Early inquiry into technologies and technological change within the social sciences has predominantly been concerned with the degree to which technologies influence our behaviour and whether they do so positively or negatively (Lister et al., 2009). Early debates were characterised by disagreement between those who were extremely optimistic about the emancipatory capacities of new technologies, and those who were more anxious about the influence of technology (Murphie and Potts, 2003). Whilst mobile phone research emerged well after most of these debates, it is useful to briefly examine some of its key aspects, as these significantly influenced later scholarship, in particular, those theories that attempted to avoid the essentialism of earlier approaches (Ling, 2004). Crudely speaking, early debates about the role of technology in sociology fall between technological determinist perspectives and social constructivist perspectives, though, as I will suggest, truly technological determinist perspectives are rare (Grint and Woolgar, 1997). I will spend some time discussing these perspectives to demonstrate the dominance of what could be considered a false problematisation, in which the attempt to attribute causality to either the technological object or human sociality has prevented an analysis of the in-between: of those forces prior to the individuation of subject and object that condition the genesis of these structures. Technologically determinist theories consider technology to be the key agent of social change and attribute such changes to the determining material qualities, and structuring, of a given technological system (Murphie and Potts, 2003). A Marxist conceptualisation of technology, notably, the determining relationship Karl Marx
posited between industrial technologies and social relations, has characteristically determinist elements (Winner, 1980). Marx’s (2000, pp. 219–220) statements on the relationship between changing modes of production and changing social relations clearly locate technologies as central agents of change:
In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
However, some scholars insist that Marx’s understanding of technology should not be misconstrued as determinist, especially as it relates to his understanding of the forces of production, which involved, but were not limited to, industrial technologies (Bimber, 1990; MacKenzie, 1984). Steve Matthewman (2011) argues that Marx located the source of the problems of industrial technologies firmly with the social, political and economic system of capitalism, not in the capacities of technologies themselves, and that in this sense he departs significantly from determinist logic.
More recently, Lewis Mumford’s (1974) at least partly determinist analysis of technologies of mass production and automation suggests that processes of mechanization and automation arising from technological changes have inevitable social consequences. Mumford (1974, p. 186) criticises the naive acceptance of technological change as ‘progress’, arguing that now ‘society meekly submits to every new technological demand and utilizes without question every new product, whether it is an actual improvement or not’. Mumford urges for a consideration of alternative modes of technological development, seeing the implications of the current trajectory as unavoidable (Murphie and Potts, 2003).
Considered perhaps the most determinist of modern theorists of technology, media scholar Marshall McLuhan traces the rise of mass media forms such as television and radio, which he sees as representing a shift away from print technologies and from linearity and rationality more generally (Murphie and Potts, 2003). As indicated by his well-known phrase, ‘the medium is the message’, McLuhan (2001) argues that focus
should be directed not to the meanings or content expressed through technologies, but rather to the material thing itself. The content, McLuhan (2001, p. 19) maintains:
is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content”.
McLuhan (2001, p. 8) argues that each new technology or medium offers a novel extension of human capacities but this induces a ‘change of scale or pace or pattern’ in human life. In a somewhat similar vein, Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality emphasised the determining influence of technologies of reproduction with respect to cultural life. Famously, Baudrillard (1988) suggests that we now live in a world of simulacra, which become indistinguishable from, and ultimately replace, the real. Differences aside, both McLuhan and Baudrillard afford technological change a central role in the key shifts in the social world that they identify and hold to varying degrees of determinism in suggesting that it is the qualities of new technologies that give rise to novel social arrangements.
