Technological appropriation in everyday life

According to the 18th Study on the Habits of Internet Users in Mexico, conducted by the Internet Association MX in 2022, there were 88.6 million Internet users in the country; the online activity with the highest proportion of users was instant messaging with 88.4%, followed by a very small margin by the use of social networks (87.2%). Meanwhile, the National Survey on Availability and Use of Information Technologies in Households (ENDUTIH, 2021) of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) recorded that 89.2% of users in the country were connected every day of the week, with an average connection time per person of 4.8 hours every 24 hours.

Thus, socio-digital networks have become undeniable influences in daily life which gives rise to new ways of being and being in the world according to access, competencies, use and technological appropriation. Although Mexico has made progress in expanding Internet coverage, the digital divide is still significant as only 7 out of 10 people have access to the network, while in countries such as South Korea, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, the United States and Japan, nine out of ten are Internet users.

Adolescents are positioned as an active social group in relation to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet, not only because of the way they are used to facilitate training, socialization or entertainment, but also because of their interests in content creation.

In Mexico, the second age group with the highest Internet use was between 25 and 34 years of age. With respect to socio-digital networks, their use has expanded especially among adolescents, because, despite being below the suggested age for doing so, they use them to communicate with classmates with whom they live daily at school, but also with adolescents located around the world.

The appropriation of technology by younger people is becoming more and more noticeable, since from an early age they incorporate the Internet into their daily tasks as a result of their immersion in digital technologies through the use of computers, tablets, smartphones and video game consoles. This appropriation, which seems so natural today, is the result of a long historical and technological process that, as described in the following paragraphs, occurred gradually, first in slow steps and then vertiginously.

Technology in everyday life

It is necessary to start from the appearance of the first technological artifacts in order to observe their evolution in the course of history, because from being utensils to facilitate certain tasks and solve needs, they became tools of socialization and cultural appropriation. From the invention of arrowheads, weapons or hunting instruments, to culinary objects such as the invention of the blender, we can identify a diversity of artifacts that express a technological use.

Technologies arise from a dialogue with certain knowledge and expectations of control. In the development of techniques, along with the desire to understand the environment, science is discovered, whose product is knowledge; thus technology is the result of the use of techniques based on one or more sciences to create an object or to develop ideas.

Objects such as a spoon, everyday clothing or objects such as the sink have not always been there, which indicates that the insertion of technology into everyday life is not something natural, nor does it imply a change in one's awareness of the world around us. The history of technology, in turn, corresponds to the history of worship, belief, knowledge and/or classification criteria.

In the crossroads of knowledge, techniques and control expectations, the body, reason and emotionality are not alien, from which it follows that it is not possible to treat technique, science and technology as separate concepts, but as interrelated and complementary aspects, since from its origins, the human being has been characterized by developing not only technical capabilities to create artifacts that meet the needs or solve certain practical problems, but also tools that produce emotionality.

In this sense, technology cannot be understood as neutral, since technological objects not only provide practical value but also mythical, aesthetic, fetishistic and symbolic value, originating alternatives and highlighting gaps, among them the choice of the most efficient object, the one that provides greater status, the one that is perceived as pleasing to the senses, the one that is attributed special characteristics different from its properties, the one that is fashionable or the one that is believed to reafirma identity. As a result, technology is overestimated and vaunted beyond use.

In 2006, Raymundo Mier, a Mexican linguist who has dedicated himself to research and bibliographic production on issues of art, power, media, psychoanalysis and anthropology studies, pointed out that technology cannot be explained solely as a means or a tool, but rather as a reason, with the understanding that thoughts and ways of looking at the world pass through technology, which has an impact on the expression of emotions and, therefore, on the reactions of bodies. The above, while considering that technological innovations pose certain challenges.

The specialist reinforces this idea by considering that technology is inscribed in the horizon of the social as an autonomous sphere capable of fully dominating the framework of practice and imposing on it a regime of rationality of its own, alien to the demand for dialogue of human action; a regime arising from the autonomous dispositions of control and the growing radical opacity of the technological object.

