One of the central issues that interests me in STS is the debate over blaming technology. When we look around us in our modern world and see aspects that have changed for the worse due to some manifestation of “progress”, we necessarily start trying to figure out where the fault lies. This is what brought me to STS. But I concede that the answer isn’t simple. If our technology is making our lives worse, who or what is to blame? Where is the root of the problem?
One response is to blame technology itself. Regardless of the intentions of its creators, new technology always seems to lead in unintended directions – at times toward unintended and undesired consequences that can outweigh its benefits, often then spurring the invention of yet newer technology to solve the next problems. The answer, therefore, might be to resist or avoid certain technologies altogether – particularly those that fail to “put humans first”.
Technological determinism, as this way of thinking is called, says that technology has an agenda. Our technology shapes us. Therefore if we are unhappy with how it shapes us, we should look at the technology and the inherent influences within it. Langdon Winner examined this idea in the early 1980’s. In his essay, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” he shows how technologies are designed and built to impact people and push society in one way or another.
A different way of looking at the problems of technology came from Trevor Pinch and Weibe Bijker a few years later. They argued that, just as much as technology shapes us, technology is also shaped by society. Therefore society shapes itself through technology. This Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory places the root blame of our technological woes back on humans and the social frameworks in which technology is created.
So where should we direct our efforts to combat problems caused by technology? Toward slowing the train of technological developments, or toward changing the social, economic, and political systems that spur those developments to advance?
Clearly there are a web of factors that influence the developments of our modern world. If political entities, capitalist structures, or public opinion of technology were to change, any of these could send us toward a wildly different future than the one we are currently heading for.
And, in fact, given the limits of our economic systems and natural resources, I expect it is likely we will indeed see things change in the near future.