How Users Matter: The Co‐construction of Users and Technologies

Abstract

Oudshoorn, Nelly and Pinch, Trevor (eds) How Users Matter: The Co-construction of Users and Technologies MIT Press 2002 340 pp. £ 25.95 (hardback) Use stands, from many angles, as a privileged object for sociological inquiry. It is in use that people characterize their relationship to objects and attribute values to them. Use is also something that we teach and are taught about, something that we may impose or contest. But, in order to cope with this prevalence, social research has to avoid a recurrent mistake, that of reducing use to an encounter between two already formed and essentially independent entities – namely, the user and the object of use. The contributors to this volume carefully avoid this error. Their detailed empirical studies aim at making explicit the entanglement of users and technologies. It is not only a matter of pointing out the fact that users are taken into account in the design of technology, or that they may have their word to say. It is about showing how both users and technologies are mutually shaped. The contributors to this volume cover a wide range of cases – from telephones to vaccines, from contraceptive techniques to personal computers. The balance between this empirical variety and the coherence of the overall approach is among the many points that make this volume stand out for its originality. Although different research methods and intellectual backgrounds are visible through the contributions, notions such as ‘technological script’ or ‘user configuration’ play a major role in federating them into an STS (science and technology studies) discussion framework. One of the main results of this collective endeavour is to show that many versions of what a user is are at stake in technological innovation. The notion of ‘user’ explodes into a myriad of collective agencies, of diverse scope and scale, fighting to be considered as legitimate spokespersons. For instance, some contributions study the role of advocacy groups while others focus on how the State may stand as the user of a particular technology. Users also have bodies that might be projected in various ways in the design phase of a technology, and manipulated in its test phase or its implementation phase. As many contributions convincingly show, the definition of users as gendered bodies is never stable and can be at the origin of important political controversies. The authors also devote particular attention to recalcitrant voices in technological innovation: not using a technology, or refusing to use it in the prescribed way, can indeed be a way to frame it. Users also have a widespread economically-oriented version: consumers. Consequently, as a number of contributions explicitly point out, much of what can be said about the co-construction of technology and users can apply to the co-construction of ‘supply’ and ‘demand’, i.e. to the formation of markets and to the crucial role that mediators play in it. Finally, although some of the contributions focus largely on social representations, the work presented in Oudshoorn and Pinch’s volume does not limit itself to the realm of symbolic projections of users into technology (or of technology into users). The materiality of the relevant practices is emphasized, which allows the authors to take into account the several kinds of trials in which users and technologies are put to the test.