Donald MacKenzie & Judy Wajcman's Social Shaping of Technology (ft. Judy Wajcman)

Here at the Sociology of Everything podcast, we acknowledge the people of Ghana Yarta, whose land this episode was mainly produced on and whose past and present elders repair respects to. Hi, I'm Eric Sue. And I'm Louis Efras. And we're Lou and the Sue, and this is the Sociology of Everything podcast, the podcast that's recently celebrated a quarter of a million downloads. Louis, huge, right? Yeah. And we didn't like celebrate it like we didn't throw a pizza party or anything. No, no, no. But it was a nice feeling. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you messaged me and I think I smiled and thought, yeah, I hope it's not just like, I don't know. We haven't paid like a... Yeah, not Russian bots. Russian bots. Have they been confirmed? These human downloads? Presumably. Yeah, presumably. And we don't just have like, you know, 20 fans who have downloaded it, tens of thousands of times. I take it, Louis. I take it. Yeah. Like independent ID addresses, that's what I want to know. Well, whoever's listening, thank you very much. Thanks also for the listeners that have written in. We are really excited about today's episode. Yeah. And that episode is on the social shaping of technology. This work was an anthology originally co-edited by Donald McKenzie and Judy Wiseman. It was published in 1985. And then it was updated in 1999. It contains an introductory essay that's become a really influential piece in the field of science and technology studies. And I guess the reason why we've chosen to do an episode on this work is because even though we've looked at technology in some of our other episodes, we haven't actually addressed this topic head on. Yeah, we've nibbled around the edges of kind of sociological understandings of technology. And as this piece will argue, technology is such an important part of society that it's almost impossible to examine any sociological subject without technology being relevant in some fashion. But we haven't really addressed head on sociological theories of technology. Yeah. So why do we need to consider? Why do we need to theorize? Why do we need to take seriously the impact of technology on our lives when we're doing social analysis that is answered in this very piece? So the piece begins by exploring commonplace understandings, commonplace framings of technology in society. Perhaps the most dominant understanding of technology is that it is an autonomous force that invariably leads to certain social consequences when it is introduced into various social contexts. And that is captured in the term technological determinism. So the piece really starts there. What is technological determinism? For me, in more kind of simple terms, it's really the notion that technology has a kind of cause and effect relationship with society. Technology is this autonomous force, and it creates and causes social change. And the entire pieces are really a critique and a response to that idea, which is so commonplace in just general everyday discussions and understandings of technology. When you look at any news article and it'll be like, chat, GBT is going to do this. It's going to replace this many jobs and it's going to create these issues and problems or these solutions, depending on who you're talking to. Look at the discourse around smartphones. Because smartphones are in our lives, we become more distracted. We become less able to hold conversations with people on a train, public settings, everyone's on their phones. We blame the technology. And all of those things are likely true. But it's not the smartphone itself as this atomized thing that's making those changes happen. It's a whole bunch of different social and technical stuff, which is what this piece talks about. It's a really sophisticated way of understanding the relationship between technology and society, because it's not trying to say that technologies don't actually matter. In fact, they matter a great deal. It's that when we focus on how technologies are shaped, it then gets us to understand how human beings bring values and practices into these technologies. We're not simply powerless. We don't just simply submit to the will of technologies. We shape them in some very significant ways. Yeah. And in fact, I think that's a really good point because at the start of this piece, it sort of sets up two critiques of technological determinism, and one's a descriptive critique. It's just not accurate to say technology is this individual thing that has a cause and effect relationship with historical change. That's a great quote. As a simple cause and effect theory of historical change, technological determinism is at best an oversimplification. Changing technology will always be only one factor, amongst many others, political, economic, cultural, and so on. So at its best, it just oversimplifies social change. But what you just said then is really interesting, and it's something I was reminded of when I was rereading this piece. It's also a critique of the kind of prescriptive way that we deal with technological determinism, because the authors say that if we agree with this technological determinism way of seeing the world, then we lose our ability to intervene. We lose our ability to try and shape what technology does. You just submit to the technology, and then that's it. That's right. Yeah. So in some respects then, it's trying to understand how technologies are shaped by human beings, but also how human beings are shaped by technology. So you might even think of this approach as involving an awareness that technologies and societies are mutually shaping of one another. So then the task then becomes, how do we develop a more sophisticated, a more complex, a more multifaceted understanding of the relationship between technology and society? So this then leads Mackenzie and Wiseman to ask a series of questions. One of those questions is, to what extent does science shape technology? What are they