6.1 What is technology?

How much do you know?

Answer the following:

When social scientists talk about any system that uses knowledge and organization to produce objects for the attainment of specific goals they are referring to:

• Science
• Culture
• Technology
• Society

Expected learning outcomes

After completing the learning module participants will be able to recognize, identify and define technology.

What is technology?

The term technology is often used to refer to tools, machines and equipment, including computers and like devices. Sociologists, however, use a broader definition that includes social relationships dictated by the technical organization and mechanization of activities, for example, the technical organization of work (Oxford Dictionary of Sociology 2005).

Technology is often defined as tools, machines, equipment, and devices that aid humans in numerous activities, especially work. But for students of technology, including sociologists, historians and philosophers, technology is more than just a collection of apparatuses. For them, defining technology as gadgets, devices and machines is rather tendentious.

For Andrew Feenberg (1995: 8), for instance, technology “cannot longer be considered as a collection of devices, or more generally, as the sum of rational means. These are biased definitions that make technology appear more functional and less social than in fact it is.” From his perspective technology cannot be reduced to material artifacts nor can it be defined merely in terms of its functionality or its rationality. Furthermore, technology is inherently social; it is social all the way down. The social and the cultural are deeply enmeshed in scientific and technological practices and as a result on technologies themselves. Put differently, technology is determined in its meaning and normative content, not by technical rationality alone, but by the socio-cultural world in which it is embedded and which is entrenched in the technology itself.

Wiebe E. Bijker (1992: 75) also discards traditional accounts and definitions of technology:

Technology is assumed to be designed, developed, and produced by engineers. They are at the drawing boards and behind the laboratory benches; they apply for patents, model the prototype, and test in the pilot plant; they show the newly born artifact to the press and, if lucky, they figure prominently in the glossy photographs of stories about heroic inventors. Once these engineers have produced the technology, it is passed on to the sales people, the managers, the trade, and, finally, to the users. Engineers design technology, managers produce it, salespeople sell it, trades people distribute it, users use it. Alas, this neat and orderly image of technical development, so pervasive in all but the most recent technology studies, is not only too simple--it is wrong.

Also stressing the social origins and character of technology Bijker and Law (1992: 11) state that:

Technology does not spring, ab initio , from some disinterested fount of innovation. Rather it is born of the social, the economic and the technical relations that are already in place. A product of the existing structure of opportunities and constraints, it extends, shapes, reworks, or reproduces that structure in ways that are more or less unpredictable. And, in so doing, it distributes, or redistributes, opportunities and constraints equally or unequally, fairly or unfairly.