4: The Commentator Machine and the Digital Street

In the previous chapter, we explored the extent to which the concept of ‘interaction order’ is relevant to current socio-technical transformation and human experience. The argument advanced is that it remains an important concept that points to a signature of social organisation that is fundamental to the way in which society is both accomplished and reproduced as a situated social fact and also represents a primary site from which a range of interconnected disruptive technologies have sought to extract value, often in ways that have significant social implications. An important idea, referred to in the last chapter, is the notion of the ‘interaction order 2.0’ as a flow of situated and occasioned forms of life that are necessarily oriented towards moral and everyday practical calculus, contexture and senses of wider social-technical structure and networks as incarnate accomplishments and features of everyday life.¹