| Chapter 1: | Converting Consumers: The Conceptual Dependence of Controversial Artifacts |
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The meanings assigned to each social group tend to be established a priori, not by the features of the artifact but by the analyst. One goal recent gender studies share with SCOT, however, is to debunk the idea of users as passive recipients of technological change.
The notion of users as empowered social groups in recent technology studies may have arisen as a reaction to the traditional approach of crediting sole authority to designers with direct access to technological form. Steve Woolgar, for instance, argues in his study on the microcomputer in the late 1980s that computer manufacturers attempt to “configure the user” with features designed to control the range of user agency. In the view of such designers, form should direct use, and designers should direct users.
Woolgar describes designers attempting to manage user agency through machine designs, a concept akin to that of embedded scripts, advocated by actor-network theorists such as Madeline Akrich.37 Akrich argues that a “technical object defines a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act.”38 While Bijker describes the limits of social agency in terms of conceptual frameworks such as “technological frames,” actor-network theorists attribute user constraints to artifacts. Artifacts are not simply receptacles of meanings. They become active participants, although their prevalence, paradoxically, relies on their being taken for granted, or “black-boxed.” Black-box status becomes a prerequisite for technological diffusion.