A Media-Studies take on Social Robots as Media-Machines

The authors argue for a sociologically inspired media studies approach to social robotics, and to Human-Machine communication in everyday life contexts. From this perspective, social robots need to be contextualised within the radicalization of the process of convergence, that in the last 30 years has reshaped our media environment. After the convergence of media, in fact, what we are witnessing today is a convergence of media and programmable machines, leading to the rise of media-machines (including, along with social robots, smart speakers and the internet of things). Advanced automation allows these new devices not only to exert some form of material agency in the world, but also to propose themselves to humans as proper communicative partners, interacting with them and co-constructing meaning in a ‘natural way’. Our study investigated the relationships between humans and media-machines in natural settings, drawing on two cases of human-robot communication: the deployment of Pepper at the Bologna airport, and at Universit  Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – curated by the authors. The preliminary results show how the interaction with social robots, far from being ‘natural’, is actually prefigured and disciplined by the robot programming, configuration and scripts, and how humans are instructed to assume a defined – and limited – interactional role.