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Overcoming resistance to new technologies

Need  People need a reason to engage with a new technology.  In most cases they are not going to take on the time, cost and work involved in getting and learning about a new technology unless there is some benefit to them.  Consequently for example, it’s not enough to put IT suites in the community and expect people to use them because they are there; they need to know what the concrete benefits for themselves are.  Computers are a good example of this.

Those who have engaged with IT speak of various reasons relating to jobs, the changing nature of IT and the need to keep up, the prevalence of IT in society, and to help their children with IT.

“Well I just think, you know, it might help me one day to get a job or something.”

“I think now the world’s just going computer crazy, you need to know how to use them, don’t you?”

 “…they were doing computers at school, you feel like you can’t help them…I’m no good on computers and then I thought ‘well I’ll have to do something, try and keep him up to date with things.’”

However, if people don’t have such reasons to engage with IT, then they probably won’t.  This lack of a reason to engage with IT is often also related to the individual’s lack of knowledge of the technology.  In simple terms, they don’t see the technology as useful partly because they have no real understanding of what it does.  As one man said whilst explaining why he was not interested in computers,

“…to me computers are just an electronic way of replacing the index cards, they’re not anything more…”

This is an extreme example, but many don’t understand the potential of IT, and therefore don’t see it as useful to them.  Those who had kind of view tended to be those who were out of the jobs market, perhaps due to age, illness or unemployment.  They had therefore not been introduced to using IT through the workplace, and therefore to the benefits it could bring to them.

‘Tech-conversion’  However, our evidence showed that when people who were negative towards IT did have a go at using the technology, they changed their attitude to it, tending to view it more positively.

“…I had a pretty ambivalent attitude towards them, maybe even like sorta distrust of [computers] in the beginning, but they are essential for the way I work now and…I feel they’re essential.  I use them all the time.”

Once using technology, people tended to find that it was much easier to use than they had feared and that the technology was useful to their lives.  This led to a ‘tech-conversion’, a more positive attitude to the technology, and often a desire to learn more about them.  The issue, then, is how firstly to ‘hook’ people into using the technologies, so that they see the benefits, and are more inclined to use them.

The Biography of a Technology  The process of engaging with a new technology can be explained through the idea of the ‘biography’ of a technology (See Kopytoff’s chapter in the book, The Social Life of Things for a full explanation of the idea).  Each technology has a ‘biography’ or history in the eyes of an individual.  Much of the history between individuals of similar ages will be the same.  For example, with computers, their history is of them first being huge machines needing experts to operate them, then smaller home machines that needed careful programming, and finally the user-friendly multi-use machines we are accustomed to today.  However, individuals’ own personal experiences of that technology will also affect its ‘biography’ in their eyes.    Someone who used a computer in the ‘80s, pressed the wrong key and deleted all their work, and hasn’t used one since will have a different feeling about the user-friendliness of computers to the person brought up on modern computers!  The following two peoples’ biographies of computers highlight these issues,

“…they had one computer at school and it was like workin’ in some BBC language…the only way you could interface with the bloody thing was to know a whole load of nonsense language.”

“…[computers] terrified me…when they first came in I was on a YTS and we had to program ‘em, and the tutor kept saying to us ‘don’t press any buttons other than what we tell you otherwise you will wipe it all off’…I always had the image of the tutor saying ‘don’t press any buttons!’ and I’m like ‘eurgh’…!”

The idea of a ‘biography’ shows us two main things about adopting technologies.  Firstly the age of an individual is important, as this will affect their experiences of, and attitudes to that technology.  A teenager has no reason to see a computer as anything other than user-friendly; the person who grew up with a BBC computer and has had little experience since may have a different opinion!  Secondly, the biography of a technology is not static, it changes with time and the technology, and so people’s attitudes are not necessarily set, they can change as technology changes, and as they experience technology, or see others using it around them.