| Chapter 1: | Converting Consumers: The Conceptual Dependence of Controversial Artifacts |
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Kline and Pinch equate the embedding of new meanings with the finding of new technological applications. Identifying technological change, in this application of the SCOT model, becomes a matter of recognizing new sets of meanings in newfound functionalities.
Kline and Pinch suggest that innovation was no longer the exclusive domain of designers and manufacturers. Users themselves could add new features to an artifact’s functionality, a state of affairs that suggests an open-endedness in the SCOT model. Indeed, this technological flux is mentioned by Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch in their study of the “plasmid prep,” a laboratory technique used to insert pieces of DNA into a bacterial medium in order to create genetic material for experimentation.32 Jordan and Lynch argue that even in a highly formalized, well-established, and seemingly straightforward laboratory procedure such as the plasmid prep there was a “continual genesis of incoherence and fragmentation within the relatively settled development of an established technology.”33 Permanent closure and concession were difficult to establish even in an area that appears to be an exemplar of standardization.
Since its publication, the Kline and Pinch study has attracted subsequent research on users of technology, as evidenced by the recent publication of How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies, edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch.34 Oudshoorn and Pinch expand on what Kline and Pinch initially sought to illustrate in the Ford Model T study—the possibility of finding new uses for familiar technologies. In this study, adoption becomes deeply tied to the notion of localization. Users become the new designers of stable technologies.
Oudshoorn and Pinch also point to the recent trend in feminist studies of moving away from a technologically deterministic perspective toward granting users, particularly women, the capacity to change technological use and design. The common perception that women were hapless victims of technology has been modified by the last two decades of scholarship on women as capable users.35 The extent of users’ influence varies depending on their direct control of a particular artifact and their socioeconomic conditions. Implicit in this analysis, and perhaps more explicit in some cases, is a sense of struggle emanating from social groups themselves rather than from the meanings they advocate.
Contrary to the approach of impartiality in SCOT, scholars of gender studies, such as Judy Wajcman, give prominence to power relationships—the dominance of men in the technological world and the disadvantaged position of women. Gender becomes a simultaneously organizing and explanatory device.