Technology in everyday life : a study of consumers and technology in a banking context

Sammanfattning: Technology is increasingly making its presence felt in the lives of consumers. This disserta-tion focuses on how consumers use, relate to and make sense of technology. Through methodo-logical triangulation in the form of interviews, diaries, experiments and observations we hear individual consumers talk about their lives with technology. The empirical study is set in the financial services arena and the studied technology is computers, telephones, ATMs and other machinery used by consumers in the financial sector. Technology is perceived to fundamen-tally change everyday life and an everyday life perspective is used to arrive at an under-standing of this change. Everyday life is perceived to be founded on four concepts: Sociality, Materiality, Time and Space, which are used to illustrate this change. Answers are given as to the strategies consumers adopt in order to handle technology, the strategies are: Adaptive use strategy, Partially adaptive use strategy and dis-adaptive use strategy. Four paradoxes are introduced as a means of understanding how consumers make sense of technology. The para-doxes are; hopeful/disappointed, flexibility/overload, in control/out of control and trust/distrust.