4 Major Theoretical FrameworksTECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM:

– strong tendency to view TECHNOLOGIES as CAUSAL AGENTS– entering societies independent of social contexts and then affecting them;

humans have little power to resist– especially the case with new technologies

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGY:– HUMANS are the CAUSAL AGENTS– we are the primary sources of change in both technology and society

SOCIAL SHAPING:– influence flows in both directions (BI-DIRECTIONAL CAUSALITY)– humans influence technological development; technologies influence

humans and societal development

DOMESTICATION:– technologies NO LONGER agents of change– historical perspective; humans stop questioning individual technologies as

they become taken-for-granted parts of everyday life

• “As the similarities amongst Socrates, Carr’s and Alloways’s articulation of new media’s affect on wisdom suggest, deterministic rhetoric’s tend to be formulaic and hyperbolic. Predictable negatives stories are met with predictable positive alternatives in a familiar contradictory binary” (27).

Baym’s Sexual Assault Comments

• public understanding of the internet: sexual crimes reaching new heights

• “When adult men and under-age girls do meet through the internet for sexual encounters, it is usually consensual and honest, if morally dubious.” (pp 42).

• “end users”: “those individuals and groups who are affected downstream by products of technological innovation” (Casper and Clarke 1998, as quoted in Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003:6)

• “lay end users”: “highlight some end users’ relative exclusion from expert discourse” (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003:6)

• “implicated actors”: “those silent or not present but affected by the action” (Clarket 1998:267, as quoted in Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003:6)

Cyborg

Codes: the sweater

warm clothing

keeping warm

winter is coming

a cold day

informal style of dress

long walk in the woods

comfortable

meaning system of values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions

made of wool

Judy Wajcman