Making AR Usable through the Socio-Technical Imagineering Circulating in Facebook Pages and Vlogs

• In Event: Performing Socio-Technical Imaginaries - I

Abstract

Socio-technical imaginaries participate in the process of making a technology usable. In this case, I am interested in understanding how assisted reproduction (AR) and particularly in vitro fertilization (IVF) are made usable through the on-line circulation of socio-technical imaginaries.

Imaginaries about AR and IVF are created and circulated throughout the digital realm in websites, chatrooms, and the social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube). A variety of actors participate in creating these imaginaries; for example, the pharmaceutical and technological industry, the clinical industry, content development firms, and the group of users. Each presents a particular narrative of what AR and IVF are, what can be achieved through them, and the costs, risks, and decisions implied in the process.

In this paper I only look at two of these online spaces: the fertility clinics's Facebook pages and the vlogs of people undergoing IVF treatments. I specifically look at the rhetoric and narrative strategies used to make AR and IVF usable. During this presentation I will focus on the success-failure talk: how success-failure are depicted, described, understood, and explained. I compare the narrative of the success-failure talk in these two spaces, in order to see if and how the imaginaries change depending on the source of the information. I draw on the concept of regimes of hope and socio-technical imaginaries to see what sort of socio-technical reproduction is being reproduced in these digital sites.

Author

• Sandra Patricia Gonzalez-Santos, Universidad Anahuac