Technology/Ideology: How Ideological Fields Influence Consumers' Technology Narratives

Through a systematic study of consumer narratives, this article models how technology ideologies influence consumer-level thought, speech, and action. Applying critical discourse analysis and articulation theory approaches, a semiotic square model represents the relations between Techtopian, Green Luddite, Work Machine, and Techspressive ideological elements in an ideological field. The narratives of individual consumers move between ideological elements in ways suggested by the model's semantic relations. The results reveal novel aspects of consumers' dynamic relations to technology ideology and invite further investigations of technology and consumption ideology. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..