The Taken-for-Grantedness of Technologies as Social Facts

Copenhagen.
We're now starting the second keynote here at the AoIR 2008 conference in Copenhagen, by Rich Ling. He begins by asking how technology has become part of the 'social woodwork', how it is being domesticated. The Internet, he suggests, is actually a quasi-broadcast medium, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary - a one-to-many metaphor holds sway for many of its services (excepting email, of course, but certainly this applies for many Websites).

Mobiles, by contrast, are a point-to-point form of communication - SMS and mobile voice communications account for the vast majority of usage, and the mobile telephone enables individual (rather than geographically fixed) addressability. Mobile phone communication is also a relatively intimate form of communication - and while new phones and new services may change this, most people use relatively old and limited phones which do not cope with such services particularly well (the most popular phone in Norway, for example, belongs to a now discontinued and comparatively ancient line of phones).

There is a process of domestication here, by which items from the commercial world are brought into our everyday lives. This requires a number of choices by the user - determining exactly how this alien artefact is to be embedded into everyday life. This is not determined simply by technological functionality or mediated representations, but by social processes.

There are a number of steps along the way here (though not necessarily occurring in a preset order): we begin by understanding that a technology exists in the first place (and may resist the changes that such technologies may bring for our existing uses of technology), we may purchase it (a conversion from the commercial to the private realm, which follows our examination of the pros and cons of purchasing the technology, a determination of where to make the purchase, and an analysis of how one's social network may react to the purchase), we determine its placement, integration, and use in our lives (which may be further complicated by the existing and perhaps relatively static physical environments of our domestic lives - and importantly, may also lead to giving up on the technology if it turns out to be too difficult to domesticate), and as a result we may be regarded differently by others around us (because technologies take on iconic meanings in addition to their functionality).

Domestication is often focussed on a small group (the family, or a circle of friends), but what happens when there is widespread adoption throughout society is that technology becomes a social fact, and the object changes the general equilibrium of the environment in which it exists. There emerges a certain 'taken-for-grantedness', which is especially palpable if the object suddenly disappears again, and a kind of folk ideology develops around them. Social facts are things that exist before the user comes on the scene; they exist outside of the user and are definable through the power of social coercion, as they impose themselves on the user. The pressure of social facts makes itself felt immediately if we attempt to resist it - but one consequence of such social facts is social cohesion, too.

Technologies can be such (emergent) social facts - including, for example, refrigerators, watches, spectacles, as well as the Internet and mobile phones. The automobile is another example - the car is now the assumed form of transportation in most developed nations, and is supported by a substantial infrastructure of environments and services; loss of automobile transport is experienced as an almost insurmountable complication by many users. Further, the car has developed its own folk ideology; there is significant emotional attachment to cars.

The Net and mobile phones are also social facts, of course. The Internet is reconfiguring social reality, and many aspects of our lives are being colonised by the Internet; this has positive as well as negative consequences as it rearranges relations between individuals and corporations and allows for instant access to a vast array of information, for example.

How is loss of access felt in this case - and how is lack of access felt for the many who still do not have reliable Internet access, in developed as well as developing countries? In the same way, people who do not have mobile phones are now not only left out from an important communication network, but also become problems for their friends. Additionally, there is an ongoing process of convergence between Internet and mobile phone technologies (though likely never resulting in a full merger, Rich suggests).

If there is a progression from purchase to placement in our daily lives to the establishment of technologies as social facts, then there is also a feedback loop back to the start, where such social facts determine further purchase decisions. The stronger this loop becomes, the harder it is to steer the further development and social use of such technologies - in good part because of the emergence of ever more intractable folk ideologies around these technologies as they become taken for granted.

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