trying to get at there? Well, they make the point that the notion, and this is a quote actually, that scientists discover facts about reality and technologists apply these facts to produce useful things is a key part of the dominant narrative of technological determinism. And they really call about critiquing this for a number of reasons. And the first of which is that the notion of discovery that scientists just in an objective and neutral fashion uncover some discovery that's waiting to be found out there. It's like, you know, they're not, you know, archaeologists digging up and look, I found the wheel. It was just hidden under the rock here. You won't guess what I just found. It's an iPod. Exactly, exactly. So that's just not the case. Scientists have their own position in society, they have their own interests, they're influenced by these things. So it's not a neutral objective activity or pursuit. Yeah. And another thing they say is technological invention hasn't always been driven by science. Yeah, that we can't always pause at a universal link between science and technology. Louis, you and I have had the opportunity to travel to different parts of the world. Some of them have been around for hundreds of years. There are technologies in all of those places, right? Like when we traveled to places in Japan, it's amazing, like joinery. Did they study this scientifically? Not necessarily, but those technologies still exist. Yeah, could be everyday practices and trial and error and just, I mean, I suppose we're starting to describe science here, but we'll leave that to the side. Another really interesting point they make in this section is that it's not a one-way linear relationship because sure, science might lead to technologies being developed, but technologies also shape science. So something like the microscope or the telescope or the computer or the computer. These things, I wanted to keep everything to scopes, but that's okay. You went computer. The computer scope. I don't know if that's a thing. It's not. Probably is. Sorry for all you out there who are fans of the computer scope. But these things obviously have been hugely influential in what science can do and how science functions as a result. I think the term they use, it's the resource that scientists can use, but it also shapes science itself. Exactly. So if it's not simply then science shaping technology in a very crude linear way, could it just be that technology shapes itself? Could it be that technological change follows an autonomous logic? Well, they don't think it does follow an autonomous logic because a new technology isn't created into a vacuum. It's created into a context which significantly includes existing technologies. You can contrast this with the myth of the heroic inventor. We think about how technologies come to be. We think about someone like Steve Jobs saying, "I've invented the iPhone." Like you will be able to do this thing that I've just conjured up. Or you might think of, I don't know, like Thomas Edison and electricity and stuff. So the idea of the heroic inventor divorces technologies from their social context and from other technologies. So when it comes to technological development, they think we should think about how it builds off of existing technologies. Yeah. In fact, they state here, and I think it's a nice way of putting it, that invention is not a matter of a sudden flash of inspiration from which a new device emerges ready made. Largely, it is a matter of the minute and painstaking modification of existing technology. And it's interesting, they bring Coon into this here, and you might want to expand on that. But when it comes to iteration, and you mentioned Jobs and smartphones, it makes you think of poor or black bear. Because if you think about that moment in phones, there were divergences in what the next device was going to be. Was it going to be lots of tiny little buttons where people could do emails and have a traditional keyboard? Was it going to be a kind of clunky touchpad? And in the original iPhones, the touchpad didn't work all that well. And so there was a kind of a fork in the road, and ultimately, poor or blackberry. Yeah, it got left in. Yeah, the dumpster heap. Anyway. But yeah, the way in which they illustrate this point is through a really interesting discussion of the work of Thomas Coon. Yeah. So when they talk about technological paradigms, they're really trying to get at a couple of things. First of all, a paradigm according to Coon has two different meanings. The first is as an exemplar, a particular scientific problem solution that is accepted and successful, and which becomes the basis for future work. So the example they give is Newton's explanation of the refraction of light, which of course, I'm sure, Louis, you know, off the top of your head. Oh, absolutely. And then we can also think of paradigm as the entire constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given scientific community. Now, let's just set aside the second understanding of paradigm for a second. The first one is really like an exemplar technology that can lead to new technologies. So you can think of then, in one respect, a technology having its own pathway. So I give you this technology and then you can build upon it, but it more or less is leading you in a certain pathway. But they note, though, that if you look at examples in history, this doesn't quite happen, this doesn't quite line up, because if you look at the development of missiles between the U.S. and the Soviet Union after the Second World War, you see divergences and how their missile systems have developed. So even though they have the same model, the same exemplar, the German V2 missile model to work from, they came up with different missile technologies. Yeah. And that shows that existing technologies aren't purely determining the next technological development or step. Even if a technology is an improvement or a development on a previous one, it's not a predetermined outcome. And