The document outlines 4 major theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between technology and society: 1. Technological determinism views technologies as autonomous agents that determine social change with little human influence. 2. The social construction of technology sees humans as the primary agents who develop technologies based on social needs and influences. 3. Social shaping recognizes that influence flows both ways with technologies and society mutually shaping each other. 4. Domestication describes how technologies become ordinary integrated parts of daily life over time, losing their power to provoke questions about social change.

1. 4 Major Theoretical Frameworks
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM:
– strong tendency to view TECHNOLOGIES as CAUSAL AGENTS
– entering societies independent of social contexts and then affecting
them; humans have little power to resist
– especially the case with new technologies
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGY:
– HUMANS are the CAUSAL AGENTS
– we are the primary sources of change in both technology and society
SOCIAL SHAPING:
– influence flows in both directions (BI-DIRECTIONAL CAUSALITY)
– humans influence technological development; technologies influence
humans and societal development
DOMESTICATION:
– technologies NO LONGER agents of change
– historical perspective; humans stop questioning individual
technologies as they become taken-for-granted parts of everyday life

2. • “As the similarities amongst Socrates, Carr’s
and Alloways’s articulation of new media’s
affect on wisdom suggest, deterministic
rhetoric’s tend to be formulaic and hyperbolic.
Predictable negatives stories are met with
predictable positive alternatives in a familiar
contradictory binary” (27).

4. Baym’s Sexual Assault Comments
• public understanding of the internet: sexual
crimes reaching new heights
• “When adult men and under-age girls do meet
through the internet for sexual encounters, it
is usually consensual and honest, if morally
dubious.” (pp 42).

5. • “end users”: “those individuals and groups who are
affected downstream by products of technological
innovation” (Casper and Clarke 1998, as quoted in
Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003:6)
• “lay end users”: “highlight some end users’ relative
exclusion from expert discourse” (Oudshoorn and Pinch
2003:6)
• “implicated actors”: “those silent or not present but
affected by the action” (Clarket 1998:267, as quoted in
Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003:6)

6. Cyborg

7. Codes: the sweater
informal style
comfortable
of dress
long walk in made of wool
the woods
warm clothing
winter is coming
a cold day keeping warm
meaning system of values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions

9. Judy Wajcman