discourse

Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) is a multimodal analytic technique
for the investigation of Internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture. It integrates
an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to
unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of
information and communication technologies (ICTs). CTDA requires the incorporation
of critical theory—critical race, feminism, queer theory, and so on—to incorporate
the epistemological standpoint of underserved ICT users so as to avoid deficit-based
models of underrepresented populations’ technology use.

This critical cultural approach, which I am calling “Critical Technocultural Discourse
Analysis” (CTDA), combines analyses of information technology material and virtual
design with an inquiry into the production of meaning through information technology
practice and the articulations of information technology users in situ. CTDA offers the
opportunity to think about all three in parallel, using a conceptual framework interrogat-
ing power relations, in order to tease out the connections between them. This approach
provides a holistic analysis of the interactions between technology, cultural ideology, and
technology practice.

CTDA’s emphasis on evaluating technologies as an assemblage of artifacts, practices, and cultural beliefs

More recent research has evolved to more thoroughly describe
(rather than interrogate) ICT interfaces and texts, but the theorizations have shifted to
analyses of ICT’s oppression, resistance, labor, or commodification of the social. Webster
(2006) concluded that the concept of “information society” is unsatisfactory partially due
to the “conviction that quantitative changes in information are bringing into being a
qualitatively new sort of social system” (p. 8). Moreover, many qualitative analyses nor-
malize a Western cultural ICT context as the “social,” while other cultural ICT usages
(especially, but not limited to, within a US context) are “ethnic” or “niche” (Lanier,
2010; Rheingold, 2007; Turkle, 2011).

CTDA reduces this formulation to a triad
of *artifact*, *practice*, and *belief*, becoming essentially a hermeneutic empirical analysis inte-
grating interface analysis (semiosis of the material and virtual aspects of the artifact) and
critical discourse analysis (focusing on representations within and of technology) framed by
rhetorics of information technology and critical race theory. In particular, CTDA is keenly
interested in the technological artifact, here theorized as a “set of rules and resources built
into the technology by designers during its development which are then appropriated by
users as they interact with the technology” (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001). From this per-
spective, CTDA’s examination of computational artifacts, the ways their interfaces create
users through metaphor and practices, and the beliefs expressed by users of those interfaces/
artifacts integrate symbolic, material, and discursive aspects of the ICT under examination.

Dinerstain (2006) : technoculture is a matrix of six beliefs shaping technology design and use:
progress, religion, the future, modernity, masculinity, and Whiteness.

G.H. Mead’s (1934) definition: “institutions ... are organized forms of group or social activity—forms so organized that the individual members of society can act adequately and socially by taking the attitudes of others toward these activities”

- Artifact
- Practice
- Belief

1. Culture as technological artifact

2. Technocultural theory: technology as cultural artifact

CTDA’s SI origins, on the other hand, lead to a structured inquiry based on empirical
examinations of the computational artifact in an organizational setting (e.g. where is the
artifact located when it is used?)

Conceptual framework

1. Discourse analysis

"technology as text" ?

December’s (1996) work is integral to CTDA’s empirical analysis of the discursive mediation of Internet-connected devices, as he defines computer-mediated communication as operating as a triad of “Server/Client/Content.” This formulation highlights the need for Internet and new media researchers to examine not only the texts generated by their human subjects but also the artifact and the program (or protocol) through which these texts are generated.

CTDA principles:
• Discourse exhibits recurrent patterns;
• Discourse involves speaker choices;
• Computer-mediated discourse may be, but is not inevitably, shaped by the technological features of computer-mediated communication systems.

Interfaces, rather than programming languages or physical design, are the medium through which humans primarily interact with ICT algorithms, symbols, and practices. Accordingly, CTDA is keenly interested in the interface’s symbolic articulation/accretion of meaning.

CTDA redirects Kellner’s claim to apply to ICTs by arguing as follows:
• ICTs are not neutral artifacts outside of society; they are shaped by the sociocultural context of their design and use.
• Society organizes itself through the artifacts, ideologies, and discourses of ICT-based technoculture.
• Technocultural discourses must be framed from the cultural perspectives of the user AND of the designer.

2. Interface analysis

Both the application and the hardware are acknowledged as the "interface"

→ "Challenging Code:
A Sociological Reading of the
KDE Free Software Project"

KDE is one of several projects intended to bring ease of use of a graphical user interface (GUI) to various free operating systems.

Programming is the creation and modification of software; programmers are people
who make and modify software, whether professionally, for pleasure, or both.

Many in the FLOSS world see themselves as hackers, but not hackers in the
popular conception of people who attack and break into computer systems (‘cracker’ has
been suggested as a better term for those who break into systems; Anonymous, 1999: ch.
1; Wall, 2007: 53–5), but as people who enjoy programming as a creative, problem-
solving activity.