Technology thus implies a new rationalization within modernity, a rationality that responds to a sense of control and visibility which have effects on the configuration of contemporary identities.

Such control is expressed in the management of energy and its distribution, also in the control of its derivatives such as heat, light and movement. Technology thus responds to the needs of the market (capital reproduces itself under the mass production of goods), which results in the transformation of society from a production regime, but also from a disciplinary regime, as proposed by Michel Foucault, French philosopher, historian and psychologist who mainly studied the forms of control and subjugation of bodies, human sexualities and the ethics of the subject.

From this perspective, bodies are considered prepared for industrial production through the establishment of processes of mass domestication of certain spatialities (factories, schools, militia, hospitals, psychiatric centers, prisons, among others).

According to Abraham González, a Mexican philosopher specializing in social and political research, in the so-called digital era, whose technological development is conceived in a global, immediate and multimedia way, social control has been added. In this type of control, capital is reproduced through the data/algorithms duo and no longer exclusively through industrial production. Consequently, we speak of technologies of the gaze and movement, or narrative technologies, such as cinema, photography, journalism, mass-produced books and printed matter, as well as the industrial creation of scenarios and scenifications.

In this regard, Raymundo Mier considers that narrative technologies transfigure the uses and habits of the word, the relevance of different symbolic actions, the regulations of interaction and the transmission of knowledge and the exchange of affections.

In this way, current digital technologies are not only the result of the constant updating of the media, but of the mediatization of experiences and knowledge that modulate behavior, sociability, identity, affections and the sense of belonging.

In 2017 Carolina Di Prospero, Argentine communicologist and anthropologist, investigates on techno-artistic expressions, socio-technical networks of collective learning and learning in contexts of confinement, pointing out that an asynchronous communication can be established that makes use of the communication system in different times, which shows that time is not the same as the traditional one, since it is no longer linear and enables co-presence.

The latter favors the links between users of digital platforms through access and stable internet connection in the different communication channels, which is complemented by face-to-face interaction; that is, you can be in a work meeting through the zoom platform and simultaneously talk to your partner through instant messaging (or chat), and at the same time respond to a customer by email.

For Raymundo Mier, the technological fabric is plagued by the incorporation of technology in all planes and folds of life, of intimacy in the public space, of the most imperceptible habits of daily life, of visible structures of control and instituted governance, to the extent of marking the times of the family group and its routines.

Thus, technology acquires the quality of omnipresence, since the content of the new information tools is found everywhere without limitations in time or space, offering a resolute illusion of not being alone and eliminating frontiers. At the same time, the content that transits and is shared in digital environments becomes global.

It can be said that technological innovation implies the generation of global codes, which is why Pablo García Ruiz, a Spanish sociologist who studies information societies, commented in 2009: "sometimes it seems that the whole world in a literal sense is witnessing the same media event". Thus, users of such innovations find themselves invaded by signs or messages that induce them to live through the products offered by the media, resulting in new forms of reality.

In parallel, some authors such as Néstor García Canclini, Mexican anthropologist and philosopher interested in globalization and interculturality, together with Pablo García Ruíz, warn about the unbalanced hierarchy of information and the complicities between digital corporations and governments, aspects that could act in a biased way against the recognition of minorities and differences.

Here it would be worth paying attention to the hegemony that certain platforms are generating in the production of knowledge and entertainment, to the audiences to whom they are addressed and who actively participate in them. In the case of platforms aimed at younger consumers, it would be necessary to analyze the corporations that monopolize and generate the contents that are susceptible to certain manipulations and the creative possibilities offered.

Technological appropriation

The possibility of increasing speed through broadband led to technological evolution, giving rise to the Web 2.0 format in 2004. The Internet then became popular, offering users for the first time the opportunity to create, update and broadcast content over the network. Mass participation in the exchange of ideas resulted in an active role of creation, unlike the previous version (web 1.0) which limited users to being recipients of information and content.

