Chapter 3 is about the social and semiotic mediation of experiential grounds. In particular, the way people interrelate the dimensions and degrees of their sensations and instigations, or experience and action. It offers a continuous time semiotics of such processes and uses this to critique widespread notions of materiality, as well as to better theorize the notion of affordances. It builds a bridge between ecological theories of perception and pragmatist notions of meaning.

This chapter explores parallels between CALL and MALL and outlines how the technological affordances of various devices affect the ways in which they are used to achieve specific goals. The chapter describes the interrelationship of technology, research, practice and theory; outlines the evolution of mobile technologies and emphasises the importance of moving from affordance-based practice to pedagogy-based practice as technologies move through the hype cycle (cf. Gartner, 2016). The issue of push and pull modes associated with mobile technologies is outlined here, along with the ability of mobile devices to interact with other devices through a range of networking functions, the potential for mixed-reality learning and context-sensitive learning, and the use of other functions such as cameras and audio recorders for language learning. The chapter continues by pointing out some of the limitations of research on technology use in language education and then considers some of the complexities of both theory and practice in MALL in order to lay the foundations for the later chapters.

Much has been written about human error in the setting of medication safety; much less has been written about violations, which may be equally important and even more common. Violations may vary from and individual's failure to label a syringe to an organization's failure to invest in medication safety. Perhaps the most compelling challenge in this regard is lack of engagement by practitioners in the safety initiatives that exist within their organizations. This chapter includes a discussion of the 4 main reasons for violations: 1) rules must be violated in order for the work to be done; 2) a sense of powerfulness, that one can skillfully complete the job without needing rules; 3) violations represent short-cuts that allow the work to be done better or faster; 4) poor work planning, which results in having to invent the work process as one goes and solve problems as they arise. Reducing violations requires understanding why, and then fixing, the reasons for the violations. An understanding of violation in all its shades and a greater willingness to name this problem and to expect accountability for it within the context of a just culture may well be the key to improving medication safety in the future.

The process of medication management in anesthesia is both complicated (numerous steps) and complex, in that it requires continual adaptation to a continually changing environment. In addition, medication safety depends on systemic factors, some of which involve processes far from the clinical interface. The system in which medications are managed is complex, if only because humans are a key part of this system. The processes of human cognition are particularly complex, and include knowledge, evidence, information, wisdom and expertise. These processes are explored in some detail, including a discussion of short term and long-term memory. Each practitioner responds to an internally developed mental model of the current situation, which may differ considerable from that of other team members. An understanding of complexity and human cognition may often provide an explanation for failure in healthcare: such an understanding provides a foundation for our overall pursuit of medication safety.

Chapter 9 examines a second necessary extension of the analysis of social influence to a consideration of the effects of designed artefacts in social relations. The chapter starts with an elaboration of the notion of inter-objectivity: designed hardware permeates human social relations as infrastructure, tools, gadgets and instruments. How is different hardware used to implement modalities of social influence? Crowds have historically used barricades to enhance their power. People easily recognise the fait accompli, for example as a wall, installed in a collective effort of construction. Such installations provide boundaries and parameters of attitudes and behaviour afforded by design, but do so without prior consent. Legitimation is achieved post-hoc by cognitive dissonance in analogy to forced-compliance. Resistance to such faits accompli is introduced as a hitherto unrecognised modality of social influence. It functions to evaluate and to redesign hardware and systems in ways that correct the initial designs; resistance potentially innovates on the 'innovation'.

Three fundamental anthropologic dimensions are severely disturbed in anorexia nervosa: corporeality, spatiality and temporality. These dimensions constitute an existential form of anorexia which actualizes a disembodied subject in a purely physical world exhibiting rationalistic thoughts. We will not separate corporeality and spatiality, but indeed temporality. In the chapter we describe the most prominent characteristics.

