Technology and Social Change
March 20th, 2009 by SocProf and tagged Social Institutions, Social Interactions, Social Structure, Sociology, Technology
What do these four (which certainly are shortcuts and simplifications) items say about the social structure?
What are the principles behind their selection? After all, they do not all belong to the same category. Take the first item for instance. Shouldn’t it be followed by three other types of weapons (such as WMDs for the 20th century and robotic devices for the 21st?). Is the implication that warfare was the main mode of communication way back when?
Looking a bit more closely at the other three. One could also argue that all of them have been socially questioned and used to promote violence (in an interpersonal, mass, structural or symbolic forms) but the same could be said of many other cultural objects.
Finally, these objects are presented as socially diembedded as if they were neutral relative to the social structure and as if there were not different types of societies. Insted, this linear evolution seems universal. Also, these different objects involve different social classes and are the products of different economic, political, military and educational structures. The interactions between these institutions are central to what kind of technological research gets promoted, funded and diffused (see Callon and Latour’s work on the social embeddedness of scientific activity). Quite often, technology is presenting as emerging in and of itself and changing society whereas the opposite relationship (how society influences technology is downplayed). The social processes are not neutral in terms of power distribution throughout the social structure either.
So, a fun little graph that raises more questions than it answers.
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