projects of...

The article analyzes the implementation of an online educational module and its impact on the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. The latter is institutionally constrained by the presence of a goal and the distribution of roles between teacher and students. The introduction of a digital learning platform adds a technological context...

The following paper aims to engage recent reconsiderations of Gibson’s theory of affordances and Goffman’s concept of copresence in the context of the material turn – especially in the form expressed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. The paper’s central claim is that microsociology cannot avoid engaging material turn theory. It will be argued...

The article analyzes how an emerging form of automation may drastically transform contemporary employment dynamics. Recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) make it possible to automate both manual and mental non-standard tasks. The first part of the article traces the development of AI. Whereas classical algorithms require...

Nass’ and Reeves’ media equation paradigm within human–computer interaction (HCI) challenges long-held assumptions about how users approach computers. Given a rudimentary set of cues present in the system’s design, users are said to unconsciously treat computers as genuine interactants—extending rules of politeness, biases and human interactive con...

This article examines the methodological difficulties surrounding the topic of agency-ascription in human-computer interaction (HCI). The author evaluates a certain shift which occurred within this field, from analyzing computer-human interactions as model-like abstractions, which could be expressed in "program-like" scripts, to analyzing human-com...

The following study conceptualizes and evaluates a phone-based, natural-language-employing Automated Computer-Telephone Interviewing system. It will be argued that the conversational agent, by virtue of its technical limitations, is situated squarely within the interactional "uncanny valley," precisely because it exhibits a rudimentary interactivit...