Technology and society.
What impact has one had over the other over time? Have technological evolutions shaped society, or was it the other way around?
As a new student at CCIT, reflecting on these key questions has proven to be as interesting and challenging as one could have hoped for over these past few months. And regardless of which side of the question you land on, technological determinism and social shaping can both be used individually to justify these competing points of view.
Technological determinism argues that institutions, societies, culture and economics evolvebecause ofdevelopments in technology. Technology affects all people in all situations in the same way and at the same pace. In order words, technology shapes our society. As McLuhan argues in "Understanding Media”, media technologies impact us, change our perception and ultimately change our world. For example, social media have become extensions of ourselves. Users participate in these platforms to spread their offline mindset online and share with the world a virtual version of their self-image. These platforms have become extremely popular in recent years (e.g. Instagram influencers), to a point that using them is now common practice for most people. When adopted broadly by the majority population, such technologies massively transform society. In summary, technological determinism is a form of self-determination and direction of the evolution of technology within society, as McLuhan also argues in his theory.
On the contrary, social shaping rather argues that technological changes arethe result ofinfluences coming from important social groups within a society. Cultural, institutional, economic and other societal factors ultimately drive - if not dictate - technological opportunities, innovations and trends. In other words, need and context are the engines powering discoveries and the direction of technological evolution. In "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century", Henry Jenkins argues that there has been a communication shift in society as a result of more and more people participating online. For advocates of participatory culture, new technologies adapt to the new cultural norms and practices implemented in society - not the other way around. Facebook making changes to their "real name" policy as a result of users' complaints is a good example of this. In brief, social shaping implies that technology is not neutral but somehow shaped by dominant social values of the society at any given time.
In my opinion, neither of these two theories adequately accounts for all influences between technology and society over time. Just like the snowmobile was invented - out of societal need - by a man having just lost a child because he could not take him to medical care in a timely fashion during a snowstorm, the wheel - one of the most transformative discoveries in the history of humankind - was probably "discovered" by a caveman that tripped onto a log. Technological determinism and social shaping are, therefore, both relevant and important to understand how technologies and societies are linked and influence one another.
I would be curious to know if you share my view or if you rather believe that one of these two theories has played a dominant role over the other in History. Are you more on the side that technology shapes society or that society shapes technology?
