INFO 202 Chap.1 Social Informatics and Theories of Technology
Social Informatics and Theories of Technology
What the first week is really teaching
The opening lecture borrows a line from statistics: all models are wrong, but some are useful. A model of an orbit, a supply and demand diagram and a regression line each leave out most of reality, yet each organizes information for a purpose and reveals a pattern that would otherwise be missed. The same holds for theories about technology and society.
The lecture states plainly that two conflicting theories can both be right, and that what decides between them is the set of assumptions and conditions attached. That is the habit this chapter trains: name a position, state when it holds, then apply it.
Technological determinism and its two parts
Wyatt defines technological determinism in two parts.
The first is that technology develops autonomously, following an internal technical logic independent of social, economic and political forces. The second, which she treats as the more crucial, is that technological change causes social change.
She explains why the idea feels like common sense, since eras and nations are routinely named after their machines, and why it is dangerous: if technology simply unfolds, nobody is responsible for choosing it, and technological progress is quietly equated with social progress.
Her most useful contribution for revision is a sorting of four types by who uses them: justificatory, descriptive, methodological and normative.
Social constructivism and symmetry
Constructivism answers from the other side. A soft version holds that social context matters to science and technology; a hard version holds that their content is itself socially constructed.
Technology and society are treated as one sociotechnical ensemble whose parts constitute each other, and the question moves from why a technology won to how it came to be. The principle of symmetry drives the approach: successful and failed machines are explained in the same social terms, because working is an outcome of acceptance rather than its cause.
Bijker, quoted in the lecture, concedes that analysing impact also needs concepts for how hard and obdurate technology becomes once built, which is where Hughes' idea of technological momentum fits.
Social informatics as a working field
Kling, Rosenbaum and Sawyer define social informatics as an interdisciplinary field that examines how information and communication technologies are designed and used and what they lead to, always read against the institutions and cultures around them.
It is organized by problems rather than by one theory or method, and it has three orientations: analytical work that explains why systems succeed or fail, normative work that recommends how they should be designed and implemented, and critical work that questions whose goals a system serves.
Its signature finding is that the same technology produces contradictory outcomes in different settings, and that organizational IT rarely fails for purely technical reasons.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why the course treats every theory as a useful but incomplete model
- 02
The two parts of technological determinism and which one matters more
- 03
Wyatt's four types: justificatory, descriptive, methodological, normative
- 04
Hard and soft determinism on the Smith and Marx spectrum
- 05
Soft and hard social constructivism and the sociotechnical ensemble
- 06
The principle of symmetry, from Bloor to Pinch and Bijker
- 07
Obduracy and Hughes' technological momentum
- 08
Social informatics: definition, characteristics and three orientations
- 09
Contradictory outcomes and socio-technical failure
Worked example · free
Explain one outcome through determinism and through social informatics
- 2Give the determinist reading and name the part of determinism it relies on.
- 2Explain the drift in use analytically, through the incentives of the office that configured the system.
- 2Add one normative recommendation and one critical question about whose goals the system serves.
Key terms
- Technological Determinism
- The view that technology develops by its own technical logic and that technological change drives social change. Wyatt treats these as two jointly necessary parts.
- Social Constructivism
- The position that science and technology are shaped by social and political processes; the soft form stresses context, the hard form treats the content itself as constructed.
- Sociotechnical Ensemble
- A unit of analysis that treats technology and society as one mutually constituting whole, instead of two separate forces acting on each other.
- Principle of Symmetry
- A methodological rule requiring that successful and failed beliefs or machines be explained in the same social terms, so success is never its own explanation.
- Technological Momentum
- Hughes' idea that a large technical system is shaped by society while it emerges and increasingly shapes society as it grows.
- Soft Determinism
- A position placing technology inside a wider social, economic, political and cultural matrix. Wyatt considers it too vague to count as determinism.
- Social Informatics
- An interdisciplinary, problem-driven field that studies how information technologies are designed, used and felt, always within their institutional and cultural settings.
- Obduracy
- The hardness of an established technology, meaning its resistance to reinterpretation once built, which constructivist accounts of design can overlook.
Social Informatics and Theories of Technology FAQ
What is the difference between technological determinism and social constructivism?
Determinism places the driving force in technology: it develops by its own logic and then reshapes society. Constructivism places it in people and institutions, treating technology and society as one ensemble whose parts shape each other, and it asks how a technology came to be rather than why it won. The course expects you to state the conditions under which each account is useful.
What are Wyatt's four types of technological determinism?
Justificatory determinism is used by actors such as managers to make decisions look inevitable. Descriptive determinism is identified by analysts in other people's claims. Methodological determinism uses machines as a starting point for studying a society. Normative determinism warns that systems have grown beyond political control. Sorting by speaker is the point of the typology.
What are the three orientations of social informatics?
Analytical work explains why an information system succeeds or fails in a particular context. Normative work recommends how systems should be designed, configured and implemented, for example by involving users. Critical work questions the goals of those who commission systems, often from the viewpoint of people with less power. One study can combine all three.
Exam move
Make a one-page map with determinism at one end and constructivism at the other, and place each named author on it with a single sentence of their claim. Then take a technology you used this week and write three short sentences about it, one per social informatics orientation. If you cannot write the critical sentence, you have not yet asked whose goals the system serves.
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