SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES (STS) AND IT
Philip Doty

Before reading the material below, and over the course of the semester, you may want to consider the material on Reading Discussions of Theory.

While Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a complex and highly contentious field, we can, for our purposes, characterize it in the following ways. The material below is a very brief introduction, and we apologize for making it appear much more simplistic and "flat" than the field of STS is. For more information, you can always start with the list of print and digital resources listed below.

One of the primary elements of an STS-informed understanding of technology is that we must go beyond asserting that technology is "just a tool." This instrumental approach has been replaced by a growing understanding of technology as both an expression of and constitutive of meaning in the society that produces and is produced by it.

We can think of technology from several perspectives:

• The ontological - what is technology?
• The pragmatic - what do technologies accomplish?
• The phenomenological - how do technologies affect our experience in ways beyond the merely instrumental or functional?

Since c. 1960, we have developed our understanding that technology is of interest to a number of disciplines, embedded in a wide range of communities of practice, and placed in a wide range of discursive domains. Among these disciplines are history, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, ethics, women's studies, communication, cognitive science, biology, psychology, political science, information studies, law, literary and rhetorical studies, and anthropology. These disciplines have helped build an understanding that society, culture, science, and technology are mutually constitutive, highly localized, and temporal. Further, our use of these terms is ideological and lies largely unexamined, since technology, in particular, is so embedded in our ideas of self and of what social life is like and should be. Thus, technologies, and analysis of technology, are in media res.

One of the primary insights of this approach is the undermining of any notion of determinism, whether social, biological, or technological. That is, there is no simple "one-to-one correspondence between the causal agent and its effects; rather technology permeates, or inheres in, all these regions, practices, and ideologies" (Menser & Aronowitz, 1996, p. 8; emphasis in original). Such an understanding runs counter to what some have seen as the obsession of Western culture with simple, linear causality.

A further insight of STS is that there is no way to be merely a critic of technology; rather one is both a user and a critic -- technology fully permeates culture of all kinds and has since there have been human beings. Cultural activity, cultural production, and knowledge production are inseparable from the technologies and the utilization of the technologies that reflect and form social life. This characteristic embeds technology firmly in the narrativity, rhetorics, and discursive practices that characterize social life. As Joerges says, while artifacts certainly have politics, so do politics have artifacts or legitimizing narratives. Menser & Aronowitz (1996, p. 21) continue:

Technology is not simply a system to be deployed - as the U.S. Army was deployed in the Persian Gulf; rather it constitutes what we refer to as "culture" itself. We claim . . . that technologies, nature, and culture are all intertwined, not just in practice but ontologically. Thus, technologies are deployed, but they also employ and engage human beings and nature in such a manner that a continuity among the three arises that prevents any essentialist isolations of one from the other. To be a subject is to be natural-cultural-technological; to be a social animal is to be techno-social.

While there is a great deal of contention about this point, we must balance our understanding that technologies permeate social practice with our understanding that these technologies and their effects and meanings are indeterminate. These effects and meanings are unpredictable and inextricably intertwined with highly localized practice and are contingent on local, temporalized circumstances. In other words, we must keep in mind both the materiality of technology (its status as a tool) and its nature as socially constructed (its status as a sign, symbol, or signal in the semiotic sense).

Maturana & Varela, among others, shed further light on this concept. Technology can be regarded as both a floor and a ceiling. It is a floor insofar as it allows us to build upon the accomplishments, conceptual as well as utilitarian, of those who proceeded us. This floor also "grounds" us in the evolving cultural practice that we emulate and play an active role in. Technology is a ceiling in that it inhibits our imaginations and limits our ability to evoke new relationships and understandings. Regarding technology in such a complex light, as you can see, neither demonizes nor valorizes it.

Kingery (1996a, p. 15) cites Polanyi's Personal Knowledge that understanding any machine requires knowledge of its "operational principle," i.e., how its components fulfill their function together. Such a (functional) understanding requires Polanyi's notion of tacit knowledge, a form of what philosophers call "indexicality." Indexicality is that which cannot be articulated, including things like work-arounds, implications, meanings, and so on, that members of a community of practice develop together. Without such an embedded understanding, any characterization of technology and its uses is empty and limited in applicability and utility.

