SOC317H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Sherry Turkle, Prosumer, Technological Determinism
November 1st 2019
SOC317 Shopping & Society
Week 8 Lecture – Smart Phones
• The Telephone: 1876-today
o How is the phone emancipatory?
o Controlling and exploitative?
• Evolution of the phone
o Cell phones were invented and began being used in 1980’s-1990’s
▪ Not attached to physical spaces
▪ Highly mobile phones
o Smart phones evolved
▪ Highly personalized
▪ Extension of the self
▪ Multi-functional
▪ Major consumer purchase
▪ Emergence of prosumers
o Smart phones: Symbolize and actualize our social networks
o Apple Revolution:
▪ Watch old Apple commercials with a “revolution” theme
• Theorizing technology
o How does technology empower us? Allow us to ‘think different’?
o How does technology involve social control, discipline and exploitation?
o Technological Determinism
▪ A thesis that places technology as the sole determinant of social development
▪ Technology = one factor (among multiple factors) that shape social life
o New technologies both pull us together and drive us apart.
o Distract us from important issues but provide tools for collective mobilization.
o Offer new possibilities but create new problems
• The 3 Paradoxes:
o 1. The difficulty with easy technology
▪ Technology should be as easy as possible (hegemonic)
• Ex. iPhone, frozen pizza
▪ Don’t always deliver more time / leisure.
▪ Sherry Turkle: “[we] are always on, always at work, and always on call.”
• MIT professor
▪ Demanding technology has pleasures and rewards.
• 1.Takes time to master
• 2.Usage is highly occupying
• 3.Some risk of failure
o 2. The loneliness of instant connections
▪ On one hand... mobile devices offer the promise of instant communication,
connection, and cooperation
