Social Shaping of Technology

BACK: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

Can we talk about technology in the same way that we’ve been discussing science–with paradigms, revolutions, sociological factors? Typically one way this plays out is to think about technology as a set of black boxes, where people don’t understand what’s inside the box. People are particularly interested in the goal of what it does, not how it works.

To some point, we have to accept black boxes and accept what other people have done–why reinvent the wheel every time? What if we open up these black boxes and analyze the social factors that made them?

Various approaches have tried to explain these rationality for technologies (economic, political, etc.) because they were unified in trying to disprove technological determinism.

J.L Borge’s Garden of Forked Paths (basically a giant binary tree) suggests that once you go down a path, there’s no way to go back up–you can only go back down. This metaphor helps us show that it’s not just a linear path–what is going to be the next choice–based upon choices that were made prior.

With technology, we have this idea of “the next version,” the next version, the next version. With one choice, you’re really creating one large choice for choices made down generations later. What if we decided to go down the fork where we made steam cars?

Technological change is always shaped by choices made under specific circumstances. Through policy claims and objectives, there is a big emphasis on who uses the technologies, rather than some ‘linear model’ of innovation. This forking path model is much more useful for considering all of the social ideas behind a technology.

Within STS, political agendas are the heart of what to study for the politics from the artifacts and the deomcratization of decision making.

In the Netherlands, which was created by ‘taking a chunk out of the sea,’ where the very existence of the country was created through technology, it is quite natural for them to think of technology as social. (Bijker was from the Netherlands).

Relevant Social Group: Whenever you study a technology, you need to know the relevant people who share the meaning of the artifact. Either the engineers, designers, the users. Who’s going to use computers and iPhones? These don’t have to be fixed–they can change over to better technologies, how the understand it or use it, etc.

Technological Frame: These are what the people in the relevant groups share. Goals, criteria for efficiency, theoretical assumptions, tacit knowledge, testing procedures. This is a lot like paradigms–you share something with the other people in the way that you use or experience technology. But people may be included in different degrees–you don’t have to be caged within the paradigm. You might be using a computer in a different way, but it’s still in the frame.

Interpretive Flexibility: Artifacts can have different meaning to different groups. What it does, how it can be used, why you should use it–all of these things can mean different things to different groups. To an accountant, it might just be some way to use spreadsheets, but to a data scientist, it is a computational machine.

Case Study: The Invention of the Bicycle (1879 - 1898)

Technologies are created through thousands of iterations. Movies sort of portray them being built in a flash, but we only recently created a bicycle that would be recognizable to us today.

The process of creating a bicycle (and any other technology) takes so long because there are different relevant social groups competing to determine what a bicycle should be like–different groups have different interpretations of bikes. Is it just a healthy activity to do? Is it a mode of transportation? Is it something we should put in our cities for people to rent?

Everyone is trying to push it in a different direction to which they think is the best–so the stabilization of the design never converges.

How safe does your car need to be? Are cars just tools to show off your wealth? Is it a transportation tool?

Machines aren’t accepted because they work: they work because they have been accepted by relevant social groups. For a machine to ‘work,’ it must also be explainable in social terms. Efficiency is relative.

Technological artifacts are always socially constructed and interpreted: there is not just one way to design or interpret an artifact. When the relevant social groups involved see the problem as being solved, technical controversies are closed and stabilized.

Moreover, we can note that these groups can establishes ‘alliances’ in order to push their agenda. Sporting cyclists and the general public can see the air tire for a bicycle as a solution to both speed and safety.

Criticisms:

It mainly deals with the design phase–it doesn’t follow up with what happens after the technology is ‘closed.’ Cars have been ‘closed,’ but we’re still working on it and transforming it.
The notion of “closure” seems too rigid
What about marginalized social groups?
It doesn’t say much about social structure and power relations
It doesn’t say much about the reciprocal relationship between artifacts and social groups.

Because social groups shape the artifacts, their collective identities are reconsituted in the process–since one social group saw bikes as a way to express masculinity, bikes were designed to be dangerous and masculine.

LTS: Large Technological Systems (Thomas Hughes)

How do inventions come about? What does it mean to invent something? The process-like structure needed to be explained. There’s no isolated ‘genius’ of an inventor, and there’s no ‘flashes’ of disembodied inspiration. Inventions are a gradual process that moves existing technological/social conditions.

In a way, inventions reorder both the natural and social world. With the use of inventions (atomic bomb, electricity), changes the world, the market, the legal systems. These are large organic systems that develop, evolve, gain momentum, and becomes extremely difficult to get out of it.

For example, think about just taking out the oil industry. There are hundreds of other industries that are dependent on this industry and have been rooted across the globe. It would require a huge reshaping of the world if we were to ‘just stop’ using oil. So it’s not that this was technologically determined, but that we’ve been so deep in this invention that we can’t come out of it.

It's nice to be able to forget things.