Myth, Advertising, Future, FOSS, HCI, SEO

In their article ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and Technology Might Benefit Each Other’, Pinch and Bijker highlight the problematic nature of the description of the Science-Technology relationship, especially those descriptions which are a priori.

They denigrate the common statement that science is about the ‘discovery of the truth’ and that technology is about the ‘application of the truth’, stating that the literature on the philosophy of technology is ‘rather disappointing’. They say that even when claims of interdependence have been posited, the interdependence has been ‘difficult to specify’. In Pinch and Bijker’s opinion, a sociological conception of the creation of science and technology would enable a clearer view of their interdependency.

The reason I bring this up is because of Frank Webster’s chapter, ‘The Information Society Revisited’, from the Handbook of New Media. I really liked this text, loved the desire for clarity.

Webster outlines five measures by which some have claimed to distinguish the ‘information society’, and then a sixth way. The five: ‘technological innovation and diffusion’, ‘occupational change’, ‘economic value’, ‘information flows’, and ‘the expansion of symbols and signs’. All of these ways, Webster says, ‘rely on quantitative assessments of a particular phenomenon to argue that its expansion has brought about a qualitatively different form of social organization.’ The sixth way, ‘theory as fulcrum’, ‘refers to changes in the ways in which life is now conducted because of information’, and is therefore not a quantitative measure and can then perhaps impact ‘qualitatively different forms of social organization’.

‘Bluntly, quantitative measures – simply more information – cannot of themselves identify a break with previous systems, while it is at least theoretically possible to regard small but decisive qualitative changes as marking a system break.’

Webster nearly ends with a challenge to those who blithely throw around the term ‘information’ and ‘theory’. Why should all the hard work of de Saussure, Chomsky, Barthes, Foucault, et al, et al, be ignored, he implies? Do we know what we mean by the two words? Shouldn’t we take seriously various intelligent criticisms of language and symbols made through the centuries, and quite vehemently in this past century? Aren’t these important political and sociological issues?

But then he doesn’t end with this challenge. For some reason, this ‘sixth way’ allows us to dispense with the need to ‘reflect on the meanings of the information so developed’. I am unclear as to why this is so. Moving on.

This here is why I mentioned Pinch and Bijker in the first place. This ‘sixth way’, where ‘theory’ is the fulcrum for organized community action, individual self-analysis, all sorts of things. Theories, in this century at least, are models, models of how the world might work, or ‘look’. It is certainly along the line of what one might call Science. And it is these theories that are now informing more and more of our decisions, and our technologies. If something about the relationship of Science and Technology is changing, if the movement is becoming more one-way (S–>T) or something, and if Science and Technology are sociological constructs, then something is qualitatively changing.

But then Webster asks the (‘key’) question that he claims Gidden’s begs– “What do commentators mean by theoretical knowledge?” And is this not similar to the question that Pinch and Bijker pose– ‘How do we begin to analyse the interdependence of science and technology?’?

I’m still a bit unclear as to what I’ve said, and it’s kind of late in the pm for my critical functions. But it seems to me like these two questions have a clear relationship, and that the problem is key. If you’ve read the pieces, do you think so? I’ve merely made a connection, not really analyzed the connection. Anybody?

And just because it’s late: