Beyond Toaster Studies: Moving beyond Tech-Centric Internet Research

The first AoIR 2012 plenary begins with Mary L. Gray, whose interest is in moving past technology-centric work in Internet studies. Rather, life is entangled with Internet technologies: the study of media should be used to draw out larger questions, and Internet research needs to be an interdiscipline concerned with boundary work.

Early on, cultivation theory dominated media studies, but domestication theory finally provided a more sophisticated view of the adoption and adaptation of media technologies; but this also overlooked the reinscription of normative users to the exclusion of other user groups, who were considered to be outsiders and always already late adopters. Domestication theory can be critiqued from this perspective: this is a matter of complicating the boundaries of use, and investigating boundary publics, whose use of (digital) media is more complex.

Mary discusses some examples of such boundary practices: for rural queer groups in the US, for example, the Net was used to share their uses of boundary spaces (churches, Walmart) as a way of establishing their identity. Recent apps for the queer community, on the other hand, have re-centred the city in the gay imaginary – the apps being built for the queer community do not serve the needs of rural users.

The boundary work which is required here moves us beyond 'toaster studies', which focus only of technological innovation and digital novelty, but takes a broader approach to the understanding of the historical impact of media on society. The mad rush to quantify 'big data' must be critiqued from this perspective, too – we've reached a critical moment in Internet studies, and must develop a more nuanced perspective which thinks relationally, dialectically about our relationship with technology.

We must do more than studying gadgets, gizmos, or memes, and instead see the larger questions at sake when studying technology. This is no small challenge, because our publics often do want to hear the technologistic stories – how do we bring our publics to see media as more complex than that, and shift to a focus on the contexts of technology use?