The Point of PoSR
THIS MATERIAL ©2008–2022 SALLY A. APPLIN AND MICHAEL D. FISCHER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PoSR was developed to better represent and understand increasingly heterogenous social contexts and relations between people that seemed to arise from increased use of mobile communications combined with existing forms of communications. PoSR can be used to understand how messages that people create independently have related properties.
In other words, different types of behavior that may sometimes seem unrelated can be associated together.
PoSR can help to claify emerging social behavior better by revealing the emergent properties of heterogeneity, multiplexing, multiplicity, asynchronicity and synchronicity in relation to overlapping and partially overlapping social networks.
For the past few years, Applin and Fischer have been examining the impact of ‘digital’ and ‘mobile’ augmentations based on a framework comprised of polysocial networks; the abstract networks representing the union of all instantiable networks for each person in an aggregate; and the instantiation of a subset of these in a given context, which we have called PolySocial Reality. In terms of intersectionality, each person represents a perspectual intersection of many potential resources for information and interaction, only some of which can be instantiated in a given instance, considering constraints of time, cognitive capacity, and mutual exclusion. In past augmentations the changes in polysocial networks and the exercise of agency in instantiating these in different contexts have eventually been resolved in widespread practices that become regarded as ‘cultural’.
