Social Shaping of Technology - Essay Example

Social Shaping of Technology The social shaping of technology (SST) is an approach that examines the processes that partake in innovation and the content of technology. A host of social, cultural, organizational, and political factors are included in the SST in contrast to the conventional approaches that explain the impacts or outcomes of the technological change. Examples of SST are omnipresent. For example, Facebook was introduced as a social networking website in response to the growing demand of people to have a free of cost, convenient, and user-friendly platform that would allow them to be in touch with their social network 24/7. Furthermore, owing to the growing popularity of Facebook, other social networking websites like Twitter and LinkedIn were created with particular emphasis on addressing the political and professional networking of people. Similarly, portable communication devices evolved from heavy-weight mobile phones to light-weight smartphones in response to people’s growing aspirations for style, convenience, and portability. Since it is not a well-defined theory, various approaches to SST are recognized. Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) is one major approach in which Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker assert that social groups socially construct technological artefacts. The concerned social groups interpret and evaluate the success and failure differently and sometimes with completely conflicting goals, intentions, and objectives. A rich and diverse body of research has flowed from the work of Pinch and Bijker (1987), most of which has supported an agency-centered approach. In spite of the conceptual evolution in structural theory’s favor, particularly in Bijker’s (1995) work Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, SCOT has not played a significant role in illuminating the influence of social structures on the development of technology. Winner (1993) has identified various deficiencies with SCOT such as its failure to anticipate technical choices’ social consequences; irrelevant social groups’ marginalization, a deficiency originating in SCOT’s definition of the social groups as groups with empirically discernible impact on technology whereas social groups whose influence on the shaping of technology is secondary are neglected in this definition. Another deficiency in SCOT is that it is inconsiderate of technology’s social influence; “it is mistaken to think of technology and society as separate spheres influencing each other: technology and society are mutually constitutive” (MacKenzie and Wacjman 1999). An alternative approach to this is Actor Network Theory (ANT) that identifies a range of central actors that create models of heterogeneous interest networks. This can best be explained as a material-semiotic technique since it identifies simultaneously semiotic and material relations. For example, bank is a place where people’s ideas and technologies interact to create a single network. The concept of translation is central to the theory where all actors in a forum mutually consent upon the importance of building and defending the network. Social relations shape a framework of market calculations and hence affect technological change. However, market is not the only social institution which plays its part in shaping technological change. States have invariably shaped and even sponsored technological projects. “[A]uthoritarian technics…begins around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control…The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labour and slavery which brought into existence [human-powered] machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower” (Dewis and Sigler 1997, 205). European states in the 17th and 18th centuries saw technical progress as a means of gaining greater population, treasure, and national power. This mercantilist framework’s implications were different from those of the straightforwardly capitalist judgments for the shaping of technology. The single most important way in which technology has been shaped by the society is the state’s sponsorship of military technology. Like international economic competition, the threat of war and the actual war coercively act to facilitate a change in technology, and the anticipated punishment for the ones that lose the war is defeat. Nuclear power, electronics, and air transport are three cases in point. Military in inspiration was the initial work on the nuclear energy technology. The state interest in obtaining fissile material for the atomic weapons has often overridden the economic drawbacks of nuclear power. Design of the reactor was closely shaped by these state interests particularly during the initial years of nuclear energy (Simpson 1983). In the post-war period, a generation of military jet work made the making of civilian jet airlines possible. Design of the civil airlines of Britain and Germany in the 1930s reflected their status of the instruments of imperial and foreign policy (Constant 1980). Military in general and especially the military of the USA has largely sponsored the development of electronics in this century. Military need and support’s role in the development of digital computer cannot be overemphasized. The role of end user is very important in the discourse of SST. The user is an actor who does not partake as a decision maker or a professional in the service sectors, commercial sectors, or industry developing the technology of computer networking. Ordinary users can be innovative in a variety of ways that include designing and redesigning the information and communication technologies (ICT), coming up with new practices surrounding ICTs, increasingly widespread creative design, and innovative uses or technology. Silverstone and Haddon (1996) proposed a design and domestication interface to help consider the innovative role of ordinary user in the shaping of technology sustainably. There are three interrelated dimensions in the design phase including creation of a technological artifact, construction of the user, and catching up of the consumer. There are three dimensions of consumption of technologies on the other side of the equation, including commodification in which the market driven actors make particular claims regarding the artifact, appropriation wherein the consumers drive a technology from the commercial to the private sphere and incorporate it in their everyday routine, and thirdly conversion wherein the flow takes place from the private to the public space. Conversion explains it to the market driven agents how ordinary users consume the technologies. “Design and domestication are two sides of the innovation coin. Domestication is anticipated in design and design is completed in domestication” (Silverstone and Haddon 1996). Establishment of the concept of SST generates many questions about the influence and nature of the forces facilitating this process. Social shaping of technology extends beyond such ordinary forms of social determinism that visualize technology as depicting a single rationality e.g. ruling elite’s political imperative, or economic imperative. For instance, economic analysis’ dominant neo-classical tradition has been critiqued on the basis of the assumptions that market demands would cause technologies to readily emerge (Coombs et al 1987). The concept that there are conscious or unconscious choices inherent in the individual systems’ and artefacts’ design and in the