Technology as Sociomaterial Practice
What role, then, does technology play in shaping people’s experience of time? Does technological acceleration necessarily hasten the pace of our everyday lives? To answer these questions, let us look more generally at how the relationship between technology and society has been conceived.
The most influential commonsense assumption about the relationship between technology and society is “technological determinism.” Few would explicitly subscribe to this theory, but, as I have indicated, it is pervasive. It has several versions, but in its strongest version, it is the claim that technological innovation is the most important cause of change in society. Key here is the idea that technology impinges on society from the outside, that technical change is autonomous and itself causes social change. That technology is not part of society but a separate, external sphere, so to speak.
By contrast, the founding principle of science and technology studies is that all technologies are inherently social in that they are designed, produced, used and governed by people. Perhaps it is worth saying at the outset that our objection to technological determinism was and is political as well as intellectual. Many of us who got involved in the development of this field in the 1980s had a simple polemical purpose, to shake the stranglehold that a naïve determinism had on the dominant understanding of the intertwining of society and technology. We were concerned that this view of technology, as an external force exerting an influence on society, narrows the possibilities for democratic engagement. It presents a limited set of options: uncritical embracing of technological change, defensive adaptation to it, or simple rejection of it. Against this, STS had its origins in a belief that the content and direction of technological innovation are amenable to sociological analysis and explanation, and to political intervention.
Hig h-Speed Society
27