Another useful insight from STS is that communication technologies simultaneously connect persons and bypass others. Thus, while cyber-enthusiasts celebrate how digital technologies connect persons from around the world, the same technologies also serve to remove one from one's immediate neighbors. Expressways are a good example of this phenomenon. It is not that this complexity of effect and meaning brands technology as "bad"; rather, it means that technologies can rarely be essentialized to one characteristic along some imagined continuum.

Further, examining technologies as a social code that demands interpretation and reflection, not simple unexamined, instrumental use is another important element of STS. This kind of critique, as well as the critique of technology as a means of social control and domination, is often unwelcome by technologists and scientists of many kinds. Instead they often dismiss the work of STS scholars as anti-scientific, unscientific, and "merely subjective" and luddite.

The challenge for us, both generally and in this course, is to determine the answers to questions, including these:

• Are these concepts of value to us?
• If they are, how?
• How, if at all, might they inform our discursive practice as well as our implementation of information technologies?
• How might these general observations about technologies help us understand information technologies that, by design, involve communication among people?
• How are information technologies like and unlike other technologies?

As you might expect, the answers to these questions are highly individualized, temporal, and contingent upon local circumstances.

Selected Sources

Cornell University Department of Science and Technology Studies: http://www.sts.cornell.edu/CU-STS.html

Haraway, Donna. (1991). A cyborg manifesto. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

Jasanoff, Sheila, Markle, Gerry, Petersen, J., & Pinch, Trevor. (Eds.). (1995). Handbook of science and technology studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kingery, W. David. (1996a). Introduction. In W. David Kingery (Ed.), Learning from things: Method and theory of material culture studies. (pp. 1-15). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Kingery, W. David. (Ed.). (1996b). Learning from things: Method and theory of material culture studies. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno, & Woolgar, Steve. (1979). Laboratory life. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Lubar, Steven, & Kingery, W. David. (eds.). (1993). History from things: Essays on material culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Maturana, Humberto R., & Varela, Francisco J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Boston:Shambhala.

Menser, Michael, & Aronowitz, Stanley. (1996). On cultural studies, science, and technology. In Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Martinsons, & Michael Menser (Eds.), Technoscience and cyberculture (pp. 7-28). New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994). Picture theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nelkin, Dorothy. (1996). Perspectives on the evolution of science studies. In Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Martinsons, & Michael Menser (Eds.), Technoscience and cyberculture (pp. 31-36). New York: Routledge.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Department of Science and Technology Studies: http://www.rpi.edu/dept/sts/

Rich, Jennifer, & Menser, Michael. (1996). Introduction: Establishing markers in the milieu. In Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Martinsons, & Michael Menser (Eds.), Technoscience and cyberculture (pp. 1-4). New York: Routledge.

Society for Social Studies of Science: http://its2.ocs.lsu.edu/guests/ssss/public_html/

University of Birmingham Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology: http://www.bham.ac.uk/CulturalStudies/

Winner, Langdon. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121-136.

Woolgar, Steve. (1986). On the alleged distinction between discourse and praxis. Social Studies of Science, 16(2), 309-317.

THE "INFORMATION AGE AND INFORMATION SOCIETY" - REALITY, EMPTY HYPERBOLE, OR . . .?

One of the major themes that STS can help us consider is the so-called "Information Age," its rhetoric, and its ideology. Proponents of the Information Age say that we have entered a new and different kind of economic era that emphasizes the centrality of knowledge, its production, commodification, and sale. Critics of this approach undermine that assertion in several ways: by asserting that economic modes are not the most important or determinative of social characteristics, by describing the blind spots of the IT enthusiasts, and/or by noting that we are merely in an advanced state of capitalism not an entirely new type of economy. Daniel Bell, a sociologist, is one of the primary theorists of the Information Age, and his 1963 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society provides us with some useful analytic tools for thinking about the concept.

