Mundane Technologies Research Articles

The thermal 'Buddha Board'-application of microstructured polyolefin films for variable thermal infrared transparency materials.

In this study, we explore the innovative application of biological principles of scattering foams and structural colouration of white materials to manipulate the transmission properties of thermal infrared (IR) radiation, particularly within the 8-14 μm wavelength range in polyolefin materials. Inspired by the complex skin of organisms such as chameleons, which can dynamically change colour through structural alterations, as well as more mundane technologies such as Buddha Boards and magic water colouring books, we are developing methods to control thermal IR transmission using common thermoplastic materials that are semi-transparent to thermal IR radiation. Polyethylene and polypropylene, known for their versatility and cost-effectiveness, can be engineered into microstructured sheets with feature sizes spanning from 5 to 100 μm. By integrating these precisely moulded microstructures with index-matching fluids, specifically IR transparent oils, we achieve a reversible modification of the thermal transmission properties. This novel approach not only mimics the adaptive functionality of natural systems but also offers a practical and scalable solution for dynamic thermal management. Our results indicate a promising pathway for the development of new materials that can adapt their IR properties in real time, paving the way for smarter thermal management solutions via radiative emission/absorption.

Mundane technologies of educational policy consultancy: Presentations and interpretive control

This conceptual article examines how consultants use a mundane policy device, the powerpoint presentation, to manage education policy relations between international lenders and education ministries in the global South. The article theorizes presentations as socio-material assemblages that combine consultants, software, visualization conventions, presentation styles, and participant structures in ways that enable consultants to control public interpretations of program evidence. Our analysis is a “constitutive argument” (Pacewicz, 2022) about how to conceptualize presentations. We draw evidence from diverse sources including published accounts by consultants, descriptions of presentations in corporate settings, internet discussions of slide construction, online archives of slides, and data from semi-structured interviews with 12 current or former members of a education ministry in a South Asian country. We argue that consultants use mundane presentation technologies to establish closed interpretive spaces in which they can control interpretation by rendering project information in visually coded forms and structuring interaction through language ideologies and participant structures that ritualize presentation discourse. We close by highlighting implications of these arguments and noting lacunae in our account to be addressed in further research.

Migrancy and utopia: the global network in Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT This paper attends to the utopian imagination circulating in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997). These texts exemplify the formal innovation assigned to migrancy fiction more generally, a genre characterised by its embrace of mobility in content as well as in form. Alongside migrancy novels, utopian fiction both maps and distorts the networks and infrastructures that generate wealth inequality on a global scale. But while previous studies have touched on the utopian implications to migration fiction, this paper elaborates on the affordances of placing these fields into full dialogue. To develop this last point, this paper draws from Mary Louise Pratt’s influential concept of the contact zone in order to acknowledge the different scales of utopian thinking within (and between) Tropic of Orange, which demarcates a specific utopian community, and Exit West, which imagines a global commons. Approaching these texts through the lens of the contact zone helps bring into focus how mundane technologies create inequality today but might be repurposed to radically remake society in the future.

An assemblage of everyday technologies in the practice of western herbal medicine - a photo essay

Small, mundane technologies, such as stethoscopes, medicinal bottles, labels, cleaning and dispensing equipment, are integral to the practice of western herbal medicine (WHM) in the UK. A focus on such technologies reveals the dynamic character and porousness of medical systems and allows us to identify cultural interactions. In this photo essay, based on long-term anthropological research, I explore an assemblage of everyday technologies used by WHM practitioners and the ways in which these technologies contribute to shaping diagnostic stories, to performing (bio)medical legitimacy and invoking herbal traditions. The biomedical, herbal and domestic technologies-in-use come into view as vibrant and dynamic objects with highly contingent meanings and identities. Their absorption into this non-biomedical therapy supports the performance of (bio)medical legitimacy, authority, tradition and professionalism, while the use of everyday domestic objects may signal female-coded practices of care. This demonstrates the adaptability of a medical practice situated at the margin of mainstream healthcare and subject to ongoing technological and ideological influence. The strategic integration of this assemblage of everyday technologies into WHM contributes, I suggest, to evoking a competent, trustworthy and time-honoured medical practice, which is simultaneously inscribed with multiple tensions, ambiguities and contestations.

