The Mutual Shaping of Technology and Society in Videotex Newspapers: Beyond the Diffusion and Social Shaping Perspectives

This article argues that a mutual shaping lens enables a more encompassing account of the joint processes of technological and social change in new media than the diffusion of innovations and social shaping of technology perspectives. Drawing from recent work in sociology and history of technology, organization studies, social informatics, and computer-supported cooperative work, this article suggests that the shaping and diffusion of media artifacts are so intimately tied that they should be seen as the two sides of the same innovation coin. Using examples from the history of videotex newspapers in the United States, the analysis shows that actors simultaneously pursued interdependent technological and social transformations, that this was an ongoing process in which partial outcomes in the technological domain influenced social events at a later phase—and vice versa—and that such process was influenced by historical developments. Keywords: diffusion of innovationsmedia industrymutual shaping of technology and societynew medianewspaperssocial shaping of technologyvideotext I would like to thank Leah Lievrouw for most insightful comments on earlier versions of this article, and for the always stimulating conversations we have had over the years about how to think about new media at the intersection of communication and technology scholarship. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable feedback received from this journal's three anonymous reviewers and its editor, Harmeet Sawhney, from Frederick Turner, and from participants in a seminar at Harvard University and in a session at the 2003 annual meeting of the International Communication Association. Notes 2 The following paragraphs center on one set of differences between the American and French experiences with videotex. This comparison is meant to illustrate the role of historical factors in shaping this set of differences, not to present a comprehensive comparative analysis of videotex development and use in different countries. For an example of this kind of more comprehensive comparative analysis, see the study of CitationSchneider et al. (1991) about the dissimilar trajectories pursued by videotex in France, Germany, and United Kingdom. Space limitations prevent this analysis from engaging with this broader matter in the context of this paper. However, these authors' finding that historically anchored contextual features partly account for these dissimilar trajectories underscores my more general claim about the heuristic power of looking at historical dynamics in the evolution of new media. 2 This kind of "fortunate accident" has an important antecedent in the history of computerized communication systems: the role that early users of ARPANET had in turning electronic mail from a secondary technical capability into a major source of its attractiveness and further use (CitationAbbatte, 1999; CitationCampbell-Kelly & Aspray, 1996; CitationCeruzzi, 1998; CitationNorberg & O'Neill, 1996).