In response to technologically determinist arguments, an approach to technology which could be broadly understood as social constructivist (sometimes called the ‘social shaping’ approach) emerged from the 1970s onwards. This approach critiqued the causal role afforded to technology and the simplistic understanding of social change it implied, arguing that technology should be seen as constituted by the social conditions in which it is embedded (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999). As Wiebe Bijker (1997, p. 3) explains, the primary point for social constructivists is that technology and society are both constructed and neither exist prior to this process of co-constitution; technologies are shaped by engineers, designers, marketers and consumers (Bijker, 1997). Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar (1997) argue that constructivists sought to bring the same interpretative approach that sociology had applied to gender, class, ethnicity and power to technology, which had previously been treated as curiously beyond social analysis. Technologies, from this perspective, have no inherent properties, and indeed could operate differently, since their expression comes from their context, not their qualities. As Bijker and John Law (1994, p. 3) put it we ‘get the technologies we deserve.’ This kind
of analysis seeks to question the underlying social conditions that give rise to specific kinds of technologies, with an eye to creating the conditions in which different technological arrangements could flourish (Bijker and Law, 1994).
Social constructivist scholars characteristically emphasise that their approach goes beyond merely arguing that technologies are socially moulded, seeking rather to grasp the complex and interconnected social factors that shape technological innovation (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999; Williams and Edge, 1996). Though scholars who adopt this view are heterogeneous, in their influential edited collection Bijker and Law (1994, pp. 8–10) suggest that they share several significant assumptions: that technology is contingent on social change, which involves conflicts and resistance rather than unified ‘progress’; that these conflicts are managed through strategies by those involved in the dispute; that these technologies stabilise only if the heterogeneous relations they must necessarily form a part of also stabilise; and finally that all these arrangements must be treated as emergent, rather than pre-existing. Bijker and Law’s (1994, p. 8) ‘social shaping’ perspective argues that ‘[t]echnologies do not have a momentum of their own’. Whilst technological determinist accounts had stressed the qualities of technologies as primary in shaping associated social formations, social constructivists contend that technologies have no inherent qualities or constraints that do not originate from a human context, such that technologies and their relationships with humans cannot be explained by reference to any qualities pre-existing social interaction (Grint and Woolgar, 1997).
Despite these shared assumptions, there is significant disagreement within social constructivist approaches about the extent to which the material capacities of specific technologies should be considered, and this disagreement has shaped later theories that have attempted to reconcile not only technological determinism and social constructivism but also these constructivist disputes over the causal power of the material (Hutchby, 2001). Grint and Woolgar (1997) support a constructivist understanding of technology that refutes the notion of pre-given properties particular to technological forms, insisting that these are all socially situated. They are critical of Langdon Winner’s (1980) claim that technologies can have political qualities in their specific designs or in the systems they could encourage, asserting that these qualities
belong not to the technology itself but to the social circumstances of its production (Grint and Woolgar, 1997). Grint and Woolgar (1997) argue that ‘social shaping’ focused accounts like Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman’s (1999) and Bijker and Law’s (1994) continue to attribute significance to material attributes of technologies themselves. What is common to both determinist theories of technology and social constructivist accounts is an effort to determine where the boundaries of the social are. Technological determinist accounts have placed technology outside of the social as a cause of social arrangements not an effect of them, by focusing on the material qualities of the technology as determining its use. Social constructivist scholars have located technology
within the bounds of the social by arguing that technology is constituted by social forces, rather than being the cause of these forces. Constructivists contend that the material qualities of the technology are not objective or determining but rather socially constructed through shared meaning and interpretation. Social constructivists have been critical of determinist approaches for putting technology in a ‘black box’ that is not open to sociological analysis, neglecting the role of the social in the development of new technologies and the interpretation of their capacities (Grint and Woolgar, 1997). For others, however, social constructivist accounts run the risk of neglecting the material differences between technologies, their different qualities and what these properties facilitate (Hutchby, 2001). While the terms of these debates have focused on whether the material qualities of technologies are determining or socially constructed, both sides of the debate are attempting to discern what constitutes the realm of the social and what is not subject to social forces. For determinists, the social is shaped by the material properties and conditions of technology. On the other hand, constructionists have argued that there is nothing that operates external to the social world, understood as constructed through the production of shared meaning generated through interaction between social actors (Harris, 2008).