Critics of the "Information Age" have identified a number of major difficulties with its conceptualization, political implications, and other characteristics. Among these are:

• Information overload
• The twin extremes of technophoria and technophobia
• Creation of a divide between information haves and have nots
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• International conflicts, e.g., information imperialism, spectrum use, "brain drain," and conflict about intellectual property, privacy, and information use
• Labor displacement
• The mismatch between the educational needs of students and educational institutions' ability to train them for the "new economy"
• Electronic sweatshops
• Limited knowledge of the public, "experts," and policy makers about "Information Age" topics, problems, and long-term threats to our well-being
• Increased anxiety by persons of all kinds
• Surveillance, control.

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO IT

John Buschman has edited a volume of papers that use some of the insights of STS as well as other critical approaches to information technology. Of particular value to us is the paper by Norman Balabanian:

Balabanian, Norman. (1993). The neutrality of technology: A critique of assumptions. In John Buschman(Ed.), Critical approaches to information technology in librarianship: Foundations and applications (pp. 15-40). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Balabanian takes a "critical" or "conflict" approach to understanding IT generally and in the information professions. He says that (p. 17):

Like the term "society," technology is an abstract concept. A society is not simply a collection of people, but also the interrelationship among them. In the same way, technology means not simply a collection of machines, but the relationships among them, their uses, and the relationship between them and people.

• Physical objects
  
  
  1. Hardware: tools, instruments, machines, weapons, appliances
  2. Structures: bridges, buildings, plants, dams, networks (road, rail, telephone, pipeline, electric)
  3. Materials: metals, plastics, drugs, chemicals, synthetic fibers
     
     
• Know-how: "not abstract, scientific knowledge but procedures, methods, processes, technique. Accumulated knowledge is as much a part of technology as a machine."
  
  
• Personnel: "not autonomous human individuals but standardized people, largely interchangeable with one another, having the appropriate know-how to manipulate the physical objects."
  
  
• Organization and system: "the organized structure, the mechanisms of management and control . . . the linkages that tie together hardware, technique, and personnel with the social institution."
  
  
• Political and economic power: these are implicit in organization and system, but should be made explicit.

He summarizes by noting that (p. 18):

Technology is not simply the computer, for example, but large-scale computer networks linked through telecommunications systems; it is command-and-control systems; it is data banks, the know-how and the software to manipulate them, and the power implicit in controlling them.

We can also identify some difficulties or challenges for the information professions that information technologies, STS, the "Information Age," and the related concepts already discussed sensitize us to:

• Changing roles and relationships of authors, readers, publishers, and information intermediaries
  
  
• Defining authorship
  
  
• Defining fair use, especially but not limited to digital environments (1976 Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and initiatives to further protect databases)
  
  
• User authentication and definition of qualified user and acceptable use
  
  
• Document authentication
  
  
• Determining rights to edit, repackage, and sell information
  
  
• Filtering and access control -- who decides? For whom? Using what criteria? -- all especially problematic in institutions that use public money and/or serve children
  
  
• Intellectual property, especially copyright -- is it like the Volstead Act (that introduced Prohibition in the U.S.), i.e., unenforceable, ignored with impunity, and ripe for repeal?
  
  
• Distinguishing private from public communication
  
  
• Free vs. fee conflicts
  
  
• Information overload, misinformation, and increased need for quality control
  
  
• Lack of adequate cataloging, information retrieval, and access tools, including a lack of trained intermediaries and institutionalized criteria for deciding what to catalog and what to archive
  
  
• Liability of network owners and service providers for the behavior of their users, e.g., information malpractice, intellectual property infringement, and privacy infringement
  
  
• Standards and compatibility
  
  
• Conservation, e.g., what are the effective lives of CD-ROMs, DVD discs, and magnetic tapes? Will there be equipment to run these media? (NASA LANDSAT as a good example of a bad example)
  
  
• Matthew Effect -- the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer
  
  
• Need for training and retraining -- permanent obsolescence of us all, especially information professionals
  
  
• International concerns, e.g.:
  
  
  1. Standards for equipment and transmission protocols
  2. Diacritical marks and non-Roman alphabets
  3. Technology transfer and export control
  4. "Information imperialism," including conflicts about the homogenization and Americanization of global culture, geosynchronous satellites, and the allocation of the radio spectrum
  5. Conflict among privacy and intellectual property regulations and statutes.