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Chapter 9 - Designing and Resisting Artefacts

from Part III - Necessary Extensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2020

Gordon Sammut
Affiliation:
University of Malta
Martin W. Bauer
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

Chapter 9 examines a second necessary extension of the analysis of social influence to a consideration of the effects of designed artefacts in social relations. The chapter starts with an elaboration of the notion of inter-objectivity: designed hardware permeates human social relations as infrastructure, tools, gadgets and instruments. How is different hardware used to implement modalities of social influence? Crowds have historically used barricades to enhance their power. People easily recognise the fait accompli, for example as a wall, installed in a collective effort of construction. Such installations provide boundaries and parameters of attitudes and behaviour afforded by design, but do so without prior consent. Legitimation is achieved post-hoc by cognitive dissonance in analogy to forced-compliance. Resistance to such faits accompli is introduced as a hitherto unrecognised modality of social influence. It functions to evaluate and to redesign hardware and systems in ways that correct the initial designs; resistance potentially innovates on the 'innovation'.

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Chapter
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The Psychology of Social Influence
Modes and Modalities of Shifting Common Sense
, pp. 188 - 214
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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