How Mundane Technologies Can Trigger and Drive Institutional Change

We examine the role that mundane technologies may play in institutional change. We conduct an inductive longitudinal study in the field of UK grocery retailing and elucidate a process of bottom-up institutional change, where customer data replaced product data as a key determinant in decision making. Mundane technologies have typically been seen to support rather than drive institutional change. We illustrate an alternative mechanism, through which the high cost of employing mundane technologies at scale drove institutional change. Building on this, our study illustrates a mechanism through which high costs associated with the use of a technology can lead to field-level change in three phases: (1) costs of the mundane technology drives a search for its greater application, (2) costs of the new applications drives the need for their monetization through new services, and (3) costs of the new services creates the need to find competition at the field level.

Algorithmic reparation

Machine learning algorithms pervade contemporary society. They are integral to social institutions, inform processes of governance, and animate the mundane technologies of daily life. Consistently, the outcomes of machine learning reflect, reproduce, and amplify structural inequalities. The field of fair machine learning has emerged in response, developing mathematical techniques that increase fairness based on anti-classification, classification parity, and calibration standards. In practice, these computational correctives invariably fall short, operating from an algorithmic idealism that does not, and cannot, address systemic, Intersectional stratifications. Taking present fair machine learning methods as our point of departure, we suggest instead the notion and practice of algorithmic reparation. Rooted in theories of Intersectionality, reparative algorithms name, unmask, and undo allocative and representational harms as they materialize in sociotechnical form. We propose algorithmic reparation as a foundation for building, evaluating, adjusting, and when necessary, omitting and eradicating machine learning systems.

Technosocial configurations for sociability in rural Denmark

Abstract The proliferation of ICTs, including social media platforms, has the potential to substantially affect the technological mix that underpins rural sociability. Little is currently known about the practices of technology use emerging from this novel situation. The paper takes steps to address this gap by applying a Foucauldian-inspired mundane technologies perspective to investigate the technosocial configurations for rural sociability after the introduction of social media platforms. Empirically, a mixed-methods approach including a quantitative phone survey and qualitative online ethnography, focusing on community groups on facebook, is used to study three small areas in the Danish countryside. Results show how rural residents employ a mix of embedded and disembedded technologies to inform themselves about social life in their area. Embedded technologies include noticeboards at grocery stores, village halls, and other meeting places; free weekly newspapers, brochures and leaflets delivered by mail; face-to-face interaction (in public spaces, at the workplace, and at home). Disembedded technologies include community websites, mailing lists and newsletters, text messaging chains, and social media platforms. Importantly, technologies are used in complementary combination and a large majority of residents use several technologies. Social media platforms play a major role, but results do not suggest that they have replaced previous practices. Rather, the paper finds that they should be viewed as additions whose integration in the technology mix contributes to an on-going process of incremental reconfiguration. Rural sociability, then, has not been fundamentally reworked by the arrival of social media, although it has brought some changes of note, including the attenuation of local digital divides, the emergence of a new arena for social control, and an unprecedented external visibility of social life in the countryside, where outsiders may gain fragmented glimpses of the local gossip and goings-on.

A City at the Front of Change: Technology and Urban Life in Lemberg during the First World War

Abstract This examination of Lemberg during the First World War uses newspapers, diaries, memoirs, official proclamations, and contemporary published statistical data to explore how the relationships between the citizens of Lemberg and modern technologies changed during the war years. The citizens of the city experienced two kinds of modern technology during the war. The first, titled here mundane, involved technologies that had only recently come to the city, but that had become essential to everyday life. These included electric trams, lighting (both electric and gas), and items such as cash registers, battery powered flashlights, and sewing machines. The second type of technology, the extraordinary, consisted of technologies that provided some level of spectacle prior to the war. These included motorized transportation, airplanes, and the cinema. This article argues that the relationship between both of these categories of technology and the populace changed during the war years. Mundane technologies became even more important in the daily lives of the citizenry, while the extraordinary technologies of cars, motorcycles, and airplanes became machines of war, while the cinema became both an escape from, and a transmitter of, the realities of the war happening nearby. The article also serves as a contrast to the experiences of citizens in other Polish-speaking cities during the war.

