How to Understand Mundane Technology: New Ways of Thinking about Human-Technology Relations

Abstract

In this chapter, I attempt to trace out some of the ways in which recent developments in the study of mundane technology might inform “technological literacy.” As a subject taught in schools, “technology” (often twinned with design) makes certain assumptions about the nature of technology and the humans that engage with it. The design and production of technology is often conceptualized in terms of “fitness for function.” However, the sociology of technology would problematize the very idea of “function” by showing how this is subject to all manner of negotiation. As we shall see, the malleability of “function” is something that is addressed in curricula, usually under a heading that addresses “context” (e.g., environmental or social effects). In contrast, latter-day sociology of science would seek to show how the functions of technologies emerge in the sociotechnical ensembles of which they are a part. In a sense, one can contrast the “assembling” of technology (by which is meant the assembling of skills, resources, and contexts to understand or make a technology) with the “ensembling” of technology, by which I mean the idea that technology emerges out of ensembles of heterogeneous entities in which there are various complex dynamics of ordering, disordering, and reordering. In this model of “ensembling,” technologies are held to have an “influence” on people, often shaping them through their impacts upon their bodies. As such, humans are emergent too.