"Interaction" in a "Hybrid Society": A Terminological Footnote

The aim of this paper is to substitute sociologically more pertinent explanations for the popular sociology notions of "interaction" and "hybrid society". The scope and implications of these notions are discussed from a perspective of microsociology as applied to distributed artifical intelligence. The authors argue that only a precise use of the terms in specific disciplinary contexts is conducive to an adequate understanding of the studied subjectmatter.The term "hybrid society" overstates the social consequences of the phenomena it sets out to describe and should not be used even in an everyday language context. The term "interaction" should be used in the sociological sense of the word and not as what is in effect a synonym for the new media term "navigation". Finally, it is suggested that the term "multiagent environment" is better suited to the discussions of agent interactions from a microsociological perspective than the term "multiagent systems".