Technology + Complexity = Sociotechnicality
Artifacts, things, devices, and services share common characteristics. For instance, all are created by humans to satisfy their desires and needs. What we call commonly technology encompasses only a short dimension of those creations. They aren´t limited to recent digital creations, or even to objects made by atoms.
Our concept of technology is quite recent. In ancient Greek, they use the word techne to refer artificial things, in particular to craft or art projects. But as Schatzberg¹ explores the evolution of this concept, who has been used by intellectuals and the elite to undermine the techniques of craftsmen. “Some argue that it represented a new appreciation for the moral status of crafts and craftsmen, while others insist that medieval scholars, with their otherworldly concerns, had no more appreciation for the crafts than their ancient predecessors had.” (p.29)
It was not until the 19th century that the idea of technology became part of the common language. as Schatzberg² argues “when now address attitudes toward technology before 1930, they are an analyst’s category not used by the historical actors themselves.” For this reason, the notion of technology is complicated, elusive and, sometimes frustrating. In the USA since 1930, the concept of technology has been used to refer to ideas as “useful arts, manufacturing, invention, applied science, and the machine”.³ In the last 20 years, this concept became a shorting reference of information and communication technologies (ICT) that are our computers, smartphones, tablets and current developments, complicating, even more, its meaning.
But none of the technology (or words) is isolated from its context of creation, production, distribution, and use. A difference to a linguist, the contextual understanding of technologies is even more recently for its researchers. Understand the connections and relations of technologies requiere more our lenses from specific material artifacts to a multidimensional lense which observe not only “a thing”, if not the people, energy, designs, values, histories, practices, optimizations, standard and properties, simultaneously. This is particularly messy⁴, but perhaps some stories can help us to visualize this approach.
In most families, women had a house management task (which has been redistributed in recent years) But despite this can be perceived as common, it is part of a technological revolution. Ruth Swartz Cowan is an American sociologist and historian who in 1976 published an article an unexpected transformation⁵. Based on the analysis of women magazines in the US of 1920s, she described the constitution of the household labor for mothers and wives, in particular, when it is related to appliances as refrigerators, laundry machines, and ovens. Basic household actions, as cooking, cleaning or caring are gendered shaped, and our technologies contribute to reinforces these assumptions or practices.
Swartz Cowan did not stop there. In her research went back until finding how colonial and moderns institutions reassert the housework from men to woman in western societies⁶. As I will illustrate constantly, technology is culture, and our devices are intertwined with our deepest values, practices, and assumptions.
Another American transformation was fundamental to sustain the popularization of the household artifacts as microwaves in a middle-class home. Several appliances are electric-powered, and requiere and stable and reliable source of power, as well as, fair cost, a safety installation and adequate regulation. Even in 2020, near to 1 billion people in the world is still without electric service in the world⁷. The electricity was also living a process of expansion as service in homes during the early 20th century.
Interconnect the US (or any country) to electricity is not a simple history. And even in 2020, barely bellow 1 billion people in the world are still without electric service in the world. Nevertheless, several historians, engineers, and journalists have been reporting, collecting and making sense of those histories. Among them, Thomas Hughes stands out with a rich language and crafted prose to describe the complexity of technological systems.
In Hughes´s book “Networks of Power”, a comparative case between Berlin, Chicago, and London, he made a detailed account of factors, situations, and decisions of system-builders. He observed how technologies are shaped regionally “Influences at the national level, such as legislation, affected evolving technological systems, but local geographical factors, both natural and man-made, were more direct and discernible determinants of the shape of the systems.” ⁸
In addition, Hughes's historical approach to electrification has a particular purpose for non-researchers. He said, “Consumers of technology can more effectively influence the output of technological systems if they, too, understand the functioning of systems and the nature of the critical decisions made by those who direct them”⁸. The system approach makes explicit the interactions and relations between different elements of the context. It allows us to embrace the complexity (and its emergent properties) in the exploration of users, software programs, consumers, money, designers, and machines which may become part of the same system. A system that is called a socio-technical system.
The concept of socio-technical systems is a crucial swift to think through technological issues. In the case of Hughes “the technological systems of the system builders, such as an electric light and power system, interconnect components so diverse as physical artifacts, mines, manufacturing firms, utility companies, academic research and development laboratories, and investment bank”⁹
As with household products and the electrical service, all our ideas of technologies are conveyed in different, connected and systemic layers of materials, meanings and interactions, between humans and non-humans beings, and even beyond them. Our experience in a technological world requires to be carefully described, observed and explored. I trust that collect and connect new ways to look (literally) things will allow you to increase the tools to create, understand and transform our current world which is continuously looking for solutions, alternatives, criminals, and hopes into the “technosphere”.
References ^
- Schatzberg, E. (2018). Technology: critical history of a concept. University of Chicago Press.
- Schatzberg, E. (2006). “ Technik” Comes to America: Changing Meanings of” Technology” before 1930. Technology and culture, 47(3), 486–512.
- Marx, L. (1997). “ Technology”: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Social Research, 965–988.
- Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge.
- Cowan, R. S. (1976). The ‘industrial revolution’ in the home: household technology and social change in the 20th century. Technology and Culture, 17(1), 1–23.
- Cowan, R. S. (1983). More work for mother: The ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave(Vol. 5131). New York: Basic Books.
- Ritche, H. (2019, January 18) Number of people without electricity falls below one billion. Our world in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/number-of-people-in-the-world-without-electricity-access-falls-below-one-billion
- Hughes, T. P. (1993). Networks of power: electrification in Western society, 1880–1930. JHU Press. p. ix-x
- Hughes, T. P. (1986). The seamless web: technology, science, etcetera, etcetera. Social studies of science, 16(2), 281–292.
