Summary: Hoe Users And Non Users Matter

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• 1 Introduction

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• What is the use of a technology?

  There is no one correct use for a technology. Of course, there may be one dominant use of a technology, or a prescribed use, or a use that confirms the manufacturer's warrenty, but there is no one essential use that can be deduced from the artifact itself.

• What is a user-related problem to many innovators of new technologies?

  Working out who the new users are and how they will actually interact with a new technology.

• 2 Different approaches to users

• How are users and technology connected?

  In most literature they are not connected. But when they are, users and technology are seen as two sides of the same problem - as co-constructed.

• 3 The SCOT approach: Users as Agents of Technological Change

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• What was the first approach to draw attention to users?

  The SCOT approach.

• What is the SCOT approach?

  The Social Construction of Technology.
  
  In defining the SCOT approach, conceived of users as a social group that played a part in the construction of a technology. 

• What is a technology's interpretive flexibility?

  Different social groups could construct radically different meanings of a technology

• What are the mechanisms within the SCOT approach?

  Social processes, whereby interpretative flexibility is curtailed. Eventually, a technology stabilizes, interpretative flexibility vanishes, and a predominant meaning and a predominant use emerge.

• What are the critiques of the SCOT approach?

  - It was criticized for its rather cavalier attitude toward users;
  - It closed down the problem of users too early
  - It did not show how users could actively modify stable technologies

• What are "agents of technological change"?

  Users that radically change the use of a technology.

• What did Kline and Pinch do to correct SCOT's neglect of gender?

  They argued that users should be studied as a crucial location where often-contradictory gender identities and power relationships were woven around technologies.