Technology, Agency, and Community: The Case of Modding in World of Warcraft

This chapter considers whether and to what extent digital technologies enable people to accomplish expressive activities of personal or social value. We explore these questions by examining customization and extension of software artifacts in the context of multiplayer online games. We connect a creative engagement with software artifacts with the potential emergence of new cultural meanings and means of satisfying desires for self-expression. Such an orientation obviously departs from the dominant tradition of mainstream information studies to which industrial informatics certainly belongs (e.g. Ronnback et al. 2007). Technology has traditionally been deployed as a productive force, first in industrial organizations and later in other sectors of modern societies. These conditions have historically established the dominant motif whereby technology has been conceived, designed and implemented as means to the accomplishment of pre-established ends. Despite the flaws and limitations of this project, technologies have firmly been inscribed within the stratified (power-based) social topology of organizations and the prevailing division of labor (Noble,1984; Perrow, 2002). Against AbstrAct