The Social Construction of a Machine: Ritual, Superstition, Magical Thinking and other Pragmatic Responses to Running a CT Scanner

Abstract

Because technologies embody scientific knowledge, we believe they should e objectively comprehensible and that their mastery should involve no more than learning a discrete body of information that may be quite complex but nevertheless definite. Morever, because we view technical knowledge as potentially universal, we expect technologies to be understood equivalently by all who use them skillfully. Hence, aside from ritualistic nodes in the direction of adequate training,s ocial scientists interested in the problems of technical change rarely ponder how people make sense of the technologies they use of what their sense making may imply for patterns of social organization.