ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a thumbnail sketch of computing in Sheffield during 1986 and 1987. The humanistic approach implies something about how to study computing—the use of methods that give meaningful attention to the cultural constructs through which real people apprehend their experience. A proportion of local service industry—software production, data processing, and computerized business services—was directly involved in computing. Computer literacy was a prominent component of the extensive range of adult education courses available in the cities and towns of South Yorkshire. The southern part of Yorkshire, about 200 miles north of London, had a central role in the development of employment society or the "Industrial Revolution." An ethnographic approach can complement the preoccupations of structuralisms with attention to the "emic" dimension of technological change—that is, how the change is experienced by people and what cultural categories they use. The ethnographer chooses a site where there is good reason to believe that informants will be cooperative.
