Paradoxes of technology: Consumer cognizance, emotions, and coping strategies

Although technological products are unavoidable in contemporary life, studies focusing on them in the consumer behavior field have been few and narrow. In this article, we investigate consumers ’ perspectives, meanings, and experiences in relation to a range of technological products, emphasizing lengthy and repeated interviews with 29 households, including a set of first-time owners. We draw on literatures spanning from technology, paradox, and postmodernism to clinical and social psychology, and combine them with data collection and analysis in the spirit of grounded theory. The outcome is a new conceptual framework on the paradoxes of technological products and their influences on emotional reac-tions and behavioral coping strategies. We discuss the findings in terms of impli-cations for theories of technology, innovation diffusion, and human coping, and an expanded role for the paradox construct in consumer research. N of technology have been limited in number and focus.Most work has emphasized the antecedents, rates, and acto one eludes technology—the telephone, the com-puter, the airplane over head, the air-conditioned air. Technoculture is irrefutable and pervasive (Postman of technology adoption (see, e.g., Gatignon and Robert-son 1985; Oropesa 1993). By comparison, only a minus-1992). One leading view, called the substantive theory (Feenberg 1991), contends that technology is a power in cule amount of research has been devoted to consumer behavior after technology has been acquired (about 0.2its own right, fundamental to the historical trajectory of Western civilization. Without it, ‘‘contemporary cul- percent of studies within the diffusion-of-innovations par-adigm; Rogers 1995). Television and computer productsture—work, art, science, and education, indeed the entire range of interactions—is unthinkable’ ’ (Aronowitz 1994, account for the bulk of consumer technology researc