it's the same as fine for that matter as well. The Nokia 3310 didn't have a predetermined next step competing fines. So the next way in which they try to answer this question do technologies shape technology is through a discussion of technological systems. And so this is where they refer to the work of people like Hughes and Rosenberg. But essentially, they're trying to understand how technologies are never simply developed in a vacuum, right? They exist in a broader network of other technologies and other technological practices. So if you think of like the washing machine, I presume, Louis, you don't wash your clothes by hand. No, no, it's been a while. Yeah. You don't, you don't go to the local river and like wash your clothes on a washboard. Although I have shrunken a fair few wall jumpers that probably should be hand-washed. I should do more hand washing if I'm not mistaken. All right, all right. But yes, but largely use an automatic laundry machine. But you see, in order for that technology to work, quote unquote, it involves all these other technological systems and devices. Yeah, it's got to fit the plumbing network. It's got to fit the electricity grid. And interestingly, they even say that if you look at the existing system, you can probably even predict or start to think about where the next development might happen. Because it's often the part of the system that's lagging behind in some way. Yeah. Well, technological development is oftentimes uneven. Yes. Right. So again, it goes back to the myth of the Herbaric inventor who like just developed something and says, look what I've developed. Yeah. But when we look at the practice of technological development, a very complex story emerges where some parts lag more than others, right? Which are crucial for the over system all system functioning. Yes. If you don't have a thing that allows your washing machine to be plugged into the system, well, that all the other components could be amazing, but you don't have a washing machine. Yes. And so the concept of that lagging component is known as a reverse salient. Yes. And that makes it the likely next development of the system is someone coming up with a dooflickie to plug it into the system. But the interesting thing they point out is that it still doesn't inherently determine what the invention is going to be because different solutions can be developed. Reading this made me think about Australia's electricity grid at the moment. And we've got coal power stations coming off the grid. So we've got a problem of needing more generation, which you could describe in these terms as the reverse salient, something that everyone's trying to develop solutions for. But the solutions range from more wind power to nuclear energy to all these things. And the battle lines aren't just who's got the best and best efficient technology. Yeah. They're political, they're economic, they're social, they're other factors at play. So let's pick up on the economic aspect that you just mentioned, Louis. So the next line of questioning that Mackenzie and Wiseman engage in is if technology doesn't simply shape technology and it relates to other social forces, could these forces be mainly just economic? So it's interesting, an example they give is Edison's development of the electric light globe. And they point out that one of the biggest influences in this fundamental technological development was economic, was trying to get the cost down so it could compete with gas light. And so trying to use less copper and do other things that weren't decisions made purely by what's the most nuanced scientific technological way of designing this, it was how do I make it cheaper for a market? And in many respects, we could see another deterministic argument here being that the raw economics of it, the kind of cost benefit analysis calculations becomes a new driving force that determines technological development. They also note though that like there are some uncertainties around the economic considerations of technological development. So like let's say we're inventing a new technology, like we don't know quite exactly what effect that might have on the market. I mean you like that you can project, but those projections are also socially formed. Yes. So like I could say I'm inventing like the new Blackberry. Everyone's going to want to move away from the smartphones they have now that are like touch screen based and they're going to go back to my Blackberry or whatever Berry and it'll be amazing and people and I'm going we're going to earn loads of money. That's a good example, right? We've invented this phone. It's great. You can buy it. It's called the sociology of everything phone. It's such a great phone. You can learn so much sociology. Think of it. Is this like a million dollar idea? We got so far through an episode about a Trump person. We haven't done that. But yeah, you don't quite know though. And so yeah, the economics considerations, even if you think they're influential, have a social component. Yeah, they say that, you know, that dominant argument I was talking about before, they refer to that as a sort of neoclassical approach, which and this is a quote, which is based upon the assumption that firms will choose the technique of production that offers the maximum possible rate of profit. So we can see technological development as just being what will generate the most profit. But like you said, A, firms don't actually know ahead of time what will be profitable and what won't be and B, they make a really interesting point about how it's the same way we critique too much economic theory. A lot of the time that humans aren't always rational actors. Yeah. And that people don't always try and develop technologies in a way that's completely profit driven or deploy technologies. And it made me think of all those businesses that people are doing it for the love of it, like, you know, boutique high-five stores, people sit around and like love certain high-end speakers that are so expensive, they can't compete with jelly-high-five. I do think the best example is the Trump phone. Like who in the right mind uses a Trump phone? Is it actually a Trump phone? Would it surprise you to learn? It's a Trump-branded smartphone. Is it gold-plated I assume? Yeah, it is actually. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But you can't say like from a functional point of view, probably. I'm just guessing here. We don't, I mean, we don't have one to look at to use. We're not, we haven't gone that far down that rabbit hole. But yeah, so, so, I mean, this is maybe also related to another point, right? So even if you think economics play a big role, we do need to also think of economics as not simply being divorced from like society. Like it's not just the end of our economic shaping is social shaping. Yeah. So what do they mean by that? So the way I understood this was pretty simple, actually. It was just that economics are social. What value something has is determined by what people are willing to pay for it, what materials are available to produce it, and all these sort of things are socially situated. So if you say that technological development is influenced by economics, well then you're also at the same time inherently saying it's influenced by society, because you can't remove economics from society. Okay. Yeah. I mean, what's the, the funny little toys that are currently blowing up and selling for huge amounts? Oh, labubu. There you go. If you need any greater example of economics and society as socially intertwined, the amount people are willing to pay for labubu and the social practices and rituals involved in unwrapping them or whatever it is people are doing with them. Anyway. Louis, we need to develop one of these type of toys. Yeah. Well, there's been a few furbies and beanie babies. Yeah, beanie babies. Beanie babies. Yeah. But anyway. Of course. Yeah. So if not simply economics, if not technologies themselves, wholly determine how technologies are shaped, how they're developed, then what else might we consider? What else might we look at? One possibility is to explore how the state, the nation state, has an influence on technological development. So what are some examples of this? What are some of the points that Mackenzie and Weisman are trying to make here? Well, simply put that the state as a massive investor and as a very powerful actor in the social and economic environment of any place has a huge amount of influence on what technology to develop. I mean, one thing that the state has is, well, most states have the ability to print their own money and rack up huge debt, which means they can do massive investments in things that private actors may not have been able to invest in. And that can have huge repercussions on what technologies become viable down the line. I mean, they talk in this a lot about military technologies because there's one thing we know about governments, debt becomes less of a problem when it's military spending as opposed to social welfare, something else. But it's in service of the state, right? Its ability to exercise sovereignty. What are the examples they gave? It made me laugh a lot. So they talked about how there was a motivation in France for technologies to be developed that employed the most number of people. Yeah. And so we have a different context, maybe like the UK, that's like, how can we increase efficiency, which means how can we deprive people of jobs, right? So reduce labor costs by reducing the number of workers that are needed. And then there's some context like, how can we get the most people involved in this particular machinery? And if you think about it that way, then you can imagine all these different jobs like you can imagine, oh, well, for this podcast to happen, if we wanted to like maximize the number of people that were involved, like maybe you have one person, I don't know, like holding up the microphones for us. Possibly. Yeah, another person giving massages. The important point they make is that all these things have huge kind of follow on effects. So like massive amounts of military spending on rockets and aircrafts ends up feeding into the domestic airline industry and what technology is successful there. In Australia, you know, one thing I thought about was the national broadband network. Phenomenal levels of government investment never would have happened otherwise. And think about all the technological implications that have come out of that. Yeah. Like it's got a massive follow on effect. So when we think about technological development, when we think about the impact of technology, we have to consider the state. Yeah. Yeah. Now, at this point of their chapter, Mackenzie and Weisman shift gears a little bit. They begin to draw together different threads to help them refine their account of the social shaping of technology. So one of the points they make here is that when we think about how technologies are socially shaped, we can't always think of this as an intentional conscious act. Yeah. This is a far more complex process. Yeah. I read that as being they're more talking about how technology is influenced as opposed to how it's designed. And a design process obviously has influence, but influence is a more general thing. And they also make the point here that everything we've said so far is relevant to the shaping of technology. They're all different influences that shape technology. They say the social shaping of technology is in almost all the cases we know of a process in which there is no single dominant shaping force. Yeah. The state, economics, science, all of these things have the role in the shaping of technology. Yeah. What other points do you think they make here? Well, firstly, they give some really nice case studies that we're going to not go into any detail about at all. Yeah. Please read them because they're really nicely put. And another point they make here is that their notion or the notion they're developing about the social shaping of technology, and