To take a well-known instance, the heavy use of mobile phones by adolescents exchanging SMS texts as well as audio messages was unanticipated by its designers. Or consider how developments such as Web 2.0, open-source software, and Twitter blur the traditional boundary between production and consumption. Innovative users can radically alter the meanings and deployment of technologies. While the technical character of devices matters a great deal, the life of machines ultimately depends on the locally contingent meanings that people attribute to them, in practice.
Conclusion
So to recap, a conception of technology as a sociomaterial practice recasts agency as emerging from the interconnections between people and things, the ensemble of human-machine interaction.42 It moves the analytical focus away from examining how technology influences humans to exploring how materiality and sociality are constitutive of both activities and identities. From this perspective, people and things are not distinct entities but only exist in relation to each other. Technology and society are thus enacted together in a moving relational process achieved in daily “doings.”
What implications does this have for understanding the dynamics of high-speed society? Does technological acceleration inexorably result in the acceleration of the pace of life?
My thesis is that time practices are always sociomaterial, that the contours and rhythms of our lives are calibrated by and with machines. In other words, we cannot comprehend the social organization of time separately from technology. Neither can we treat technology as a set of neutral tools with clearly defined, functional properties that determine unequivocally our time regimes. Instead, it is our human engagement with objects that generate those temporal qualities we tend to grasp as inherent in machines.
A social shaping perspective challenges the status and principal role accorded to technology in standard explanations of acceleration society. If technological change involves the interdependent activities of multiple heterogeneous agents, then it is necessarily a contingent process marked by contradictory consequences. The introduction of new machines always involves a dialectical process of promise, resistance, improvisation, and accommodation. Indeed, this process goes to the heart of who we are, as our very subjectivities and desires are articulated with technologies.
Hig h-Speed Society
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