Information Technologies and Ideologies

Abstract

Increasing digitization brings information technology (IT) into activities as varied as fitness and self-presentation online in the form of digital fitness trackers and social media. In this dissertation I study the intersection of ideology and IT. Chapters one and two concern ideologies embedded in IT design. Chapter three concerns ideologies about IT as reflected in media representations. In chapter one I study how IT design shapes consumer experience and value creation. Through participant observation, interviews, and content analysis of media articles and online forums, combined with self-use and reflection, I examine consumption of fitness tracking software. I find that IT design introduces constraints related to the algorithmic logics of legibility, visibility, and legitimacy. In turn, consumers make efforts to become legible to, manage visibility through, and endure evaluations of legitimacy by IT. I show how these efforts compromise the cognitive, practical, and affective dimensions of consumer experience and trace the impact on value creation. This chapter makes two contributions. First, since interaction is the pre-requisite for consumer experience, I delineate the interactional dynamics created by IT and the constraints they create for consumers. I build on these findings to develop a generative framework that accounts for the nature of IT mediation and the agency of IT. Second, I show how consumer efforts to navigate these constraints is a form of consumption work which shapes the multiple dimensions of the consumer experience construct and contributes to value creation. I outline implications for studying consumer experience of IT, and IT consumption more broadly. In chapter two I study how consumers adapt to threats to online self-presentation caused by IT design. Drawing on the data from chapter one and supplementing it with interviews and online forum data on social media use, I show that consumers make efforts to manage the electronic traces created by IT and to navigate the curtailment of an audience by IT. This chapter contributes to the literature by showing how IT design may threaten impression management goals and how consumers may need to make efforts to navigate such threats. So, this chapter contributes to the literature on self-presentation online and consumer work. In the third chapter, I develop a proposal to analyze US print and digital media coverage of artificial intelligence. I propose to use computational methods to study how the topics in media coverage have evolved over time and to analyze differences in the topics based on the political leanings of media outlets.