Codifying Technologies: Implications for Social Media/ted Practice

ANT points to the technical coding of heterogeneous networks. This notion that technologies are coded for use was taken in a different direction by Grint and Woolgar (1997). Here, the authors attempt to understand technologies as codified and configured in interpretive social practice. For Grint and Woolgar technologies can be understood as texts, embedded in (and at the same time constitutive of) their interpretive contexts (Cooper and Woolgar 1994; Grint and Woolgar 1992; 1997). In ‘The Machine at Work’, Grint and Woolgar (1997) argue that technologies are the outcome of specific readings by their users, strongly challenging any

74

‘essentialised’ view of technology. They highlight the fact that the capacity for use of a technology is never transparently obvious and necessarily requires interpretation. Technologies should be treated as texts, they are written (i.e. configured) in certain ways by developers, producers and marketers who set the parameters for users’ actions. In effect, these translate into efforts to ‘configure the user’ (Grint and Woolgar 1991:61), which are embedded in the artifact and then ‘read’ (i.e. interpreted) by active social subjects who interact with them, within the parameters of their interpretations. This version of social constructivism emphasises interpretive and constructive processes in the social shaping of technology. Moreover, the authors point to a particular form of distributed agency in technological artifacts, which results from processes of encoding and decoding. This approach has the potential to illuminate the processes underpinning how social media technologies become meaningful in practice. It would focus attention to how sites are codified for use with regard to user-interface design. For example, by drawing attention to how machine readable code is made culturally readable for users. It would also focus attention on how they are encountered, made sense of and engaged in active/interpretive practice. Grint and Woolgar maintain that technologies have effects in the social world, but effects are not reducible to the nature of the technology, rather they should be seen as the outcome of an on-going social process involving the interpretation of information and the persuasive attributes of technical capacities (ibid).

To overcome the technical/non-technical divide, Grint and Woolgar use the metaphor of the ‘machine as text’ on the grounds that the machine (at least in principle) is inherently flexible, from which it is possible to explore processes of construction (writing) and use (reading) of the machine. What is interesting is the way they explore how discursive practices set the parameters around design and use. For the authors, technologies need to be investigated in term of the discourses that surround, uphold and represent them. Foucault’s work on ‘regimes’ of truth alongside his understanding of power and knowledge as indissoluble, inform this standpoint. For Grint and Woolgar the questions ‘what does a technology do?’, or ‘what are the effects of a technology?’ are not the most important questions. Rather, the primary question should be ‘how do we analyse how technologies gain specific understandings and attributes in social and cultural life?’. They argue that how we come to interpret technologies has an important bearing on how we come to use them. The metaphor ‘machine as text’ encourages us to think about the textuality of technologies, to consider how it is that technological artifacts acquire cultural meaning and form in everyday

75

life. In doing this, it highlights how representational processes can mediate functionality whilst also maintaining that people shape technologies through practice. Grint and Woolgar make explicit that practice is discursively framed, reminding us that the social construction of technologies (in terms of techno-cultural encoding and decoding) must also be located in wider social practices, cultural knowledge and discourses. However, treating material artifacts as texts, even metaphorically, presents a number of problems. The authors themselves note that the metaphor is ‘counter- intuitive’. Technologies are more than cultural or material artifacts, they can be read and interpreted but they are also used as devices to assist in acting in the social world. Interpretation and understanding of a technology is often a pre-requisite for use but technologies shape the social world in different ways to texts: they constitute it in ways that go beyond representation.

Whilst orientated towards technologies, Grint and Woolgar’s work has parallels with Stuart Hall’s (1980) work on the encoding and decoding of media texts. Hall’s encoding/decoding model depicts (complex processes) of meaning-making with regard to content production and consumption in the mass media. For Hall, the text is the site of complex processes of the production and consumption of meanings. Texts are coded in particular ways to convey meaning, but importantly users have the ability to shape the meanings of the text through ‘interpretive flexibility’ in the particular way that they read it. People process information differently as mediated through particular social and cultural lenses, or subject positions. Van Loon (2008) has argued that the problem with this approach to media is that, once again, media are reduced to ‘cultural tools’. Encoding and decoding is reduced to the work of humans, de-centring and neutralising the role and materiality of the medium. The medium thus becomes obscured, reduced to simply a facilitator of text. The technological dimensions of the mediation process become subordinated to subjective processes of meaning making. Hutchby (2001) has argued a similar point with regard to Grint and Woolgar’s work, arguing they run the risk of focusing entirely on the question of representations of technologies, at the expense of questions of materiality. Nonetheless, Grint and Woolgar’s framework remains useful for analysing social media design because it can be applied to examine how representational practices at the user-interface can frame functionality for the user.

76