Left to Our Own Devices: Evaluations of Personal Technology Use

• In Event: 033 - Regular Session. Internet and Society

Abstract

Personal information and communications devices are often cited in popular culture as problematic “boundary blurring” technologies that have important subjective effects on our relationships with others, and ourselves. However, these discussions often miss the ways that the ways that evaluations about these technologies are constructed depend on historically situated and diverse understandings of the social contexts where we use the technologies and the practices we engage in with the devices. Because evaluations are social constructions based on moral judgments, the ways that people construct evaluations of personal technology use demonstrates the cultural resources they use to make sense of changing institutional and affective conditions. This dissertation examines how 1) changing historical definitions of work and home and 2) the meanings of personal technology practices are negotiated to construct evaluations of personal technology practices. Depending on the cultural resources used to construct them, these evaluations vary in the ways they are framed, their intensity, and the attribution of responsibility. By examining the ways people make sense of social change, through the lens of personal technology practices, I focus on the cultural resources that are useful for different kinds of people to manage and adapt to new technologies, but also to resist and critique the broader changes that may concern them.

Author

• Julia B. Ticona, University of Virginia