Undesirable Consequences and Social Contexts of Technology Use: A Micro-analysis of Embodied User Interaction

The focus of this paper is on the unexpected and undesirable consequences of social interaction with technological innovations, which we analyse with the support of two frameworks to better comprehend their social implications. The first, techno-social framework, consists of Allenby and Sarewitz's taxonomy of technological social function. In the second, cognitive, framework, we introduce concepts from dual-systems theory. The frameworks provide a lens through which to view techno-cultural examples. This sets the stage for our case study in which we investigate an interactive game installation. Using data analytics, we uncover hidden effects due to the social interactions between the players and to their physical attributes. We conclude that there is a pressing need for innovators to broaden the scope of their evaluations to not just evaluate innovative technologies at the initial engineering/design phase but also to conduct evaluations at later phases of adoption and appropriation that focus on social contexts-of-use.