Overview
Research Method
References
Domestication
Approach
New Media and Society
Methodologies
EMTEL work
programme emerges from, and will contribute
significantly to, an increasingly important
body of social scientific work that has its
starting point the need at address
technological and media change as a social
process.
The society
in which European now live is one impregnated
by technologies, and especially those that we
know as communication and information
technologies. These technologies and
services are deeply embedded in the fabric of
everyday life. Digitalisation is having
an increasingly significant impact on the
conduct of everyday life, and our mediated
and non-mediated relationships to each other
are having, in their turn, significant
consequences for the ways new information and
communication technologies and services are
being developed and used.
EMTEL
research and training is grounded in this
radical and interdisciplinary approach to
innovation. It recognises the
significant shift in the centre of gravity in
the process of innovation from production to
consumption (Silverstone and
Hirsch, 1994). It also recognises
that the inter-relationship between
technological and social change requires new
forms of analysis and theory, as well as more
sensitive methodologies, if its full
complexities are to be understood.
Information
and communication technologies have both
material and symbolic significance.
They have functional and aesthetic
characteristics. They change the world
in which they are introduced. But they
also changed by that world and by the ways in
which users confront them.
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We speak of
domestication (Lie and Sorensen, 1996). By that is
meant the capacity of individuals, families,
households and other institutions to bring
new technologies and services into their own
culture, to make them their own.
Domestication involves concerns with the
learning of skills, practice, and the
construction of meaning. It is a dialectical
process, for these technologies and services
change the way things are done in everyday
life.
Evidence
suggests that, rhetoric apart, the process of
technological change runs neither in a smooth
nor in a straight line. Some products
never reach market, or when they do, do not
always succeed. Users and consumers
impose their own meanings and practices on
those technologies and services that do reach
market. The home computer, the
answerphone, e-mail, the mobile telephone
have all had unpredictable careers as
consumer goods. The information and
communication industry currently manifests
many examples of the ways in which, as it
converges both technologically and
industrially, uncertainties prevail: the
struggle over the portal and over integrated
mobile communications are cases in point (Mansell
and Silverstone, 1996).
The research
on which this programme of work is based is
interdisciplinary. It recognises that
the relationship between social and
technological change in this area has
political as well as economic implications,
and cultural as well as social
implications. It draws on the
appropriate and relevant social science
disciplines. It recognises that the
particular character of European society
requires a comparative approach, sensitive to
differences across States but also rigorous
enough to recognise similarities. And
it recognises the need to combine both
qualitative and quantitative methodologies (Dutton,
1999).
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Recent work from
EMTEL researchers and others has involved the
definition of a new field of research: new
media and society. This has been
represented in the publication of new
international journal with that title on
whose editorial board a number of EMTEL
members sit. It addresses the
implications of technological change, and
especially the digitalisation of new media,
from an interdisciplinary social scientific
perspective. Sociology, economics,
political science and anthropology contribute
to this research agenda whose aim it is to
make sense, and to enable the guidance, of
the innovation process. This process
involves convergence: of technologies,
industries and patterns of use. It also
involves changing relationship between the
global and the local as sites for social,
economic and political activity, as well as
the changing relationship between public and
private spaces. It involves, finally,
changes not just in industrial structures but
also in the structures that underpin everyday
life: those of community and family, work and
leisure.
The theory
that drives this innovative work draws on,
and extends, work undertaken in recent years
in the social shaping of technology, in the
anthropology of everyday life, in the study
of the regulation of new media, and in the
market analysis of new media industries and
products. The aim of the proposed EMTEL
research is to build on this converging field
of academic and policy oriented research.
This research
is seen as urgent. The rapid spread of
access to the Internet within European
households and institutions; the explosion in
television, cable and satellite channel
availability, the rapid advances in mobile
telephony, are together changing the
communicative infrastructure of Europe, with
potentially profound but unknown consequences
for everyday life. The issues to be
addressed, those of access to new media
technologies and services, but also those of
participation in economic and political life
possibly transformed by those technologies
and services, are of vital importance.
They have consequences for the European
communication and information industry
struggling to maintain or enhance its
position in the global marketplace. And
they have consequences too for the governance
of the Union.
The study of
these issues requires a focus on the users of
new media in a number of different contexts
and from a number of different, but
interrelated perspectives. EMTEL
research will therefore consider the user as
an active participant in the innovation
process. It will consider the temporal
and spatial co-ordinates of everyday life,
and how those both constrain, and are
affected by, the emergence of new
media. It will examine both inclusion
in, and exclusion from, the Information
Society and their cultural and social
consequences. It will examine the
emergence of new forms of consumption and
political action that are seen to be being
facilitated by the new media. It will
investigate the relationship between supply
and demand in the new world of
e-commerce. It will address how such
technologically informed social changes
affect the quality of life.
At this
crucial point in the emergence of the
Information Society it is essential that
European social scientists achieve a firm
grasp on the both the frame and the detail of
the consequences of new media change for
consumers and citizens in the Union (Ducatel,
Webster and Hermann, 1999). It is EMTEL’s
intention to provide an informed and critical
analysis of these changes and to extend our
understanding of the processes involved
through new empirical research, developed
theory and advanced methodologies.
Research
method
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The aim of
the project is to provide policy makers and
market managers, as well as the academic
community, with empirically grounded evidence
of the social dynamics of the emerging
Information Society.
EMTEL will
ask three crucial questions which technology
driven programmes of research generally fail
to address:
What
does a user-friendly society
mean?
What
are the facilitators of, and the
obstacles to, its realisation?
What
are the consequences for markets
and policy making?
Through a
series of carefully designed, interrelated
and co-ordinated studies EMTEL will
investigate the individual and social
dimensions of the emerging Information
Society. EMTEL will focus on the
everyday life of the European citizen and
consumer. It will examine the realities
of the new ways of living and working that
are seen to be at the core of the Information
Society. It will explore the ways in
which new technologies can be more
effectively integrated into the social fabric
of the Community, and the ways in which the
citizens and consumers of the Community can
be more effectively integrated into the
Information Society.
Such a project
requires both an interdisciplinary and a
multi-methodological approach. The
interrelationship of social and technological
change, the need to understand the dynamics
of those changes, and the need to address the
social, cultural, economic and political
implications of those changes, requires an
integrated theoretical framework for the
research and a flexible methodology which is
sensitive both to the large scale and
structural transformations as well as to the
details of meaning and consequence in
everyday life.
The
methodologies adopted will therefore be
informed by a theoretical approach defined
principally by the idea of
domestication. Domestication involves:
the
argument that users are active in
the innovation process and that
such activity has material
consequences for that process
the
argument that the acceptance of,
as well as resistance to, new
technologies and services is
conditional on the contexts of
use of old technologies and
services as well as on the
supply-side capacity for
technological innovation and
market creation
the
argument that social factors are
pre-eminent in determining access
and participation, and an
understanding of the economic
dimensions of socio-technological
change in this field has to be
supplemented and qualified by an
understanding of cultural
dimensions
the
argument that such an overall
approach to innovation in this
area requires the development of
qualitative methodologies which
can examine the details of
meaning and value as well as the
structural determinants of
action, and that these
methodologies need to be
complemented and informed by
quantitative assessments of
trends and patterns of production
and consumption.
Each partner
is EMTEL has developed specific expertise
based on academic, market related and policy
research. These complementary skills will
enable the network to address the complexity
of issues that must be considered if progress
is to be made in this field.
The methodology
proposed will have the following five
components:
qualitative
studies of individual users and
social uses, based on in depth
interviewing with selected
respondents
