Technology as a Biographical Experience (1930-2000)

Increasingly, technology is exerting a far-reaching, often downright comprehensive influence on human life. In order to get to know this influence more closely in its effect on the individual, detailed life history interviews were conducted with 92 individuals at the Institute for Folklore at the University of Hamburg. Within the service sector of the city of Hamburg, equal numbers of women and men from a wide range of professions were interviewed. The interviewees were born between 1924 and 1983, so that biographies of technology can be reconstructed for the period of experience from 1930 to 2000. A primary aim of the analysis is to allow the interviewees to speak for themselves in detail. The extensive interview material will be documented in a broad form so that the analytical steps that are carried out with and on it can be verified at any time. Documentation and evaluative analysis are continuously intertwined. At the same time, a completely new approach is taken, in that in a strict sequence of sixteen chapters, theme-centred 'cross-sectional chapters', i.e. chapters arranged according to main themes, alternate with the 'vertical' reconstruction of individual biographies. The cross-sectional chapters each contain sections on topics such as 'Technology as an Experience of Violence in the Second World War', 'Dealing with Mobile Technology', 'Dealing with Computer Technology', and so on. In the vertical chapters, for example, the biographies of a bookseller, a domestic help, an organisational programmer, etc. are traced, whereby detailed biographies of technology are created for four women and four men born between 1928 and 1982. The intention is to find the most differentiated approach possible to a variety of subjective experiences. The broad reflection of technological experiences at the crystallisation point of a millennium opens up new research terrain not only within folklore studies but also interdisciplinarily.