As a result of the above, the term "prosumer" was proposed, coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler, an American sociologist and journalist known for his works on the media revolution and digital evolution. This term refers to the participation of users as consumers and producers or players of content and highlights the dual participation of audiences (consumers and producers).

Likewise, the term prosumer is commonly used in socio-digital networks, since some platforms such as YouTube, Instagram or TikTok contribute to make the prosumer a creative user, not only because he or she has the possibility of sharing his or her product or audiovisual creation, but also because he or she takes on a more active and critical role by taking advantage of the social media to express his or her opinion and interests, recommend activities, carry out sociability and identification practices, among others.

Later, with the unstoppable advance of technology, Web 3.0 was developed, which favors obtaining answers almost instantaneously according to the preferences of the users thanks to the use of artificial intelligence created on a large database and algorithms.

This recent technological evolution was not limited to computers or telephones, but was adapted to a wide spectrum of technologies such as household appliances, telephones, domestic services, watches, cameras, etc. These digital technologies are usually complemented with voice assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, Google Now or Cortana, and as long as they have internet access, they can receive verbal instructions from the users, such as: "ask me for a cab at such time and place", which will be executed automatically.

Based on the idea that the Internet is a cultural artifact that is part of everyday life and whose evolution is incessant, it is proposed that most people appropriate the network to carry out activities that in these times are considered essential communication.

It is common to see that people satisfy their needs for learning, access to information, socialization and entertainment through the use of the Internet. For example, a basic digital tool such as e-mail allows users to receive and send messages or text and image files to multiple recipients quickly, efficiently and inexpensively in a variety of settings, such as family, social, school, work, institutional and corporate.

With regard to the uses and forms of practical and symbolic appropriation of digital technologies by prosumers, it can be said that the Internet has become a habitable space in which young people wish to integrate through the creation of virtual communities. Digital spaces are habitable in that they favor encounters guided by common interests, imply looser mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, give rise to a sense of belonging and recognition of differences, and make possible the desire to transcend beyond domestic and institutional borders.

Within digital communities, in 2006, Rosalía Winocur, Mexican educator and anthropologist dedicated to the study of the media and their relationship with culture and society, commented: "users explore the opportunity to become many others, mutate among many or become untouchable among the possible representations". Young people seek recognition through the representation of physical traits or personality characteristics that are considered socially acceptable. Thus, "The fact of being able to make changes in sex, schooling, personality or social or ethnic affiliation, becomes an ideal vehicle for young people to project denied or idealized aspects, to release repressed desires".

Indeed, it is undeniable that adolescents seek to belong to a group where they can share with their peers the experiences and meanings of the situations that occur and influence their daily lives. Rosalía Winocur proposes that young people join a community in the digital environment to consume and produce among peers, so that digital communities become spaces for socialization. Thus, groups of young people from different socio-cultural backgrounds create different contexts of appropriation of culture that allow them to recognize themselves through different identities by means of symbolic practices and expressions that accompany the use of the Internet in everyday life. It is in these scenarios that we speak of technological appropriation, understood as this author points out, in the "set of socio-cultural processes that intervene in the use, socialization and signification of new technologies in diverse socio-cultural groups".

On the other hand, it is also true that the lack of communication and the loss of real and virtual contacts generates anguish in young people, since such disconnection can be part of a social exclusion mechanism, whether due to age, race, gender or socioeconomic level. Being disconnected for most young people is tantamount to the idea of becoming invisible.

In terms of the virtual does not in itself constitute a bridge that connects realities, rather, it functions as a set of strategic links of social interaction, which never cease to have contact with offline reality. On the contrary, the "real" or face-to-face world becomes in many cases the material of virtual spaces of interaction, as proposed by Christine Hine, sociologist and pioneer in the development of virtual ethnography for the study of digital technologies and environments.

As consumers-producers of culture, adolescents have found a unique opportunity to become agents not only at the social level, but also in new ways of creating identities and communities. As agents of narrative universes through platforms, they may have the opportunity to subvert norms established by other generational groups, giving rise to other forms of subjectivity and identity that can transform the values and norms established by the dominant culture.