Sociology of Technology (Non)use: Junior Prof. Susann Wagenknecht, PhD (#SW1)

Format

Project seminar with synchronous and asynchronous elements

Keywords

Sociology, research project seminar, OPAL blog, educational videos, video conferences

Description

Content:
“Only two professions refer to their clients as users: designers and drug dealers. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that some of the language used to describe technology (non)use draws on that of substance abuse, indulgence, and addiction.” (Baumer et al. 2015: 54)

Technology is meant to be useful. Indeed, it often turns us into users who become addicted to its functionality in an astonishingly short amount of time. Using technology is a customary and obvious choice. But use is just one possible, extremely standardized perspective for examining our interactions with technology. Other approaches are also possible: Technology can be worn out or shut down; it can be hacked, reconfigured and dismantled. We also have the choice of simply not using technology. Or is it really as simple as we would like to believe?

This core seminar explores and critically examines the paradigm of use and user. We investigate the variety of the possible interactions with technology – from the instrumental to the subversive, from the exemplary to the provocative and from the active to the idle. We seek to understand how the design of technical artifacts conveys a script for their use and how this script can be described. At what point do certain technologies appear to become indispensable and how can we deal with this ostensible lack of alternatives? What forms of sociality can the use of technology broker and what social consequences does non-use bear? In what practices is technology use ingrained and where is non-use still acceptable?

These questions explore the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. They focus on power relations and shine the spotlight on those who go unnoticed on account of a tunnel vision-like focus on technology and its use. We must also ask: Who is actually using whom here? In light of sophisticated methods of consumer monitoring, Eric Baumer (2015) suggests a clear conceptual distinction between “users” and “usees.” In addition, Janet Vertesi (2014) asserts: “Many people say that the solution […] is simple: if you don’t like it, just opt out. But as my experience shows, it’s not as simple as that. And it may leave you feeling like a criminal.”

The seminar is designed to support Sociology master’s students in independently conducting structured, qualitatively empirical research projects.
References:

• Baumer, Eric, Jenna Burrell, Morgan G. Ames, Jed R. Brubaker and Paul Dourish (2015): On the importance and implications of studying technology non-use. interactions 22(2), p. 52–56.
• Baumer, Eric (2015): Usees. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 3295–3298.
• Vertesi, Janet (2014): My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal. Time, May 1, 2014. https://time.com/83200/privacy-internet-big-data-opt-out/

Short description of the virtual teaching format:
The course used the blog feature in groups on OPAL for organizing the seminar each week. In addition to the lecturer’s videos and notifications about upcoming video conferences, the blog was also used for students to post their own comments. The blog organized the switch between asynchronous and synchronous teaching and learning formats. Each week, either a video conference took place or the students received a pre-recorded video to watch, supplemented by prompts for individual or group work. We also used these other tools in the course:

• The forum feature on OPAL, which students used for questions, notices and memos during the course of their project work and also served as a place for them to exchange literature and plan their self-organized writing groups
• The folder feature on OPAL, which was used for sharing outlines and interim statuses
• An external Etherpad for collective seminar planning, which was continually adapted during the semester as we progressed
• An external TUD blog outside of OPAL, where students could present their research findings

Contact

Junior Prof. Susann Wagenknecht, PhD

Voting ID

#SW1