The future of mining in Ghana: Are stakeholders prepared for the adoption of autonomous mining systems?

Autonomous mining systems (AMS) are being developed and deployed for improving mine productivity, safety and efficiency in countries like Australia and USA. Nonetheless, AMS implementation is known to cause social challenges such as job losses. These systems are expected to eventually be introduced into the Ghanaian mining industry. Thus, it is necessary to understand stakeholder perceptions of AMS to inform policy direction towards their implementation in Ghana. Such knowledge does not exist in the literature. This paper assesses the preparedness of mine stakeholders for the adoption of AMS to surface mining industry in Ghana. Data was gathered using closed, and open-ended questionnaires and analyzed in MS Excel using pivot charts to identify respondents’ knowledge levels, and preparedness for adoption of AMS. Detailed qualitative and quantitative content analyses of the only mining engineering program in Ghana were conducted to assess the adequacy of the program in meeting the future skill demands of the mining industry. The results reveal that even though respondents generally had knowledge of AMS, they expressed unwillingness to accept AMS into Ghanaian mines due to fear of increased unemployment. University courses were perceived by the respondents to focus on mundane and outdated mining technologies. These perceptions were corroborated by detailed content analysis of mining curricula of a Ghanaian university, as 48% of undergraduate and 75% of postgraduate mining courses were focused on these mundane technologies. Thus, avenues for acquiring skill set demands of future mining operations do not exist. We propose setting up a mining education fund (MEF) for equipping mining programs with the needed facilities to train stakeholders (employees and future employees) in AMS to provide adequate local labor that can work with AMS.

From the Profound to the Mundane: Questionnaires as Emerging Technologies in Autism Genetics

It is widely argued that the final decades of the twentieth century saw a fundamental change, marked by terms such as biomedicalization and geneticization, within the biomedical sciences. What unites these concepts is the assertion that a vast array of emerging technologies—in genomics, bioengineering, information technology, and so forth—are transforming understandings of disease, diagnosis, therapeutics, and working practices. While clearly important, these analyses have been accused of perpetuating theoretical trends that attribute primacy to the new over the old, discontinuity over continuity, and the laboratory over the field. In this paper, I show that in the case of autism, the effects of genomic technologies can only be understood by simultaneously examining the role of questionnaires. Due to shortcomings in clinical diagnoses, genomic analyses could only progress once questionnaires had been developed to address a “reverse salient” within the “technological system.” Furthermore, I argue that questionnaires such as the Autism Quotient have a significance that surpasses the genomic classifications they were designed to undergird. I argue that to neglect the role of mundane technologies such as questionnaires in contemporary biomedicine is to miss complexity, bifurcate old and new, and do a disservice to innovation.

Change and Continuity: Irrigation Technologies in South Bihar, India

During the last two decades, technology studies literature has mostly focused on high-end and emerging technologies and overlooked mundane technologies. The current paper deviates from that trajectory and attempts to bring back the attention on mundane technologies by analysing irrigation technologies in South Bihar, India. The paper employs theoretical and conceptual insights from science and technology studies (STS) and especially engages with the literature on the social shaping of technology (SST) and technological change (TC). The paper elaborates how multiple socio-cultural and political factors influence the use and disuse of irrigation technologies by agrarian communities. Further, the paper expatiates how specific irrigation technologies have bearing on local environment and agricultural practices. The paper argues that technological change in the context of mundane technologies is a complex phenomenon. It does not follow a linear path but takes a complicated trajectory and occurs at multiple levels in different spatio-temporal contexts. New technologies often co-exist with the old ones and they do not entirely replace the old technologies. Resultantly, the technological landscape presents a mosaic version, where multiple strands and various types of technologies co-exist and they are differentially used by relevant social groups. Thus, technological change and continuity should be simultaneously analysed to understand the social context of irrigation technologies in South Bihar.

