Technology, Agency, and Community
Bonnie Anna Nardi, Jannis Kallinikos · IGI Global eBooks · 2010
In this chapter, the authors consider whether and to what extent digital technologies enable people to accomplish expressive activities of personal or social value by examining customization and extension of software artifacts. They approach their topic within the context of multiplayer online games that provide a rather radical departure from the studies of organizational technologies that dominate the field. While less constrained by the rigid social order of organizations, the customization and extension of software artifacts in communities like those represented by multiplayer online games still confronts the central issue of the malleability of these artifacts and their power to shape human agency.