Understanding appropriate technological choice requires that you learn a basic vocabulary. This section presents short, informal descriptions of “appropriate,” “technology,” “capability,” “social construction of technology,” and “technological determinism.” At the end, you will find a media file for a Jeopardy to help you learn these terms.
Technology
Technology : As was said in the previous section, a technology is more than just a physical object. It is a device activated within a network of social relations called a socio-technical system. (See below for more on socio-technical systems or STSs.) Technologies are much more than value neutral tools; a technological object or artifact can become an extension of the human body, a prosthesis, that magnifies, focuses, intensifies, shapes, channels, and constrains human actions and activities. Taken by themselves they are incomplete and indeterminate; enacted within a socio-technical system, they accomplish human activities.
Socio-technical system
Socio-technical System . Determining whether a technology is appropriate requires close attention to the socio-technical background which forms a system, a “complex environment of interacting components, together with the networks of relationships among them.” According to Huff, a socio-technical system is “an intellectual tool to help us recognize patterns in the way technology is used and produced.” For example, Huff has his computing students write “Social Impact Statements” to outline the impact a computing technology would have on the socio-technical system (STS) in which it is being integrated. Students triangulate their impact claims through day-in-the-life scenarios, participatory observation, and surveys; any claim made on the impact of a technology has to be substantiated through three different methods of observation (in private conversations).
Socio-technical systems, thus, exhibit several characteristics.
- STS analysis helps us understand how occupational and professional practice is shaped and constrained by different surrounding environments.
- Socio-technical systems are first and foremost systems. While they are composed of discrete parts, these are embedded in a network of relations and interact with one another. Hence, STS description requires systemic or ecological thinking; a STS must be approached as a whole which is not reducible to the sum of its parts
- The different components of a STS can include hardware, software, physical surroundings, people/groups/roles, procedures, laws/statutes/regulations, and information systems. This list of distinguishable components varies according to context and purpose. These distinguishable components are, nevertheless, inseparable from one another. Repeating the previous point,
STSs are, first and foremost, systems .
- STSs
embody or embed values . This makes it possible to prepare Social Impact Statements that identify and locate embedded values, chart out potential conflicts, and recommend system adjustments to remediate these. STS analysis, thus, adds a dimension to the determination of the appropriateness of a given technology by raising the question of whether its incorporation into a specific STS leads to value conflicts or resolves value vulnerabilities.
- STSs
change due to internal value issues as well as issues stemming from their interactions with other STSs. STS changes are directional in that they trace out trajectories or paths of change. Thus, another test of appropriate technology is whether its integration into a STS places that system on a
positive or negative trajectory of change .
- To repeat a point made just above, STS analysis employs
systems or ecological thinking . Just as important as the properties of the parts that compose a socio-technical system are the relations between these parts and the ways in which they interact. These relations and interactions give rise to properties that STSs as wholes display but which cannot be found when analyzing the constituent parts in isolation from one another. Another way of putting this is that STSs require holistic think that is markedly different from what sociologists call “methodological individualism.”
- Werhane et al. in Alleviating Poverty provide an insightful account of systems and systems thinking. They see this as necessary in building and analyzing alliances between stakeholders devoted to diminishing poverty.
