There is an interesting article online by Washington Post staff writer Ariana Eunjung Cha on "Computer Rage." Cha writes:
Technology has become a bane of modern life. People juggle a mountain of electronic equipment to store their most important records and intimate secrets. But the complicated nature of their machines, with their manuals full with unintelligible acronyms, tangles of cords and invisible wireless signals, means a breakdown is almost inevitable. The loss of a computer, cell phone or other gadget can be so jolting that it is fueling the rise of what some psychologists call "computer rage."
I do not think that this observation should come as much of a surprise since anything that has the potential to disrupt the flow of normal daily activity such as we have seen with emerging technology can have a tendency to raise anxiety levels.
From a theoretical perspective, the user/device tension expressed in Cha's article can be viewed as a sort of gap or seam between the sociological adjustment to new ways of doing old things and the adoption of new technologies. Communication theorist David Altheide offers insight into how information technology mediates -- through the computer) contributes to the nature, organization, and sometimes frustrating consequences of everyday activities in a digital age.
Altheide's construct of a technological seam signifies a temporal-spatial dynamic in the adaptation of new information technologies may help to evaluate how social activity and technological innovation are not always perfectly suited for each other. I would be curious to learn what anthropologists may think about the evolution of humankind as destined to spend lifetimes tethered to a computer keyboard.
Now, I am imagining the pile of self-help books lined up on the bookshelves to addess so-called computer rage.
Sources:
Altheide, D. (1985). Media Power. London: Sage.
Altheide, D. (1995). An ecology of communication. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.
Altheide, D. (1998). Computer formats and bureaucratic structures. In D. L. M. C. J. Couch (Ed.), Communication and social structure. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.
Altheide, D. (1999). The technological seam. Studies in symbolic interaction, 22,, 223-245.