The Domestication of Technology

The Domestication of Technology

As we learned in Chapter 2 of, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Nancy Baym elaborates that most people are afraid of technology until it is eventually accepted on a broad social level (Telephone & Internet both originally feared too). Yet these social fears and anxieties we have pertaining to new technology are often fears we would have without the new technology. This is usually why new technologies have been met with strong resistance, until positive rhetoric and symbolism can be attached to the medium and its practices relieving social anxiety.

The Domestication of Technology holds that the influence of technology-society relationships is two-way. While we as humans adapt specific characteristics and behaviors of technologies, the consequences of this process on social life are not deterministic, but emergent. The consequences of technology on social life, such as the normalization of augmented dialogue, emerges from both the technology and society in which it operates. Similarly, Katherine Pommerening relationship and rituals revolving around her new media emerge from both the behavioral practices of said technology and the social confirmation that this not only normal, but encouraged. It can never be strictly one or the other.

Once the technology-society relationship is accepted, the new technology and its interactivity become almost invisible to its users. In the article from the Washington Post, Katherine has positively accepted all interactive relationships with the new technologies she uses, therefore her interactivity with them begins to become non-apparent to herself. 

I chose this theoretical perspective because I find the almost invisible nature of accepted and socialized technologies, to be fascinating. This is primarily due to the fact that I too as an individual consistently negotiate the technology-society relationship of many devices without being fully conscious of the process.