Social bodies in virtual worlds: Intercorporeality in Esports

Body objectified? Phenomenological perspective on patient objectification in teleconsultation

The global crisis of COVID-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the use of teleconsultation (consultation between the patient and the doctor via video platforms). While it has some obvious benefits and drawbacks for both the patient and the doctor, it is important to consider-how teleconsultation impacts the quality of the patient-doctor relationship? I will approach this question through the lens of phenomenology of the body, focusing on the question-what happens to the patient objectification in teleconsultation? To answer this question I will adopt a phenomenological approach combining both insights drawn from the phenomenological tradition, i.e., the concepts of the lived body and the object body, and the results from the phenomenologically informed qualitative research study on the patient experience of teleconsultation. The theoretical background against which I have developed this study comprises discussions within the field of phenomenology of medicine regarding the different sources of patient objectification within clinical encounter and the arguments concerning the negative impact that objectification has on the quality of care. I will argue that a factor that has frequently been identified within phenomenology of medicine as the main source of patient objectification in clinical encounters, namely, the internalized gaze of the clinician, is diminished during teleconsultation, increasing patient's sense of agency, decreasing her sense of alienation and opening up the possibility for a closer relationship between the patient and the health care provider, all of which lead to the transformation of the hierarchical patient-health care professional relationship.

The role of the body in electronic sport: a scoping review

The popularity of competitive computer and videogaming, also known as electronic sport (esport), has been rising rapidly during the past decades. Because of many parallels with traditional sports, like competitiveness, skill requirements, degree of professionalization, or the way it is portrayed in the media, esport has been adopted as part of the sport canon in many countries. Still, critics argue that playing computer games lacks the physicality commonly seen in traditional sports. A significant part of the competition is mediated through digital platforms and the spotlight shifts from the players’ appearance and actions to their digital avatars. This paper takes on this issue by exploring existing evidence about the role of the body in esport via a scoping review approach. According to the findings of 47 studies, the body’s role in esport is akin to that in traditional sport, including specific motoric requirements or biometric responses. Beyond that, the body can be seen as a link between the digital and physical worlds. Players embody digital avatars in the form of esport-specific movements, transfer of norms and ideals, and identification with the in-game characters. Future research can use this review as a basis for scientific approaches to individual phenomena regarding corporeality in esport and inter-corporeality.

Subjective attitudes moderate the social connectedness in esports gaming during COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional study

Background

Electronic sports (esports) has become a practical intervention for young people craving social connections since the COVID-19 pandemic. Past studies have shown an equivocal role of esports participation in boosting social ties or social connectedness. It is unclear if their relationship is affected by subjective attitudes of gamers. Moreover, the present COVID-19 pandemic may further modify this relationship to a greater extent.

Objective

This study primarily aimed to investigate the moderating effect of participants' subjective attitudes toward esports gaming on the relationship between in-game interaction during esports participation and participants' anticipated social connectedness among Chinese young adults during the COVID-19 lockdown periods in China.

Methods

We conducted a nationwide online questionnaire survey through the Credamo platform among 550 Chinese young adults in the present study. The Social Connectedness Scale-Revised was used to assess participants' social connectedness levels.

Results

Four hundred and fifty-three participants were included in the final analysis. The effective response rate was 82.4%. Our results showed that the esports participation measured by in-game communication frequency among participants, as an independent factor, was negatively associated with participants' social connectedness scores (β = -0.13, p < 0.05). However, when the moderating effect of subjective attitudes toward esports gaming was considered, the association between communication frequency and social connectedness scores was turned into the opposite direction with a larger effect size (β = 0.35, p < 0.001).

Conclusion

Our primary finding revealed that a positive mindset in esports gaming is indispensable in boosting social connectedness. Overall, our study provided supporting evidence for the benefits of esports on individuals' social connectedness. In future circumstances similar to the COVID-19 era, playing esports games is strongly encouraged in an attempt to maintain social connections and relieve psychological stress. In the meantime, we believe that having a positive esports experience, often associated with a positive mindset during gaming, can better promote social connectedness. Nevertheless, the amount of time spent on gaming per day should be of great concern, as esports games can be addictive, especially for teenagers and college students.

Expressive Avatars: Vitality in Virtual Worlds

Critics have argued that human-controlled avatar interactions fail to facilitate the kinds of expressivity and social understanding afforded by our physical bodies. We identify three claims meant to justify the supposed expressive limits of avatar interactions compared to our physical interactions. First, “The Limited Expressivity Claim”: avatars have a more limited expressive range than our physical bodies. Second, “The Inputted Expressivity Claim”: any expressive avatarial behaviour must be deliberately inputted by the user. Third, “The Decoding Claim”: users must infer or figure out the expressive meaning of human-controlled avatars’ behaviour through cognitively onerous processes. With the aim of critically assessing all three claims, we analyze data collected through observations of and interviews with expert players of the avatar-based video game League of Legends. Focusing on Daniel Stern’s (2010) notion of vitality, we analyze the participants’ descriptions of seeing and interacting with other avatars during performance. Our analysis shows that the informants experience human-based avatarial interactions as qualitatively different than interactions with bots, that the informants see the movements of other players’ avatars as having different expressive styles, and that the informants actively use and manipulate this avatarial expressivity during performance. The results of our analysis, we argue, provide reasons for loosening or resisting the three claims concerning the limits of avatarial expressivity.

