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Towards a Sociology of Information Technology

There is a strong tendency in the social sciences to understand and conceptualize the new information technologies in terms of their technical properties and to construct the relation to the sociological world as one of applications and impacts. Less work has gone into developing analytic categories that allow us to capture the complex imbrications of technology and society. This article addresses two particular aspects of this challenge through two organizing efforts. First, understanding the place of these new technologies from a sociological perspective requires avoiding a purely technological interpretation and recognizing the embeddedness and the variable outcomes of these technologies for different social orders. These technologies can indeed be constitutive of new social dynamics, but they can also be derivative or merely reproduce older conditions. Second, such an effort will, in turn, call for categories that capture what are now often conceived of as contradictory, or mutually exclusive, attributes. The article examines these two aspects by focusing on three analytic issues for sociology: the embeddedness of the new technologies, the complex interactions between the digital and the material world, and the mediating cultures that organize the relation between these technologies and users.

Key Words: embeddedness • mediating cultures • networks • scaling

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