I’ve spent bits of today in the library trying to sort out my essay on wind power, and intermittently nudging a Wikipedia article into some form of neutral and unbiased form (which may or may not be successful, yet). Then I come home, and to my joy/horror, I find an article in the great Wikipedia debate that invokes the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), a favourite theory of the technology studies community and the one I’m using in the essay, thus combining the two together.

SCOT is an interesting theory and deserves some thought: using the example of the bicycle in Victorian times, the sociologists of technology Bijker, Hughes & Pinch cite it as an artefact given different meanings by different groups (e.g. young men, women, the elderly). These groups have different problems (want to be boy racers, want to maintain dignity, want a safe vehicle, respectively). There are a variety of solutions for each problem, and indeed a variety of problems for each group - they choose which ones to prioritise and solve. The same technological artefact can be interpreted as a solution to more than one problem - different groups interpret a technology in different ways; boy racers liked air tyres as it allowed them to cycle faster, the elderly as it made the ride more comfortable, women as it stopped people being able to look at their knickers.

Through negotiation the groups come to a common, stable agreement about how that technology should solve their problems - either by redesigning or reinterpreting that technology so that it solves their problem, or by changing the problem, or by changing other artefacts (both social and technical) so the problem no longer matters.

The point is that none of this is predetermined or linear, or even really progressive. The penny farthing, though crazy-looking to us, wasn’t an aberration or deviation of design that was quickly outmoded - though it often looks like that to us. At the time it was designated the “ordinary Bicycle” and competed alongside the “safety bicycle” (which is what we today simply refer to as the “bicycle”) for a number of years, before falling by the wayside, for various reasons. “Progress” only got attached as a label afterwards.

Thus, the very idea of a natural ‘path’ or journey to follow into the future isn’t quite right, as we are not following some journey plan determined by the technology we use. Even the idea of the ‘goal’ isn’t right either, as there are many goals and they get continually redefined and reprioritised; we may not be able to see the goals all the time. If we walk, we are ‘walking’ in an unmeasurable space towards a continually moving target(s). Only when we look behind us do we see a path, and ‘progress’.

Right, that’s SCOT (summed very badly by a fatigued me, feel free to call it, or rather my interpretation of it bollocks). I do have objections to SCOT - closure may not always happen upon a particular technology - groups can agree to disagree, and we can get rival technologies co-existing quite happily. If closure does happen, it is rarely the decision of equals; the role of power is great understated by the authors of the original text; and power has many subtleties.

My work on wind turbines is ripe for this idea of multiple interpretations and dialogues between different groups of different power. There’s plenty of fun to be had analysing the seeming irreconciabilities between how the technology is viewed : a market-oriented investment opportunity (for the DTI), the state’s means of enforcing legal obligations it’s bound to (for Defra), the saviour of the world (for the Greens) or the end of the world as you know it (for local residents). Somehow ‘agreement’ has been reached, so who has the (political) power - the environmentalists, the government or big business? All I know is that it’s not the residents…

As for Wikipedia, it prides itself on not only being a encyclopaedia technology but also a community in itself - which starts to raise interesting questions - what happens when the technology and the community start to mesh? The bicycle in the Victorian era (and the wind turbine of the contemporary era) is a nice neat object of study, as it can be seen as a ‘boundary object’, something attached to but not an intrinsic part of any social group. When the technology and the community start to become enmeshed, then SCOT might start to fall apart - renegotiating interpretations of the technology with others becomes very difficult when your community is inseparable from it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 00:02:15 and is filed under General.