Applying the Social Shaping Approach

Whether one stands with the optimists or the pessimists, either side of this debate have their drawbacks. McChesney writes that optimists tap into our love of technology, gadgetry, progress, and individualism. They suggest we can have all the benefits of equality, without the messy politics.

Skeptics provide a dash of realism and raise important, deep questions that we need to consider as digital networks and technologies are involved in more and more aspects of our lives. But as McChesney points out, just like the original skeptics who lived in ancient Greece, today’s pessimists generally fail to offer us any alternatives. Rather than suggest solutions, they chronicle how quickly the sky is falling.

So what’s the solution? Where do we go from here?

McChesney suggests that this debate is missing a key consideration. Specifically, people are all not talking about social relations – about the way that our societies and economies are structured. They all fail to consider how social relations shape our choices and constrain our actions.

The ways that society is organized, including systems like capitalism or settler colonialism, are key factors in the ways that technological change works. In order to understand how technologies are developed and used, we must also understand how social relations set the terms of our interactions with technologies. The video of Tim Wu’s talk on the rise and fall of information empires provides an excellent introduction to this idea, as well as the roles that large-scale technologies play in our societies.

McChesney asks us to consider the conflict between rich people and poor people that is caused by the inequalities generated by the economy. The economic inequality created through this process in turn corrupts our political system. He argues that this comes about as wealthy special interests come to dominate the ways our governments function. This impacts the development of technologies like the Internet.

But rather than write off this situation as a given, McChesney says that alternatives are possible. To be successful, these ideas must be considered in terms of the political economy of the world we actually live in. Rather than the powerlessness and defeatism of some pessimists, he suggests that we should focus on what humans can accomplish.

This champions the role of people and communities in technology development. We can change our society for the better, and we can develop and use technologies as tools to help us do so. The short clip from Richard Smith stresses how we can all contribute to these efforts as individuals and groups.