Emergent technologies against the background of everyday life: Discursive psychology as a technology assessment tool

Abstract

To understand prospective users' reactions to emergent technologies, it is crucial to examine the interactional contexts within which these reactions take place as people's reactions are shaped by issues that are not necessarily related to science or technology. These issues are often overshadowed or remain blind spots when descriptions or scenarios of proposed technologies are thematized as being the core objects of reference. We therefore recommend also studying prospective users' everyday-life practices in their own right, and in naturalistic settings. Insight into the social actions people accomplish in their everyday talk, such as establishing a particular identity, can help innovators translate prospective users' concerns into relevant technology characteristics. We propose discursive psychology as an analytic tool to do this and show its merit with a few illustrative examples.