During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement.

在 Covid-19 大流行期间，我们越来越多地求助于技术来与家人、朋友和同事保持联系。尽管封锁和限制有所放松，但许多人仍在鼓励我们用技术介导的交流来取代面对面的交流。然而，正如技术哲学家所强调的那样，技术可以改变我们所处的处境。从社会现象学中汲取见解，我们思考数字化的沟通和社交形式如何影响我们彼此的体验。特别是，我们提请注意当我们在数字空间中相遇时，我们彼此的具体体验发生改变的方式，并将感知访问、交互性、共享空间、过渡空间和自我呈现等主题作为我们的焦点。鉴于技术中介改变我们社会遭遇的各个方面的方式，我们认为数字遭遇构成了它们自己的社交形式，需要它们自己的现象学分析。我们在论文的结尾提出了一些更广泛的担忧，这些担忧只是简单地从替代角度思考数字和非数字介导的社会遭遇的框架。