The idea that technology has social impacts is widespread. In popular accounts, the car reshaped modern society in a fundamental way and the mobile phone is causing deep changes in late modern living. The techno-variate method of Ogburn and collaborators probably resonates much better with popular thinking about technology than domestica- tion does. The suggestion of industrial sociology that machines direct human action seems close to everyday experience. Is there any reader who has not at least once cursed her car or his computer for its spitefulness and uncomfortable interventions?
The challenge of thinking in terms of `impacts' is at its most evident when new technologies are about to be introduced. If we look at the arguments provided for heavy investments in broadband technology or so-called 3G mobile telephony, they are surprisingly slim. They focus on speed and capacity, as if these features had an immediate social meaning. It is assumed that increased speed and capacity will be translated into something useful, but it is unclear what that utility will be. Broadband and 3G clearly need to be domesticated; it is only after an eventual domestication that `impacts' may be identified. Impact is hindsight, something we may believe in after the underlying performances have been rendered invisible or uninteresting.
This argument is no denial that technologies are forceful ingredients of modern society; the argument only protests that the forcefulness should be taken to be inherent in technology itself. Actor-network theory has argued that this force emerges from the way technology and culture become enmeshed through delegation and re-delegation of action between human and non-human actants (Latour 1988, 1992). We experience the force of technology through learning and discipline made invisible.
Thus, the main advantage of the domestication perspective is that it is a conceptual device that sensitizes the analyst to the complexity of integrating artefacts into dynamic socio-technical settings, like the household, the workplace, or society. It is a reminder to be concerned with the practical, symbolic and cognitive aspects of the work needed to do this integration, at multiple sites. The brief efforts to analyse the domestication of cars and mobile phones was meant to demonstrate this point and to show the great number of diverse efforts needed to achieve a productive integration.
In particular, I have emphasized the morality of domestication to show the importance of considering the normative aspects of technolo- gies. On the one hand, domestication is disciplined through expectations and norms. A person may feel that she has to bring a car or a mobile phone into her life, even if she does not want to. On the other hand, over time, a collective domestication produces new norms and expectations that influence the way the artefact is used, the meaning it signifies, and the possibilities of learning new ways of doing and thinking about it. In this respect, technologies are deeply moral enterprises.
This observation is related to, but also distinctly different from, the perspective of a moral economy. As developed by E. P. Thompson (1971), the concept of a moral economy is meant to emphasize the importance of non-economic features to explain action and agency. Thompson was concerned with social norms and obligations as given, as preconditions of proper behaviour. The domestication argument, as presented here, is that norms may be understood as contested, fluid, emergent properties
of developing technologies. At some point, norms may influence domestication, but the moral aspects of technologies seem to remain dynamic. Maybe this is typical of norms in late modern societies, which suggests that the concept of a moral economy is too strict and stable in a fluid modernity (Bauman 2000).
This does not mean that technologies should be seen as innocent and completely malleable. Rather, the domestication argument is that technologies should be seen as under-determined and not undeter- mined. Designers inscribe visions and actions into artefacts, and they are probably successful in shaping users' actions quite often. However, this may only be clarified through empirical analysis of actual use, which is the heart of the matter for domestication approaches. The moralities elicited by a given artefact should be observed in the same vein, as cultural resources of the enactment of technology.
Notes
1. The work reported here has been supported by the EMTEL network project as well as by the Research Council of Norway. I thank Margrethe Aune, Maren Hartmann, Vivian A. Lagesen, Hendrik Spilker and Per éstby for useful comments to a previous version. 2. The group included HaÊkon With Andersen, Margrethe Aune, Anne-
Jorunn Berg, Tove HaÊpnes, Marit Hubak, Gunnar Lamvik, Per éstby, Jon Sùrgaard and myself.
3. This has been fruitfully explored in the EMTEL I and II network projects, from which this paper draws inspiration.
4. This section draws on Nordli and Sùrensen (2004), a study based on interviews with 21 Norwegian men and women in two age groups, between 25 and 45, and between 50 and 60 years of age. The informants include both early and late adopters. They have been classified as belonging to one of four categories according to use: Pioneer users (first name begins with a P), advanced users (first name begins with an A), moderate users (first name begins with an M), and resistant users (first name begins with an R).
5. http://www.ssb.no/aarbok/tab/t-070230-271.html
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