Engaging Technology: A Missing Link in the Sociological Study of Human Knowing and Acting

Robert Prus; Richard G. Mitchell

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.5.2.02

Authors

Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada
Richard G. Mitchell Oregon State University, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.5.2.02

Keywords:

Technology, Science, Sociology, Theory, Ethnography, Community, Pragmatism, Symbolic Interaction, Constructionism, Activity, Process

Abstract

Whereas technology has been the focus of much discourse in both public theatres and sociological arenas, comparatively little attention has been given to the study of the ways that people actually deal with technology as realms of human knowing and acting.
Working from a symbolic interactionist perspective (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969) and drawing on classical Greek scholarship as well as some interim sources, this paper addresses technology as a humanly engaged process.
Attending to human group life as "something in the making" and focusing on the activities entailed in encountering, using, developing, promoting, obtaining, and resisting instances of technology, this paper outlines a research agenda intended to foster situated (i.e. ethnographic) examinations of technologically-engaged, humanly enacted realities. It also serves as a reference point for assembling and comparing studies of the technology process that deal with this set of activities.

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Author Biographies

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus is a sociologist at the University of Waterloo. A symbolic interactionist, pragmatist ethnographer, and social theorist, his publications include Road Hustler with C.R.D. Sharper; Hookers, Rounders, and Desk Clerks with Styllianoss Irini; Making Sales; Pursuing Customers; Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research; Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities; Beyond the Power Mystique; and The Deviant Mystique with Scott Grills. Working as an ethnohistorian and theorist, Robert Prus has been tracing the developmental flows of pragmatist thought from the classical Greek era (c700-300BCE) to the present time. Focusing on the nature of human knowing and acting, this venture has taken him into several areas of western social thought -- including rhetoric, poetics, religious studies, history, education, politics, and philosophy. Questing for the articulation and assessment of generic social processes pertaining to the study of community life, this project also is informed by comparative analysis of these transhistorical and transcontextual materials.

Richard G. Mitchell, Oregon State University, USA

Richard G. Mitchell practices the ethnographer’s craft from his academic home at Oregon State University. His long term interests include the human capacity to embrace uncertainty: curiosity, creativity, exploration, invention, entrepreneuring and culturecraft, avocational adventuring, and the quandaries of professional ethics. Publications include Mountain Experience: The Psychology and Sociology of Adventure and Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times published by the University of Chicago Press, and Secrecy and Fieldwork by Sage. After years of mountaineering and sea kayaking he now searches for the wonderments of social life in the journeying self, in road trips, travel rites of passage, and the role of intentional stranger, on his BMW motorcycle, and lately, his Rivendell bicycle, through North America and Asia.

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