CS213 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Sociotechnical System, Social Change, Leo Marx
Alternate Understanding of Technology
● “Foregrounds the interconnectedness within which things appear, are developed, and
have effects”
● These effects arise thru relationships rather than being caused by a particular agent
● The concept of sociotechnical system draws our attn to the heterogeneity and abstracted
quality of those interconnections (heterogeneity - diff relationships and developments,
abstracted - different and seemingly removed)
TODAY
● Causality
○ Mechanistic perspectives
○ Soft-determinism
Take note of this: “In the real world, however, people often take positions on technology that mix
up these positions, which contributes to sloppy, unhelpful arguments. By carefully exploring the
four positions, it is possible to unmask such sloppy thinking (including our own) and work toward
conversations based on sound, critical thought.”
Causality
● Mechanistic perspectives: simple and symptomatic causality
● Soft determinism
● Non mechanistic perspectives: expressive causality, articulation and assemblage
● Mechanistic vs non mechanistic
○ How do we define the two?
■ Mechanistic suggests machine like quality, reliability of clockwork gears,
not much room for variation… very reliable but rigid
○ What would be an example of each?
○ What does each imply?
1. Mechanistic Causality
○ Simple or Symptomatic causality
○ 4 basic assumptions
■ Technologies are isolatable objects
■ Technologies are the cause of social change
■ Technologies are autonomous in origin and action
● As if they simply appear
● Created by individual inventor
● As if self-generating
■ Culture is made up of autonomous/individual elements
○ Donald and the wheel example:
■ Isolatable: seems like it just appears, exists on its own, gets developed
and refined to make the wheel better (progress), no sense that the wheel
gets adopted for any particular reasons, leads to other inventions
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Foregrounds the interconnectedness within which things appear, are developed, and have effects . These effects arise thru relationships rather than being caused by a particular agent. The concept of sociotechnical system draws our attn to the heterogeneity and abstracted quality of those interconnections (heterogeneity - diff relationships and developments, abstracted - different and seemingly removed) Take note of this: in the real world, however, people often take positions on technology that mix up these positions, which contributes to sloppy, unhelpful arguments. By carefully exploring the four positions, it is possible to unmask such sloppy thinking (including our own) and work toward conversations based on sound, critical thought. Non mechanistic perspectives: expressive causality, articulation and assemblage. Mechanistic suggests machine like quality, reliability of clockwork gears, not much room for variation very reliable but rigid. What does each imply: mechanistic causality. Technologies are the cause of social change. Technologies are autonomous in origin and action.
