nici /DANM202 w 2

Design and Domestication of information and communication technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life Roger Silversone and Leslie Haddon

This article is essentially a long defense of the position that you cannot separate technology and society. Technology affects society and society affects technology; this symbiotic relationship is played out through two main interactions and lots of related connections. Uses domestic life for main example, claim could be extrapolated to industry / academia. Makes some very biased statements about lone parent households, responses to technology, and the way in which family dynamics are power struggles.

Design:

How products get to be the way they are. Broken into three sections:
creating the artefact

On the level of the companies: deciding how to manufacture, what appearance to give. Consumer plays only a small part in test studies and trial runs, the imagined user in the minds of the companies plays a greater part. The companies try to ease the “tension between the familiar and the strange” in order to make it easier for consumers to replace old technology with new. Example of the progress of radio design from very visible tech. in the design to more adaptive cabinet designed to merge w/ current aesthetic, to futuristic design as the technology grew more familiar (intended to boost failing progressive nature).
Also of import, the doubling of technology as object and medium, as medium it’s uses are less predictable

constructing the user

seen as an almost oppositional relationship between designers/engineers and the imagined user where constraints are placed on possible actions? The term configure is applied to the user in that the manufacturers envisioning a user who will fit “the intentions of the designer and the embodied possibilities in the functional apparatus of the machine itself”. Mostly in this section they set up why previous definitions (including the one above) don’t address the full relationship, limit the notion of user. don’t take into account the user as part of a group, and then they go on to the next part…

catching the consumer

this is marketing the product to the buyers, making a definition of their product (I’m part of the computer world, I’m an audio system, look at me I’m a CDi why the heck do you need me) getting whole sectors of the business world on program(creating a product space with supporting products, software, even competing companies), telling people what they think the product is for.

Here’s where we start to really break away from the technological determinism angle. The “relationship between structure and agency in social life” turns out to be one big give and take with reflexivity (we participants are aware of how our actions affect the whole) thrown in as well. Apparently thought this process is initially dynamic it reifies after a while; while we (consumers) initially interpret, appropriate, and manipulate technology in its initial stages after a period of time its role becomes set in stone / institutionalized in a large part due to the social networks we build around it?

Domestication:

A “fundamentally conservative process”, where in we need good reason bother to pay for and incorporate new technology into our lives. But also part of our “isatiable’ desire for newer better things. Lots of economic and social and political dimensions to domestic life that then affect our consumption. Increasingly our domestic lives are “defined by consumption of objects and meanings”. Technologies double life: What it is meant for and what it is used for.

commodification

“Commodification refers to the industrial and commercial processes that create both material and symbolic artifacts and turn them into commodities for sale in the formal market economy.” Construction of desire for objects and social meaning, purchase as transformative action

appropriation & objectification & incorporation

Once bought, object has to be fit into our lives, where to put it, what spatial and symbolic differentiation does this reinforce or break apart, how does it affect the pattern of domestic life?

Conversion

Status, belonging, showing off technological prowess…conversion of others maybe?

Family dynamics determine how technology is used and at the same time are determined and restructured by the new technology.

Biography of technology: how changing technology passes through it’s own life cycle and that story is telling about the society in which it took place.

Back to Reading goup or back to nici