Domestication of Everyday Life Technology: Dynamic Views on the Social Histories of Artifacts

Abstract

1. From sensational feelings to routine use At the moment, social histories of technology are an expanding and interesting area for consumer research. However, standard consumer research, academic marketing studies, economics, or sociology have lacked general theories and perspectives historically integrating technology, needs, and human beings. Social development is seen unidirectly as determined by technology (i.e., technological determinism), or consumption is seen as resulting from human needs, and preferences (i.e., voluntarism).' This paper concentrates on the emerging perspectives integrating technology and human beings. Let us start with some observations from the history of technology. In the beginning of this century, the automobile, like the bicycle, was a toy, a plaything for those who could afford to buy one. It was initially used mainly for recreation and sport, representing a new concept of personal mobility and taste for independent travel. In the United States, 4,192 automobiles were sold in 1900. Only ten years later, 485,377 automobiles were registered, and the automobile was perceived by Americans to be a necessity.2 In comparison, automobiles were not perceived to be a necessity until the late-1960s in Finland. Nevertheless, the mental attributes related to the automobile have followed very similar lines across different cultures. Whereas the first automobiles were sold because of the enjoyment and excitement they gave their owners, the first telephones, slightly more than a hundred years ago, were not meant to be used for enjoyment.3 The telephone almost immediately was recognized as a marvelous invention, although how it actually might be used was not so obvious: Early users often discovered they had nothing to say. Even the enthusiastic were insufficiently imaginative. The problem was to figure out what the phone could be used for. According to an early enthusiastic prediction, 'Why the telephone is so important, every city would need one!' The idea was that everyone could gather round the phone to hear the day's news.4 More encompassing perspectives integrating macro and microlevel voluntarism and determinism have been proposed, e.g., in Russell Belk, Possessions and the Extended Self, Joumal of Consumer Research (June 13,1988): 71-84; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Book/Harper, 1983); Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Grant McCracken (1988), Culture and Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 2 For the details, see George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Arnold Pacey, The Maze of Ingenuity, Ideas, and Idealism in the Development of Technology(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); and Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile. Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 3 Fischer, America Calling. 4 Donald A. Norman, Things that Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 191.