Introducing the social shaping of technology

The social shaping of technology is an approach to research that gives us tools to critically analyze not only technologies, but also the social relations that generate and maintain them.

Technology researcher Nancy Baym points out that people often rely on unexamined assumptions about how technology develops. Especially when technologies are new, there is a strong tendency to view them as self-generating systems – things that enter societies as active forces of change that humans have little power to resist.

This way of thinking, called ‘technological determinism’, assumes that technologies have effects on us. This leaves out the key point that we also effect technologies.

Consider the statement that “Google is making us stupid”. It suggests that we rely on Google to search for facts. Rather than carefully reading long books and retaining the information, we skim webpages for bits and pieces that we use and quickly forget. But Baym argues that thinking about the impact of a technology like Google in that way – of seeing it as changing us without taking into consideration our own shaping and use of it – is part of a long-standing tradition that sees technology as acting on and changing society.

Even the ancient Greeks thought that new technologies were making us stupid. Socrates worried that the invention of the written alphabet was a threat to the rich oral tradition of Greek society. He is reported to have said:

“[T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories, they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” (Baym, p.25)

This way of thinking sees technology as having characteristics that are automatically transferred to the people using it. It is important to stress that these changes can be either good or bad. Alongside nightmares about killer robots, we come up with many optimistic scenarios where better technologies improve individuals or society.

Below, you can watch Nancy Baym’s talk on Connecting in a Digital Age. Baym is a former faculty member in Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, and is now a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts.