Theories of technology

Social theories

Descriptive approaches

• Social construction of technology – argues that technology does not determine human action, but that human action shapes technology. Key concepts include:
• *interpretive flexibility: "Technological artifacts are culturally constructed and interpreted... By this, we mean not only is there flexibility in how people think of or interpret artifacts but also there is flexibility in how artifacts are designed." Also, these technological artifacts determine and shape what that specific technology tool will symbolize and represent in society or in a culture. This is in relation to the SCOT theory because it shows how humans symbolize technology, by shaping it.
• * Relevant social group: shares a particular set of meanings about an artifact
• * Closure and stabilization: when the relevant social group has reached a consensus
• * Wider context: "the sociocultural and political situation of a social group shapes its norms and values, which in turn influence the meaning given to an artifact"
• Actor-network theory – posits a heterogeneous network of humans and non-humans as equal interrelated actors. It strives for impartiality in the description of human and nonhuman actors and the reintegration of the natural and social worlds. For example, Latour argues that instead of worrying whether we are anthropomorphizing technology, we should embrace it as inherently anthropomorphic: technology is made by humans, substitutes for the actions of humans, and shapes human action. What is important is the chain and gradients of actors' actions and competencies, and the degree to which we choose to have figurative representations. Key concepts include the inscription of beliefs, practices, relations into technology, which is then said to embody them. Key authors include Latour and Callon.
• Structuration theory – defines structures as rules and resources organized as properties of social systems. The theory employs a recursive notion of actions constrained and enabled by structures which are produced and reproduced by that action. Consequently, in this theory technology is not rendered as an artifact, but instead examines how people, as they interact with technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Key authors include DeSanctis and Poole, and Orlikowski.
• Systems theory – considers the historical development of technology and media with an emphasis on inertia and heterogeneity, stressing the connections between the artifact being built and the social, economic, political and cultural factors surrounding it. Key concepts include reverse salients when elements of a system lag in development with respect to others, differentiation, , and Key authors include Thomas P. Hughes and Luhmann.
• Activity theory - considers an entire work/activity system beyond just one actor or user. It accounts for the environment, history of the person, culture, role of the artifact, motivations, and complexity of real-life activity. One of the strengths of AT is that it bridges the gap between the individual subject and the social reality—it studies both through the mediating activity. The unit of analysis in AT is the concept of object-oriented, collective and culturally mediated human activity, or activity system.

  Critical approaches

• Values in Design - asks how do we ensure a place for values as criteria by which we judge the quality and acceptability of information systems and new media. How do values such as privacy, autonomy, democracy, and social justice become integral to conception, design, and development, not merely retrofitted after completion? Key thinkers include Helen Nissenbaum.

  Group Theories

• Social presence theory is a seminal theory of the social effects of communication technology. Its main concern is with telephony and telephone conferencing. It argues that the social impact of a communication medium depend on the social presence it allows communicators to have. Social presence is defined as a property of the medium itself: the degree of acoustic, visual, and physical contact that it allows. The theory assumes that more contact will increase the key components of "presence": greater intimacy, immediacy, warmth and inter-personal rapport. As a consequence of social presence, social influence is expected to increase. In the case of communication technology, the assumption is that more text-based forms of interaction are less social, and therefore less conducive to social influence.
• Media richness theory shares some characteristics with social presence theory. It posits that the amount of information communicated differs with respect to a medium's richness. The theory assumes that resolving ambiguity and reducing uncertainty are the main goals of communication. Because communication media differ in the rate of understanding they can achieve in a specific time, they are not all capable of resolving uncertainty and ambiguity well. The more restricted the medium's capacity, the less uncertainty and equivocality it is able to manage. It follows that the richness of the media should be matched to the task so as to prevent over simplification or complication.
• Media naturalness theory builds on human evolution ideas and has been proposed as an alternative to media richness theory. Media naturalness theory argues that since our Stone Age hominid ancestors have communicated primarily face-to-face, evolutionary pressures have led to the development of a brain that is consequently designed for that form of communication. Other forms of communication are too recent and unlikely to have posed evolutionary pressures that could have shaped our brain in their direction. Using communication media that suppress key elements found in face-to-face communication, as many electronic communication media do, thus ends up posing cognitive obstacles to communication. This is particularly the case in the context of complex tasks, because such tasks seem to require more intense communication over extended periods of time than simple tasks.
• Media synchronicity theory redirects richness theory towards the synchronicity of the communication.
• The social identity model of deindividuation effects was developed as a response to the idea that anonymity and reduced presence made communication technology socially impoverished. It provided an alternative explanation for these "deindividuation effects" based on theories of social identity. The SIDE model distinguishes cognitive and strategic effects of a communication technology. Cognitive effects occur when communication technologies make "salient" particular aspects of personal or social identity. For example, certain technologies such as email may disguise characteristics of the sender that individually differentiate them and as a result more attention may be given to their social identity. The strategic effects are due to the possibilities, afforded by communication technology, to selectively communicate or enact particular aspects of identity, and disguise others. SIDE therefore sees the social and the technological as mutually determining, and the behavior associated with particular communication forms as the product or interaction of the two.
• Time, interaction, and performance theory describes work groups as time-based, multi-modal, and multi-functional social systems. Groups interact in one of the modes of inception, problem solving, conflict resolution, and execution. The three functions of a group are production, support and well-being.

  Other Stances

Analytic theories

1. Technological imperative: focuses on organizational characteristics which can be measured and permits some level of contingency
2. Strategic choice: focuses on how technology is influenced by the context and strategies of decision-makers and users
3. Technology as a trigger of structural change: views technology as a social object

1. Decision-making: the view of engineers associated with positivist, rational, systems rationalization, and deterministic approaches
2. Institutional school: technology is an opportunity for change, focuses on social evolution, social construction of meaning, interaction and historical processes, interpretive flexibility, and an interplay between technology and power
3. An integrated perspective : soft-line determinism, with joint social and technological optimization, structural symbolic interaction theory

1. Normative: an autonomous approach where technology is an important influence on history only where societies attached cultural and political meaning to it
2. Nomological: a naturalistic approach wherein an inevitable technological order arises based on laws of nature.
3. Unintended consequences: a fuzzy approach that is demonstrative that technology is contingent

   Citations