Re-Introducing Consumption to the ‘Circular Economy’: A Sociotechnical Analysis of Domestic Food Provisioning

The paper makes two contributions to the advancement of the ‘circular economy’ as a blueprint for a more sustainable society. The first is to highlight the importance of understanding the dynamics of consumption and waste in the domestic sphere. The second is to illustrate two ways in which using insights from socio-technical literature on sustainable consumption, in combination with the sociology of food, could contribute to redressing this shortfall. This includes understanding why people use or consume particular goods or services, and how this might be altered; and what drives the production of waste and the adoption of strategies for its reduction by consumers. We mobilise insights from a socio-technical perspective on consumption, which highlights the importance of everyday interactions between routine activities, mundane technologies and cultural meanings in (re)producing patterns of consumption. These insights are illustrated with reference to domestic food provisioning, using empirical data generated through twenty semi-structured interviews with consumers in relation to meat consumption and thriftiness. Two suggestions for the development of the ‘circular economy’ to better take account of consumption within the domestic sphere are made. The first is a shift from imagining consumers as ‘users’ of particular products or services, to conceptualisation as ‘doers’ of everyday activities. The second is a broadening of the principle of ‘eco-effectiveness’ to take account for the social value of consumption.

Drawing on Accounts of Long-Term Urinary Catheter Use: Design for the "Seemingly Mundane".

The design of the Foley catheter has not changed since 1937. Scientists interested in medical technology tend to focus on state-of-the-art designs for newsworthy specialties rather than the more mundane technologies of daily life. We interviewed 36 people living with a long-term urinary catheter in the United Kingdom, who described limitations of the current catheter design, including infections and complications and consequences for social life and relationships, and their perceptions of whose responsibility it was to improve the design. All took steps to hide the urine bag, but the need to use a catheter and urine bag had, for some, a very detrimental effect on social life and relationships. People living with long-term catheters are relatively isolated at home and dealing with many different underlying health problems, undermining opportunities to speak with a collective patient voice. Qualitative health researchers could act as a conduit to help stimulate new designs.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Managing Walking Together

There are a number of mundane technologies which shape pedestrian mobility such as pavements, corridors and stairs. In this paper we focus on the practical implications revolving doors as a technology have for the social organisation of people walking together. Drawing upon video recordings we analyse the observable intersubjective resources produced and used by members of the setting when walking through doors, and the interaction between formations of people as they do this. Revolving doors are turn-taking technologies that challenge mobile formations because the formations need to disassemble in order to pass through the doors, and then re-assemble again on the other side. Using an ethnomethodologically guided approach we shed light on some of the accomplishment of walking together in mobile formations.

Familiarizing Food: Frozen Food Chains, Technology, and Consumer Trust, Norway 1940–1970

This article investigates the relationship between food chains and the production of consumer trust through cases drawn from the introduction of frozen fish fillets in Norway. Specifically, it will discuss how the frozen fish industry worked to create consumer trust in this new food product despite initial skepticism. Conventional ways of building trust such as quality control systems, branding, and marketing are investigated, but in addition to these mechanisms, the article discusses how the frozen fish industry utilized a range of more mundane technologies as trust-producing technologies. By investigating this effort, the article argues that technology is a valuable lens for understanding how consumers are familiarized with new foods.

The Real Future of the Media

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man: Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944).

Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.

Academic identities re-formed? Contesting technological determinism in accounts of the digital age

This paper will deconstruct ideas of the ‘digital age’ and ‘information society’ by exploring how digital technologies are invoked in accounts of changing academic identities. It argues that policy, and academic, narratives about the impact of digital technologies have been marred by a strand of technological determinism. Drawing on the work of Barbara Adam the paper will contest linear accounts of the experiences of time assumed in theories of space–time compression and suggest that attention needs to be given to the times of the body and the experiential which co-exist and interpolate the speeded up times of digital technologies. The paper explores the ways academic identities are being re-made, but also continuing commitments to the idea of an intellectual self. It argues that mundane technologies such as email are multiple in their effects, disrupting aspects of identity and exerting increased managerial surveillance, while simultaneously (in the same in-box) providing solace, research ideas, friendship and politics. The conclusions are more a sketch of a research agenda since there is remarkably little empirical research on academic identities and technology.

Theme issue on social interaction and mundane technologies

Theme issue on social interaction and mundane technologies