ABSTRACT
The impact of technology on all aspects of contemporary life is an unchallenged fact. We alternately suffer with and revel in the side effects of technology: from toxic waste, the social effects of too much television, and carpal tunnel syndrome, to the wonders of spreadsheets, tiny video cameras, and WD-40. Yet technology effects, both good and bad, seem always to take us by surprise. Why don’t we systematically look at technology and better anticipate its consequences? In fact, many scholars do study technology, but most of our methods are weak and our attention at best happenstance. Limited in many ways by a gee-whiz view of technology, we greet every new ’advance— as unalloyed good. It is only later we feel we may have been tricked. Paradoxically, the task of technology development itself affects the assessment of its utility. Technology serves to codify and automate procedures and to extend our sphere of action. Unlike scientific findings, which are subject to interpretation, we act as if technology development is binary: either it works or it doesn’t, it runs or it crashes, it delivers or fails. Thus for many designers and developers, technological innovation is an existence proof. Look at what we made! And the novelty either does or doesn’t capture our imagination.
