How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology. Ed. by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. viii+340 pp., illus., notes, ref., index. $40 hb (ISBN 0-262-15107-3).

Students in the fields of science and technology studies (STS), history of technology, and cultural studies no longer ask the question: "Why do users matter?" As the editors of How Users Matter note in their introduction, "This 'turn to the users' can be traced back to Ruth Schwartz Cowan's exemplary research on user-technology relations" beginning in the mid-1970s (p. 4). Thirty years and numerous publications by a variety of scholars later, Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch have compiled a volume of essays intended to show us both how users consume, domesticate, (re)design, and resist new technologies as well as how users are defined and transformed by technology. With a couple of notable exceptions, the authors of this volume demonstrate greater success towards this second goal.

  
In the introduction, the editors create a framework for the essays that follow. The light and breezy style of the first few paragraphs implies that the book is intended to inspire younger students new to the field. The authors outline the development of different theoretical approaches to users and technology, including social construction of technology (SCOT), feminist theory, semiotics, and contributions from cultural and media studies. The reader able to avoid getting dragged down by the surplus of jargon that has been created in this field (e.g., interpretative flexibility, technological frame, sociotechnical ensembles, nonrelevant social groups, implicated actors, genderscript, antiprogram, subscription, deinscription, subject networks, sign value, encoding/decoding, domestication ...) will be rewarded with a nuanced and informative presentation of the ongoing interdisciplinary discussion and critique that has propelled STS forward. More senior scholars in the field will want to refer to this overview as well.


The authors of the essays in the volume use a variety of approaches and explore a number of technologies in an effort to represent the diversity of users, intermediaries, and spokespersons for users, all of whom contribute in different ways to sociotechnical change. Rather than blindly promoting the power of users to shape technology, these writers aim for a more critical analysis, which includes an understanding of forces that constrain the relationship between users and technologies. Taken together, the essays offer a road map for future studies, guiding the reader towards new paths and pointing out the potholes along the way.

  
Part I looks at the roles of users and nonusers in the shaping of technology. Christina Lindsay demonstrates the changing roles of users of the TRS-80 computer over the 25 years since its introduction. In his study of the domestication of the telephone and electricity on early-20th century farms, Ronald Kline demonstrates that resistance and nonuse of technology are common, rather than aberrant, features of technological change. Sally Wyatt's study of the World Wide Web challenges common assumptions in public policy circles that nonuse of the Internet means inequality and deprivation. Anne Sofie Laegran studies youth in rural Norway to illustrate how the development of group identity plays a role in determining how people ultimately become users and nonusers of technologies (in this case the Internet and automobiles). These essays demonstrate that nonuse can be seen as a rational choice and, in some cases, can play an important role in shaping technology.

   
The authors in Part II explore how users of medical technologies are defined and represented by intermediaries, including advocacy groups, policymakers, and the state. Analyzing the conceptual links between users of vaccines and their roles as citizens, Stuart Blume and Dale Rose find that those who reject the appropriate use of vaccines are defined by the state as "bad" citizens. Shobita Parthasarathy's comparative study of genetic testing for breast cancer in the United States and Britain illustrates how cultural values influence different processes of negotiation among advocacy groups, patients, and the state in these two countries. In her study of antifertility vaccines, Jessika van Kammen studies the problems that result when users are represented differently by advocacy groups and by scientists. In calling for greater inclusion of underrepresented groups in biomedical research, Steven Epstein finds that advocacy groups, politicians, scientists, and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry compete to position themselves as legitimate representatives of groups that are themselves heterogeneous. The focus on medical technologies in this section illustrates the role of politics and the state in shaping technologies and users.

  
Part III emphasizes the multiple locations (by which the authors mean the various phases in the development of a technology rather than physical places) where users are defined. Looking at the design phase of Philips electric shavers, Ellen van Oost illustrates how the men's Philishave and the women's Ladyshave reinforced gender stereotypes of masculine competence and feminine indifference towards technology. In contrast, Nelly Oudshoorn's essay on male contraceptives demonstrates how this particular innovation was dependent on redefining men's attitudes towards reproductive responsibility. Playing off Cowan, Johan Schot and Adri Albert de la Bruheze introduce the "mediation junction"?forums where mediators, consumers, and producers codesign new products?in their comparative study of disposable milk cartons and snacks in the Netherlands. This comparison suggests that mediation not completely controlled by the producers stands the greatest chance of success with consumers. Finally, Pinch looks at synthesizer salespersons as conduits of information between users and producers, emphasizing the permeability of boundaries between these groups.

   
The authors conclude that a "thorough understanding of the role of users in technological development requires a methodology that takes into account the multiplicity and diversity of users, spokespersons for users, and locations where the co-construction of users and technologies takes place" (p. 24). Taken together, these essays will inspire researchers to develop more complex approaches to user/technology studies that incorporate an ever-broader range of participants. The essays in Part II in particular send a clear message that the role of the state and the role of users as citizens need to be incorporated into studies beyond those of medical technologies.

   
While theoretically the authors make a strong case for diversity, the methodological problem of where users are to be found remains largely unexplored. Historians of technology, for example, may be inspired to think of users in new ways but will continue to be challenged to find users in the historical record. Well-documented technologies for which there are rich archival holdings, such as Kline's rural telephone and electrification, offer some opportunity to find the voices of users. Pinch relies on interviews with intermediaries to find out about user innovations in the recent development of synthesizers. Many of the other authors rely on secondary literature and ethnographic observation to document contemporary technologies. These different approaches beg the question: "How are the authors' conclusions constrained by the relationship among theory, methodology, and sources peculiar to their study, and in what ways does this limit broader conclusions that can be made?"

   
One can't help but think of this volume and Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch's The Social Construction of Technological Systems (1987) as bookends in science and technology studies: the 1987 volume laying out "new directions" for study and this one reviewing and refining the field. Looking back on the introduction to the earlier work, one takes note of the unbridled enthusiasm that drove that book's contributors and resulted in classic articles, such as Pinch and Bijker's "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts," Hughes's "The Evolution of Large Technological Systems," and Cowan's "The Consumption Junction." Certainly books like that do not come around too often. While How Users Matter may not become a true classic, it is certainly worthy of attention and discussion.   

    
    Maggie Dennis <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/sia/30.1/br_13.html>