Natural Artifacts

Abstract

Many sociologists have attempted to explain what changes in our social life have been caused by new artifacts (e.g., the print, the telephone, radio, television, the computer and so on) and also what socio-cultural conditions made possible the appearance in the world of those artifacts which have so drastically changed our social life. On the other hand, such sociological explanations have taken for granted, and presupposed, the fact that those artifacts are there as such in the natural way. This paper treats this fact rather as a social phenomenon to be investigated in its own right. In the analysis of audio-visually recorded fragments of a word processor instruction session, an attempt is made to demonstrate how the natural way of being of artifacts is accomplished jointly by the instructor and the instructee in, through and as the spatio-temporal arrangement of their bodily movements, vocal or unvocal, and to show that the naturalness of artifacts being there as such is an interactional achievement in the normative order. Some consequences for conceptualizing the so-called man-machine interaction are suggested.