Networking and Other Social Aspects of Technology Use

From the first multiuser dungeons and rudimentary chatrooms to the vast lands of online gaming and incredibly popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the Internet continues to provide many ways to connect socially. This chapter provides a historical context to the discussion of the social aspects of technology use and their various functionalities to provide users with a sense of social connectedness or embeddedness. The aim of this discussion is to highlight the idiosyncrasies of the different social networking services available today in terms of their ability to connect or disconnect individuals. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of future considerations for research in this area in terms of how to better understand the impact and utility of social technology in everyday life.

Environmental Values and Technology Preferences of First-Year University Students

Environmental and technological preferences correlate. Both are empirically accessible via established instruments such as the Two Major Environmental Value model (2-MEV) with “preservation” (PRE) and “utilization” (UTL), and the technology questionnaire with “interest in technology” (INT) and “social aspects of technology” (SOC). Additionally, “appreciation of nature” (APR) was monitored with a seven-item scale. We used these instruments to assess the preferences of freshmen in five different areas of study (law, economics, science, pedagogy, cultural studies). All subsequent analyses unveiled positive relations between appreciation and preservation, between the two technology subscales, as well as between utilization and social aspects of technology. Negative relationships appeared between preservation and utilization, preservation and both technology factors, as well as appreciation and social aspects of technology. In all subsamples, preservers (individuals with preservation preferences) showed little interest in technology or its social aspects; utilizers scored high in social aspects of technology, whereas appreciators displayed no interest in it. The freshmen’s areas of study seem to predict consistent tendencies to (biocentric) preservation or (anthropocentric) utilization. Moreover, females were more likely to preserve and appreciate nature whereas males preferred utilization along with interest in technology as well as in the social implications of technology. The observed differences can be used to develop new and improve existing educational programs; recommendations are discussed.

Questioning the ontology of sociomateriality: a critical realist perspective

Purpose – The author join Orlikowski (2007) in seeking the “reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality.” In her sociomaterial approach, Orlikowski combines what is social and what is material into a “sociomaterial assemblage” in considering material and social aspects of technology. However, the author thinks this conflation creates a number of analytical and phenomenological problems for the understanding of technology in organizing. Rather than considering materiality with a primacy, the author argue that the proposed approach may reduce what is material into a social essence and makes materiality of a technology impossible to perceive separate from the social aspects. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Empirical examples of “Information Search” and “Mobile Communication” in Orlikowski (2007) are further employed to discuss the grounds of the criticism. Findings – The author propose a critical realist perspective to technology both as social and material recursively. Research limitations/implications – The analysis is primarily ontological and meta-theoretical. In future, extensive reviews can be performed on what questions have been asked and what questions have been omitted by researchers employing different versions of sociomaterial perspective. Practical implications – The perspective offered by this paper enables asking new questions and necessary empirical leverage to analyze how one technology becomes materialized and successful in the social realm and not the other. The author also discusses strategic conditions of how one successful technology can be replaced by another. Social implications – Understanding the state of the art in theory in understanding material and social aspects of technology would help us develop novel strategies to contest, complement and adapt to material and social issues of technologies. Originality/value – This paper is among the few critical papers that meta-theoretically question the relatively recent sociomaterial turn in organization studies and information systems fields.