Digital Technography : A Methodological Framework for Interrogating Emerging Technologies

• Emerging digital technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary society. As future- oriented, promissory, and sometimes yet to be realised, such technologies pose particular methodological challenges for digital social research since they partake in creating the future they aim at transforming. This paper proposes a methodological framework to study the construction of emerging digital technologies as meaningful phenomena. Corporate actors within this growing field adopt similar marketing strategies that involve sharing multimodal promotional materials on digital platforms where technical specifications blend with evocative stories. These stories employ a future- oriented vocabulary in which words such as change, re-imagination, reinvention, and transformation play an essential role. Building on recent ethnographic research, this paper demonstrates how emerging digital technologies are promoted by creating a symbolic and imaginary context in which such technologies make perfect sense. These studies focus on wearable devices, digital food technologies, and systems for work automation. The empirical examples demonstrate how the promotional materials involve discursive practices that produce a particular kind of situated and transformative knowledge that allows emerging digital technologies to appear meaningful. These empirical examples serve as a basis for the formulation of ’digital technography’ as a methodological framework that allows for an interrogation of how emerging digital technologies are imagined across different sites of knowledge production.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Medieteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Media and Communication Technology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Digital technography

ethnography

emerging technologies

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)