Simultaneously Here and There: Situating online organizing in our embodied material practices

Abstract

Online organizing is situated in offline practices. Recent theorizing has examined how online and offline practices co-evolve over time, but given limited attention to how they co-exist in time. Yet, without being ‘here’ in an embodied material practice, we cannot experience being ‘there’ online. Understanding the co-existence of online and offline practices is important as organizing becomes actively negotiated in the moments of being simultaneously here offline and there online. In this article, we pull the field of view back from the computer screen to theorize the simultaneity of online organizing with multiple offline practices in which participants are embodied and engage materially. We articulate how, in the case of the video conference, the shared experience of presence, proximity and participation in online organizing is constituted in relation to multiple – but mostly unshared – offline practices. We argue that this interconnection with multiple offline practices can blur boundaries, divert purposes and lead to glitches and breakdowns in online organizing. We make two contributions. First, we recast online organizing as embedded in multiple, mostly unshared, offline practices. Second, we develop understanding of the co-existence of online and offline in time, and its implications for interacting and organizing online. We conclude by suggesting new directions for research on organizing across simultaneously co-existing online and offline practices.