this is their words, is wholly compatible with a thoroughly realist, even a materialist viewpoint. And at this point, they're starting to contrast their idea around the social shaping of technology with another way of understanding technology, which would be the social construction of technology. Yeah. They go on a bit more detail later on about specific approaches, but they say just that terminology in general is a bit tricky for them because it can start to imply that technology can be completely socially constructed. Yeah. Invented. Yeah. Invented. And they say, "No, there's still a kind of reality to it, and it's still influenced by its material components." And the example they give in this section is looking at another person's research, which was examining how suspension bridges were designed differently in France and the US. And they look at the fact that there was a desire by the US inventor to come up with a simple suspension bridge that had easy-to-follow designs so that people could follow it easily, and it wasn't necessarily the peak of engineering, but it was just a very easy-to-follow one. And in France, it was much more about creating a very New York-ston peak of engineering. So essentially, the same problem, the same type of technological development occurred in two different ways, in two different contexts. But the point they make is that there was still a material reality. One of those inventions couldn't involve a teleportation machine. And they even point out that in early iterations of both of the different approaches, there were system failures and bridges fell down. So both engineers were still working inside a material reality. It's not like the bridges can be completely socially constructed. And so that's a really important point they draw out of that case study. Another key point they make about the social shaping of technology is that when they refer to the social as being relevant, they don't simply just mean the things we normally think of in sociology, like someone's gender, race, ethnicity. Those all matter, by the way. They don't want to downplay them. But they also think the existence of social groups, which can be local in nature, also matter a heck of a lot. Which, as I point out, is still influenced by race, class, ethnicity and all that. But that's not enough detail. You need to go to the local to really understand the social influences. One of the other sections of this chapter by Mackenzie and Wiseman looks at the issue of path dependency. So when we try to develop a social shaping of technology approach, which is critical of crude understandings of technological determinism, this leads us to interrogate what it means when technologies are thought to be path dependent. So what is path dependency, first of all? So path dependency is the notion that an existing technological system will lock in certain future developments. So if we think about mobilities and the automobile system, the fact that we already have so much infrastructure that involves roads and petrol stations and this sort of stuff, means that future developments within this system have to fit within this and it creates path dependencies. You can't invent a hovercraft because it's not going to go on the roads nicely. Or just everyone look at your keyboards on your phones or literal keyboards. The example given of path dependency is that most of us use a QWERTY keyboard. I mean, if you use a Dvorak keyboard, shout out to you, I guess. But most of you use a QWERTY keyboard because that's something you're familiar with. That's something that was adopted early on. And indeed, one of the interesting points here, I think it's a really interesting one. I mean, this discussion raises a broader set of issues. And those are, do technologies get developed because they're more efficient or they're better than others? And the answer is not always. That's the answer that Mackenzie Weisman gave. They acknowledge the point that there are some technologies that get adopted even though they aren't as technically good or advanced as other ones. And that might be because of political or economic or cultural factors. But they also do acknowledge that some technical systems, some technologies might have affordances that lead them to be adopted over others. So, yeah, again, it kind of goes back to a broader theme of this work. Each time they appraise deterministic or overly simplified understandings of technology, they do concede that there might be something there. They don't dismiss it out of hand. They just don't think it captures the full complex story. They conclude this chapter by doing two things. They know how there is a lot of work that's been done in the field of STS on theorizing the relationship between technology and society. So one of the things they cover in this particular part of the discussion is the development of the Scott approach, the social construction of technology approach that has been put forward by Beaker and Pinch. And they think that this approach has a lot of interesting things to say. Like it focuses on something called interpretive flexibility. So like if there's a thing that's in front of us, if there's a technology in front of us, we like to think of it in a very particular way. Like what do you use a dishwasher for? What do you use a blackberry for? There are some ideas that we have, but what the role of the critical social analyst is, is to understand how there's actually more than one way of interpreting, of using this very thing. And it's really interesting. They focus in on that aspect of Scott of the approach, which talks about how the consideration of whether a technology works is socially constructed. It's not something that a designer can define whether a technology works or not. It depends on whether a group of people decide to use it and accept that technology. And certainly designers do play a role in influencing whether or not a technology works or not, or is thought to work or not, but they're not the only relevant social