direction of innovation programmes is central to SST. Without a single experiment or a predetermined logic, the emergence of technology makes innovation a garden of forking paths wherein different paths can lead to conflicting technological results. These choices might have differing implications for social groups. Social shaping perspective creates understanding of the social and organizational implications of technological change. Technologies facilitate political ends with functional encoding, by way of deployment forms that they facilitate. Practices of design and marketing symbolically encode technologies to the same social end. Technologies vary in their level of openness or closure depending upon the preferred forms of deployment by the users. Technologies are getting more specific at the functional level whereas they are becoming less specific at the symbolic level since lifestyles are being marketed more than the products. Technologies, along with being encoded, comprise a site of convergence for the various social forces; a phenomenon referred to as the ‘sphere of appropriation’. Users may use technologies in ways that were not foresighted or originally intended by their manufacturers and developers. “Within a technological frame not everything is possible anymore (the structure and tradition aspect), but the remaining possibilities are relatively clearly and readily available to all members of the relevant social group (the actor and innovation aspect)” (Bijker 1995, 192). Personal computers (PC) exemplify this process. PCs were originally marketed as a technology oriented around work rather than leisure. This enabled the sellers of PCs to exploit and consolidate vast ideology of modernity. “[C]omputer as a symbol of progress was as undeniable as the relationship between a Rolls Royce and wealth” (Adamson and Kennedy 1986). Parents went under the impression that without a micro, their children’s employment prospects in the future would be impaired. Appropriation is the sphere wherein the two forces of encoding and subjective deployment of technologies come together. The notion of a subject that is socially constructed is fundamental to countering technological determinism. Technology’s nature and direction does not follow a trajectory that is inevitable. Extension of understanding of the involved scope of social choice leads to the realization of alternative trajectories. Technological determinism is quite dominant and one reason for it is that this is the way technology is read generally. It reflects cultural values and thus justifies the visualization of technology as a cultural phenomenon. A potential social implication of technological change is increased emphasis on consumption. Every year, new models of laptops and mobiles are introduced into the market. Many of these new models do not offer substantial benefits over the previous models. While people can easily do with their previous models, the attitude of keeping an outdated model when a newer version is in the market is stigmatized. This attitude is discouraged because this does not contribute to the economy. In their attempt to remain updated and ‘modern’, people buy the latest model and discard the previous one while it is functional. Big companies and corporations have used technology to bring about this change in social attitudes toward consumption. Using the power of media, ad makers have made appearance on all possible platforms ranging from billboards to social networking websites, magazines, and television. The race to stay constantly updated and equipped with the latest gadgets and accessories has dehumanized the society and made people more materialistic and less empathetic and natural. SST helps explain this social implication of technological change by drawing references from the past. Technological change has yielded similar social and organizational implications in the past. For example, the electric fridge used nowadays was not the only way to refrigerate the eatables in homes before. In the 20th century, electric refrigerator was in completion with a silent refrigerator powered by natural gas. However, that version of refrigerator was ruled out just like many other failed machines whose use was terminated even though they worked just fine. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan summed this up as, “These are not junked cars and used refrigerators that people leave along roadsides and in garbage dumps, but the rusting hulks of aborted ideas; patents that were never exploited; test models that could not be manufactured at affordable prices; machines that had considerable potential, but were, for one reason or another, actively suppressed by the companies that had the license to manufacture them; devices that were put on the market, but never sold well and were soon abandoned” (Cowan cited in Koerth-Baker 2012). To conclude, to claim that technology is socially shaped is to highlight and draw references from the history of events that have imparted the need of creation and modification of technology for the achievement of a range of social, economic, cultural, and organizational goals. The social shaping of technology perspective suggests that the creation, evolution, and modification of technology are intertwined with the global political and socioeconomic affairs. Design is often modified by the end users after the technology is domesticated. Spreading of the modified design hence generates the pattern for modification at industrial scale, reflecting the needs and aspirations of the end users. Social shaping perspective promotes an understanding of the social and organizational implications of technological change by referring to the factors and events that necessitated this change. The best understanding of a result can be obtained by trying to understand the events that caused it to surface. References: Adamson, I, and Kennedy, R 1986, Sinclair and the ‘Sunrise’ Technology, Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin. Bijker, W 1987, The social construction of bakelite: Toward a theory of invention. In The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology, edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 17-50. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bijker, W 1995, Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Constant, EW 1980, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, London. Coombs, R, Saviotti, P, & Walsh, V 1987, Economics and Technological Change, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Dewey, J, and Sigler, JA 1997, Science, Technology, and Society, University Press of America. Koerth-Baker, M 2012, How the refrigerator got its hum, [Online] Available at http://boingboing.net/2012/08/20/how-the-refrigerator-got-its-h.html [accessed: 20 November 2014]. MacKenzie, D and Wajcman, J 1999, ‘Introductory Essay and General Issues’, in D Mackenzie & J Wajcman (eds.), The Social Shaping of Technology (Second Edition), Open University Press, Buckingham. Silverstone, R, and Haddon, L 1996, ‘Design and the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life’, in Silverstone and Mansell, R (eds.), Communication by Design: The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Simpson, J 1983, The Independent Nuclear State, The United States, Britain and the Military Atom, London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. Winner, L 1993, Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology, Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 362-378. Read More