Complaints about Technology as a Resource for Identity-Work

• In Event: New Theories and New Models for Thinking About Technology

Abstract

In this paper we present an analysis of how complaints about new technologies are handled in face-to-face interaction, and how these complaints are used to present interlocutors as a certain sort of person. We propose that interactants engage in a “bemoaning” speech act that draws on a rich range of resources around communication ideologies about technologized contexts to manage competing affiliation demands and disagreements with one another, and to construct moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices moment-to-moment in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies “mean” to them. This has implications not just for understanding people’s attitudes toward new technologies and how they are negotiated and formulated, but also shows how our interpretations of “opinions” about new technologies must be grounded in the nuances of why people deliver particular opinions in certain ways to attend to interactional and cultural norms.

Authors

• Jessica Sarah Robles, Loughborough U

• Elizabeth S Parks, Colorado State University