This module explores cases studies of responsible choice of appropriate technologies for a variety of communities including communities in developing nations. This first version is incomplete and is being published to gain further reaction from students and faculty. It has been prepared in conjunction with the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez NSF project, GREAT IDEA.
I. introduction
The goal of this module is to help you to think about technology in a different way. We tend to think of technologies as value-neutral tools not good by themselves but only in terms of the uses we put them to. The moral value of the hammer depends on the user and use. It can push nails into wood to build a house or hit someone on the head expressing unjustified anger and aggression against another.
But technologies are more than just value neutral tools. They are enacted in different worlds characterized by our activities, projects, institutions, cultures, and physical environments. At times they become extensions of our hands and feet and are called prosthetics. At other times, when they fail to fulfill the functions we have assigned them, they become obstacles that thwart or oppose our desires. (In the hands of the carpenter, the hammer pounds nails quickly and flawlessly into roof tile while the inexperienced home improver finds it a clumsy tool that bends nails.) Wanda Orlikowski encourages us to think of technologies less as external objects and more as enactments. She presents a case study that shows how a word processing program takes on four very different value colorings as it is enacted in each of four different socio-technical systems. This module is designed to help you to visualize how technologies that shape, magnify, extend, and constrain human activity. (See Orlikowski below.)
Some other goals
In this module you will...
- examine cases where a community exercises technological choice
- practice socio-technical sensitivity by describing the socio-technical system that underlies your group’s case
- learn frameworks that guide the choice of appropriate technology
- develop an active understanding of how technologies form one environment alongside other environments that shape, enable, magnify, circumscribe, and constrain human action
Ii. what you need to know.
Responsibility in the context of technological choice.
Herbert Fingarette in the Meaning of Criminal Insanity (see below) characterizes moral responsibility as (moral) response to (moral) relevance. This means responsibility is a skill that combines two components. First one exercises techno-social sensitivity to uncover those aspects of a situation that have moral relevance. To a person sitting on a crowded bus, of all the things going on, the fact that an older man is awkwardly standing, uncomfortable and holding several boxes, is morally relevant. Picking this out of a complex situation draws upon a sophisticated set of emotional, cognitive, and perceptual skills. Second, having focused on what is morally relevant in a situation, a responsible agent then sets about devising action that is responsive to this relevance. The individual on the crowded bus, in response to the relevance of the man awkwardly standing, stands up and offers him a seat. Socio-technical System description and analysis provide a formal way of uncovering moral relevance in a concrete situation. This module will give you an opportunity to practice this skill. The value realization framework laid out in this module(see Flanagan, Howe, and Nissenbaum below), provides a structure for using value realization as a response to relevance. This part of the module will get you thinking about how to develop value realizing actions that respond to the relevance uncovered in STS description. See Harris below for a description of techno-socio sensitivity that falls in nicely with the account of moral responsibility as response to relevance.
