Marja Vehviläinen
The Agency, the Locality and the Differences: Cultural Interpretations of Information Technology

The rhetoric and the practices of information society, e.g. those of information strategies, in Finnish society pay little attention to the social and cultural differences of the society. Although various agents are mentioned, the agency is primarily described in terms of liberal individual western male citizenship, universal leadership and expertise, and techno-economic male entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the discussions of information and communication technologies often carry the understanding of one discoverable truth and objective universal knowledge.

In this setting, it is of crucial importance to do more research that makes (and even creates) room for the social differences, for the local and situated knowledge, and for the agency that acknowledges these in the context of information and communication technology and information society, through empirical social science and cultural studies as well as through theoretical work.

Empirical studies should examine information and communication technologies (including media contents) through various interpretations, various perspectives and localities, and various voices. The research should acknowledge the social differences and the local situated bodily positions of people (actants) that make interpretations, by, simultaneously, articulating the social practices linked to the technologies and the (global, textual, institutional, economic) relations and ordering embedded in them. The theoretical work should make room for the simultaneous existence of these elements. There is agency in the centre, and it should have openings towards identity and community, locality and differences, world wide relations, and furthermore, it should acknowledge the interconnection between the human, the nature and the machine (the cyborg, in Haraway's terms) in the very core of agency.

Feminist and cultural studies have developed approaches to study the located voices of particular groups of people, for example, in terms of standpoints and situated knowledge, as a challenge to the universal and objectified knowledge and the definitions of agency. As an example, Dorothy Smith connects the notion of standpoint (a method which starts from the concrete practices of particular people and explicates the social orders within practices) to the analysis of materially based institutional textualities which can be seen as information and communication technologies. Textualities consist of texts -- computers, programs, discourses of information technology and information society, journals and web pages -- as well as the social processes of producing and interpreting texts. The interpretation and the production processes involve knowledge of information technology. Texts, knowledge and the social order intertwine, and both texts and knowledge are socially organised.

The standpoints of particular groups of people make one useful approach for examining the social and cultural ordering of technologies. The approach has room for both the located and situated positions of interpreters and producers of technological texts, and the social -- textual, world wide, institutional, technologically shaped -- relations within technology.

Donna Haraway develops a very similar approach through a notion of situated knowledge. Her coyote perspective makes an avenue to the textual games of power, similarly to Smith's, and she further takes an effort to examine the subjectivity in the core of agency. There is no authentic human agency separated from technology but the subjectivity and the practices related to it are deeply intertwined with the machine. Haraway's subjectivity connects also to the animal in us, and it might be that it is this direction that has been mostly neglected in research and would require deepest research efforts.

Research projects

Gender, Citizenship and Information Society. The project studies the interconnection and the mutual shaping of gender and information technology by collecting empirical material in North Karelia, on the Eastern border of Finland. The practices of citizenship consist of agency, subjectivity, community, locality, institutional practices (that limit/enable agency) and broad social relations.

The Mobile Boundaries of Working Life (Tuula Heiskanen & research group, Work Research Centre, University of Tampere). The project studies the practices of working life and information technology in the context of service sector, traditional industries, tele work. It examines, for example, the social space of agency, gender, and the expertise of information technology.

Information Technology, Economy and Cultural Interpretations (together with prof Päivi Eriksson & research group, University of Tampere). The research group studies the interconnected practices of technology and economy. It examines, on the one hand, the practices of information society (e.g. information strategies) of administrators and experts to show that these practices have a tendency for the understatement of social differences, and one the other hand, looks for the social spaces that enable the differences of agency.

Information Technology, Media and Cultural Interpretations (together with prof Seppo Knuuttila & research group, Universities of Joensuu and Tampere). The research group studies the cultural interpretations of information technology and media in people's lives in the settings of academic, youth and rural village cultures. It examines the formation of community, identity and locality in the era of information networks and the construction of agency that acknowledges differences (age, gender, locality, nation) within its relationship to information technology.

Historical Construction of Information Technology. The project will collect personal narratives (oral histories, focused autobiographies) related to information technology, especially narratives of computing experts. It aims to examine, for example, the national and local construction of technology, and the gendering of information technology.

Information Technology, Transnational Democracy and Gender - a Nordic Network for Research, funded by NorFA, 1999-2001 (Christina Mörtberg, Technical University of Lulea, Sweden, & a Nordic-Baltic research group).