Face-to-Face with the Doctor Online: Phenomenological Analysis of Patient Experience of Teleconsultation

The global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the adoption of teleconsultation-a form of consultation between patient and health care professional that occurs via videoconferencing platforms. For this reason, it is important to investigate the way in which this form of interaction modifies the nature of the clinical encounter and the extent to which this modification impacts the healing process. For this purpose, I will refer to insights into the clinical encounter as a face-to-face encounter drawn from the phenomenology of medicine (R. Zaner, K. Toombs, E. Pellegrino). I will also take into account a criticism that has been expressed by various contemporary phenomenologists (H. Dreyfus, T. Fuchs, L. Dolezal, H. Carel), namely, that due to the lack of physical proximity to the other in all types of online encounters, such encounters lack significant features that are present in face-to-face encounters, with the most important of these being the possibility of attaining an empathetic perception of the other and a sense of embodied risk. As these elements are essential features of the clinical encounter, the aim of this paper is to determine whether teleconsultation exhibits these features. To do that, I will integrate phenomenological philosophy with qualitative research drawing materials from both the philosophical tradition, particularly with respect to the concepts of the face-to-face encounter and embodied risk (A. Schutz and H. Dreyfus), and qualitative research study regarding patient experiences of teleconsultation. I will argue that teleconsultation does involve both the possibility of perceiving the other empathetically and the possibility of experiencing a sense of embodied risk.

Sociality and Embodiment: Online Communication During and After Covid-19

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement.

Both Physical and Virtual: On Immediacy in Esports

This article strives to make novel headway in the debate concerning esports' relationship to sports by focusing on the relationship between esports and physicality. More precisely, the aim of this article is to critically assess the claim that esports fails to be sports because it is never properly “direct” or “immediate” compared to physical sports. To do so, I focus on the account of physicality presented by Jason Holt, who provides a theoretical framework meant to justify the claim that esports is never properly immediate and therefore never sports. I begin by motivating Holt's account of physicality by contrasting it with a more classical way of discussing physicality and sports, namely in terms of physical motor skills. Afterwards, I introduce Holt's account of physicality as immediacy and engage with its assumptions more thoroughly to problematize the claim that esports is fundamentally indirect. Lastly, I argue that the assumption that esports necessarily lacks immediacy is based on a narrow understanding of body and, consequently, of space. In response, I offer a different way of thinking about body and space, focusing on the subjective, bodily engagement of the esports practitioners with their practice, whereby physical space and virtual space can be appreciated as immediately interconnected during performance in a hybrid manner. In providing such an account, the article contributes directly to the broader, growing discussion on the relationship between physicality and virtuality in an increasingly digital world.

Interpersonal and Collective Affective Niche Construction: Empirical and Normative Perspectives on Social Media

This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of collective affective niche construction, which extends the extended mind (ExM) thesis from cognitive to affective phenomena. Although theoretically innovative, the theory lacks a detailed psychological account of how collective affectivity is scaffolded. It has also been criticized for its uncritical assumption of the subject qua the autonomous user of the affective scaffolding as disposable resources, abstracting away from embedded subjectivity in particular techno-political arrangements. We propose that the social motivation hypothesis, an account grounded in recent empirical and theoretical developments in psychology as well as in the classic theory of moral sentiments, will address the former criticism by explicating the basic mechanisms of human social orientation at work in collective affective niche construction. We also begin to address the latter normative criticism in mobilizing a so-called we-mode approach to collective emotion. To make these theoretical dialectics salient, we study social media as a case of collective affective niches, focusing on the impact on subjective well-being. Finally, we briefly identify promising future directions in building a normative theory of affective niche construction on the collective level.

Exploring the synergy between nano-influencers and sports community: behavior mapping through machine learning

Purpose

The paper aims to explore the influence of cybersecurity on the semantic orientation of the sports consumers. Focusing on both sport and esports, this study finds the social media factors contributing in the sentiment formation and commenting behavior on Twitter and proposes a scheme for attitude modulation through identification of highly engaged nano-influencers.

Design/methodology/approach

Experimental design was used as the research methodology. Data mining from Twitter using RStudio software was conducted using the keyword “cybersecurity” during the time of pandemic. Final corpus of 31,891 tweets were considered for the study. Initial sentiment analysis has been conducted to explore the consumer's emotional inclination towards cybersecurity. Further through generalized equation modeling the impact of social media attributes over the consumer's posting behavior has been analyzed.

Findings

The research findings reveal that users are inherently positive towards cybersecurity adoption in sports and the factors such as number of tweets, number of positive words contained in these tweets and the authenticity of the information source boost the pre-established tweeting behavior. However, the influx of information from non-organizational sources such as trending topics and discussions have negative impact over the users.

Originality/value

This study is first to explore the role of nano-influencers as communication moderators over digital social platforms. This study offers a new understanding of key contributing attributes of sentiments formation over social media and offers a scheme of selection of nano-influencers to modulate the pre-established sentiments of the users. Finally, the current study offers valuable insights into social media engagements and selection of nano-influencers for practicing marketing managers.

Taking Watsuji online: betweenness and expression in online spaces

In this paper, we introduce the Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji's phenomenology of aidagara ("betweenness") and use his analysis in the contemporary context of online space. We argue that Watsuji develops a prescient analysis anticipating modern technologically-mediated forms of expression and engagement. More precisely, we show that instead of adopting a traditional phenomenological focus on face-to-face interaction, Watsuji argues that communication technologies-which now include Internet-enabled technologies and spaces-are expressive vehicles enabling new forms of emotional expression, shared experiences, and modes of betweenness that would be otherwise inaccessible. Using Watsuji's phenomenological analysis, we argue that the Internet is not simply a sophisticated form of communication technology that expresses our subjective spatiality (although it is), but that it actually gives rise to new forms of subjective spatiality itself. We conclude with an exploration of how certain aspects of our online interconnections are hidden from lay users in ways that have significant political and ethical implications.