Cold technologies versus warm care? On affective and social relations with and through care technologies

'Warm care' is often contrasted with 'cold technology'. But is this a meaningful opposition? Much research into healthcare technology frames the relation between humans and their technologies as purely rational and instrumental, where technologies are functional means to a human end. Other studies, however, foreground how technologies and users (re) configure each other in particular use practices. In this paper, we build on the latter work by studying relations with healthcare technologies as not only functional but also social and affective. We analyse a documentary about robot pets next to ethnographic material about a particular care technology. We analyse the relations between these technologies and their users, the values that are brought into play and the identities generated in the interaction. Then we analyse the structuredness of the interaction, and trace the social relations that are brought into being. Our main argument is that the opposition between cold technology and warm care does not hold, but that there are different relations between people and technologies within different use practices, allowing different affective and social relations, and that this blurs taken-for-granted categories such as medical versus social problems, warm versus cold care, play and seriousness, and affective versus rational technologies. (C) 2009 Association ALTER. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.