The Social Construction of Technology; Shaping the Medium in Contextual Practice

Any account of media/ted practice needs to acknowledge that technologies are shaped by people in contextual practice. Media/ted practice is shaped by technological design, which itself is shaped in the context of particular social relations and conditions, for example, it is shaped in everyday practice, in the context of the active motivations and uses in everyday contexts, rituals and relationships. In technology studies, social constructivists55 reject the idea that technologies follow a pre-determined course based on their properties, stressing that technologies have important implications for society, they matter (MacKenzie and Wacjman 1994) but they are always socially shaped. As Bijker and Law (1992:8) explain:

Technologies do not have a momentum of their own at the outset that allows them to pass through a neutral social medium. Rather they are subject to contingency as they pass from figurative hand to hand, and so are shaped and reshaped. Sometimes they disappear altogether (...). At other times, they take on novel forms, or are subverted by users to be employed in ways quite different from those by which they were originally intended.

Technological determinism offers largely naive accounts of processes of development diffusion and uptake, which fails to address important social shaping factors and processes. Consequently, they lend themselves to uncritical accounts of technologically-related social transformations, offering an oversimplified account of the process by which technologies become embedded in everyday life (MacKenzie and Wacjman 1999). SST argues that technologies do not follow a pre-determined course of development (McKay 1995), rather technological artifacts are socially determined; they are a form of materiality shaped by social processes and people in active practice. In this way, technological trajectories must be understood as configured in wider economic, political and socio-cultural conditions, shaped by the complex ways in which social groups understand and shape technologies in various contexts of practice. People do not simply adapt to technology; they design it, market it, interact with it and appropriate it; they configure technology at every stage of its

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development. As such, development, diffusion and take-up remain contingent on the interplay of economic, social and cultural factors (see Mackenzie and Wacjman 1999; Pinch and Bijker 1984). Unintended outcomes of technological development are an observable illustration of this point.

Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker’s (1987) article, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts’, led the way in terms of a social constructivist framing of technology. Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) studied the complex relationships between technologies and the social world by focusing on the interactional circumstances in which technologies existed and through which they attain their meaning. Recognising that technologies could not be assumed to have predictable routes into society, or predictable impacts on society, they examined how people take up and use technologies in active, contextual practice. SCOT developed a view of users not as passive consumers of technology but as ‘relevant social groups’56

who are actively involved in the construction of a technology (Pinch and Bijker 1984). This was recognised as one of the first approaches in studies of technology to focus on the users of technology, promoting the maxim that ‘users matter’57 (Oudschroom and Pinch 2003:543). The constructivist turn in technology studies was part of a wider paradigm shift in the Social Sciences concerned with the active social subject in everyday cultural life. In Media Studies and Sociology, social actors were being positioned as highly active agents in the construction of cultural meanings and in their appropriations and use of texts, materia l commodities and technological artifacts. For example there was increased interest in the active social subject in everyday practices of consumption (Fiske 1989, Willis 1990). However, overwhelmingly, the focus was on how people actively encountered, made sense of, and appropriated media texts, rather than technologies.

In terms of its contribution to a sociological approach to media/ted practice, SCOT draws attention to two key elements in the course of technological development. Firstly, they introduce the notion of ‘interpretative flexibility’. This captures the openness to the processes of technological design and it highlights that outcomes are dependent on the social circumstances of development, and urges us to examine how technologies emerge out of

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Relevant groups refer to members of a certain social group who share the same set of meanings, attached to a specific artifact (Pinch and Bijker 1987, 30).

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Although not dealt with directly in this discussion, feminist research has been important in deconstructing the designer/user divide and the divide between the production and consumption of artifacts (Wajcman, 2004: 46).

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contextual ‘inter-group’ negotiations. Secondly, SCOT alerts us to mechanisms and processes of closure and stabilisation. SCOT draws attention to the role of technological frames and closure mechanisms which work to frame interpretive flexibility over time58, as predominant meanings and uses emerge. SCOT reminds us of the importance of examining how technologies are encountered and interacted within contextual practice. This said, by restricting analysis mainly to ‘relevant’ or professional social groups that had an interest in the technology, SCOT neglected to pay attention to those who have no voice in the process of shaping it but are affected by its design (see Winner 1993, Williams and Edge 1996), for example, ‘everyday users’59. This research takes seriously the impacts design has, once stable uses emerge and the technology is integrated into everyday practice. SCOT, despite expounding how technologies arise, ignored the consequences of technologies thereafter, failing to address how technologies matter in wider contexts (Winner 1993), for example, as continuing to shape the fabric of everyday life. It was Domestication Studies that shifted focus onto everyday use of technologies in everyday social contexts, offering important insights into people’s day-to-day practices with regard to media technologies. Lastly, SCOT was largely uncritical of processes of social shaping. As Williams and Edge (1996) explain:

Simply establishing that technologies are 'socially shaped' leaves open many important questions about the character and influence of the shaping forces. It is necessary to go beyond simplistic forms of social determinism and start to examine the complex reality of processes and practices that mediate between the determining character of technologies and social appropriation.

The programme failed to engage in moral discussions about the politics and ethics of technology in the longer ‘duree’, once they had become embedded in social life (see Winner 1986). This thesis addresses this shortcoming, for example, by taking seriously the commercial business models that inform design and acknowledging that technologies have an important materiality. As Winner (1993) remarks, we cannot have technology without some measure of technological determinism and without ceding some human autonomy to the technology as the intended choice of human actions. Any theory of media/ted practice needs

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Interpretive flexibility is characteristic of early stages in design and use and is thought to diminish as a consensus emerges around a technology and it begins to stabilise.

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SCOT tended to see relevant groups as equal and conceive of a situation in which all relevant social groups are present in the design process thus side-lining end/everyday users. In doing so it did not adequately attend to power asymmetry between groups.

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to constantly address the competing interests of different groups and stakeholders (Fuchs 2009, 2012). In thinking about media/ted forms of social practice, it is important to attend to (1) the materiality of technology and (2), the politics of technological artifacts.