The political process of inscribing a new technology
研究认为技术使用由政治过程塑造,通过分析澳大利亚公共广播公司网站在公开调查中的四次铭刻,揭示其从公共资源变为私有广告渠道的争议过程。
What shapes the use of a new technology? Instead of assuming that a use is already built into a technology, I argue that technology use is shaped by political processes. A central component of this involves interested organizational actors mobilizing discourses to inscribe a function into a technology. I explore this dynamic in a case where interested groups attempt to inscribe the possible use of an Australian public broadcaster's website during a public inquiry. I identify a progressive narrowing of the possible uses of the website that occurred across four successive ‘inscriptions’. This saw the website shifted from being a public resource to being a privatized outlet for advertising.The shift was not a neat process, but involved significant contestation and resistance at every step.The study shows that technical inscriptions are continually contested and resisted, inscription happens in a path-dependent fashion, and inscription is dependent on institutional platforms such as public inquiries.