Overview of the methodological approach

This chapter offers a cultural epidemiology of digital communities, describing how these groups emerge, bond, and come to develop shared embodied experiences. We argue that online communities, while seemingly novel and often “strange," can offer insights into fundamental mechanisms of human sociality albeit on an unprecedented speed and scale due to specific affordances of cyberspace. After framing this argument, we outline a noncomprehensive anthropological survey of online communities of interest. Our hope is to provide a model for how online communities grow to share interphenomenal experiences despite lack of face-to-face interaction, and how this might inform our understanding of ordinary social cognition.

Aging, Duration, and the English Novel concludes by comparing the affordances of cinema and the novel as they relate to the representation of aging. Emerging near the end of this study’s historical focus, cinema offered new formal possibilities for capturing the process of growing old. Returning to the question of duration through a discussion of Woolf’s, Bergson’s, and Deleuze’s writing on cinema, this section teases out the formal arguments about narrative explored in the previous chapters. In fact, the comparison between cinematic and textual narrative underlines this book’s thesis: that the affordances of form structure historically specific possibilities—affective, social, and political—for older people. The afterword also affirms an expanded version of this thesis by arguing that age—as a biocultural process—serves as a form with its own ability to organize human life and read texts.

The final chapters of this book look at how a participatory outlook can inform and has informed a vision of the world and what it means to live, act, pray, and seek God in it. This, the first of these chapters, considers knowledge and knowing in participatory terms. Knowledge is seen as a participation of the knower in the known, or a sharing from the known to the knower. This undergirds a 'realist' epistemology, in that knowing rests on the reality of the thing that is known. That said, it also stresses the creaturehood and particularity of the knower and the manner of knowing: that which is known comes to be in the knower in the manner of the knower, whether we are talking about our knowledge of an animal, of a plant, or of God. In the case of God, most of all, the knower never exhausts the depths of what is known. That also applies, however, although to a different degree, in the knowledge of even mundane things, since their deepest reality is a participation in God, which confers a creaturely form of inexhaustibility. In these ways, much of this chapter is an exploration of 'intra-finite participation': about how one creature participates in, or donates to, another. It closes with a discussion of the relation between reason and revelation.

The final chapters of this book look at how a participatory outlook can inform and has informed a vision of the world and what it means to live, act, pray, and seek God in it. This, the first of these chapters, considers knowledge and knowing in participatory terms. Knowledge is seen as a participation of the knower in the known, or a sharing from the known to the knower. This undergirds a 'realist' epistemology, in that knowing rests on the reality of the thing that is known. That said, it also stresses the creaturehood and particularity of the knower and the manner of knowing: that which is known comes to be in the knower in the manner of the knower, whether we are talking about our knowledge of an animal, of a plant, or of God. In the case of God, most of all, the knower never exhausts the depths of what is known. That also applies, however, although to a different degree, in the knowledge of even mundane things, since their deepest reality is a participation in God, which confers a creaturely form of inexhaustibility. In these ways, much of this chapter is an exploration of 'intra-finite participation': about how one creature participates in, or donates to, another. It closes with a discussion of the relation between reason and revelation.

This chapter is about how the concept of partial organization can contribute to our understanding of the specificity of organizing collective action through social media. Empirically, it is a story about how a small group of activists via Facebook could raise 9 million Swedish crowns (around 900 000 Euros) in just over a week to a private bank account, and also about the ensuing challenges involved in allocating the funds and packing and distributing the tons of clothes and other items they collected. Theoretically, we want to propose that the undecided order of a social media initiative may hold sufficient power to initiate it, but it may become too strenuous to manage in the long run without legitimate authority. In turn, pressures to incorporate standardized practices of membership, leadership, and monitoring may risk the very basis of the large-scale engagement that the partialness of the social media initiative has enabled.

Although the question whether organisation obstructs or supports social movement claims and mobilisation has long been debated, it is undeniable that some level of organisation exists in even the most radically horizontal social movements. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to how movements operate in dealing with the tensions associated with the question of organisation, that is, how they seek to be effective in decision-making while maintaining or advancing inclusivity and participation. This chapter presents an analysis of the organising efforts of a timebank. With a particular focus on the production of organisation, we illustrate how a group vested on the idea of horizontal, non-hierarchical collective action is dealing with the coordination and decision-making challenges they meet over time.