group. And if a social group takes that technology and uses it for a completely different purpose, then that technology is defined as working from a Scott approach. And the interesting thing about this is Mackenzie and Wiseman say that potentially this approach, and this quote, underplays the extent to which technology always involves interaction between human beings and material world. Because let's say a technology electrocutes people. It's hard for anyone to socially construct or define that as working in any way because there's a material reality to it, which stops it working for human beings. Unless it's just like a weapon. And they note how the Scott approach has received a fair amount of critical scrutiny in recent years. They do some of that themselves in this chapter. They stress, for example, the need to be critical or open-minded about who the relevant social groups are that are involved in the stabilization or contestation of certain narratives or uses of different technologies. But they also do something interesting in this chapter that I think we should spend a little bit of time talking about. They note how in recent decades, there have been efforts to theorize the relationship between technology and society in more nuanced and complex ways. And so they, in particular, query whether or not we can think of technology and society or social relations as being sort of engaged in a dichotomous relationship. So when we think of how technologies are socially shaped, we might think that social influences really matter. So societies affect technologies vice versa. But what if social relations already involve themselves, technological components and aspects? So to what extent can we think of technology as already being embedded in our understanding of the social? And so this then perhaps leads us to talk about actor network theory, which has explored this topic at some length. Yeah. And they don't go into a massive amount of depth on actor network theory. And to be honest, it's probably something we'll do a whole episode on at some point. I'd be very surprised. But they do make the kind of key point that what they largely agree with actor network theory about is actor network theory breaks down that barrier in between technology and society. It sees human beings as existing in networks that involve technologies, ideas, animals, everything inside these networks. And you can't say that one part of it is part of society and one part isn't part of society. It's all part of the same kind of area of action. And they largely agree with that. They say both society and technology actor network theory proposals are made of the same stuff, networks linking human beings and non-human entities. And so I largely agree with that. They do note that there is some controversy surrounding actor network theory in the way it starts to say that agency has a symmetry between humans and non-humans. I don't necessarily critique it in this. They just acknowledge that it's a point. And they even say it's something that requires further discussion, I think. So we can say that their saying requires further discussion also requires further discussion. To be continued in a different episode. And then they conclude this piece with a really interesting discussion of how technologies are gendered and potentially influenced by race and ethnicity. So one of the things we might think of, for example, is what even counts as a technology. So our understanding of what is defined as a technology might be influenced by gender relations. For example, might it be socially significant that some gendered social artifacts like the baby bottle aren't as commonly framed, aren't as commonly understood as technologies as other artifacts are, such as those that are found in the factory or those that are electronically based. Now, Louie, we have spent quite a bit of time trying our best to explain this chapter by Mackenzie and Wiseman. But I think it's actually worth just checking to make sure that we've actually not let our listeners astray. So that's why we're very pleased to welcome to the podcast Judy Wiseman herself. Judy Wiseman is an American professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she's previously held the Anthony Giddens Chair in Sociology. She's a member of the British Academy and a member of the AI 100 Standing Committee at Stanford University. She's the recipient of loads of awards, including the William F. Ogburn Career Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association. Judy, we are so pleased to have you on. Well, I'm absolutely delighted to be here. And it's so moving for me that we're doing this episode this year because a few months ago in Edinburgh, Donald Mackenzie and I, we had a celebration at Edinburgh University of 40 years since we published the original social shaping of technology book. So it's wonderful to have this opportunity to chat about it, you know, particularly now this year. So thank you very much for having me. Our first question to you is pretty basic. What did we miss? Or what could have we explained better? I mean, I don't think you missed anything. I thought it was an incredibly kind of careful, detailed, forensic examination of what we tried to explore in the chapter. And I mean, I guess what, you know, particularly for a sociology series, what really we were trying to do. And I mean, you know, all of these things are debatable, but we did feel like there hadn't been quite enough focus in sociology and sociological discussions of power, for example, about materiality, about the material world, about the infrastructure, about the extent to which technologies make society possible in Latour's word, that that's what we were trying to get at. And I've always, I mean, my, you know, my father was an engineer back when, and, you know, I've always been intrigued by how the world works. So when people say things are in the cloud, you know, I know this is a metaphor. I know they're not really in the cloud. And actually, we need to know how that's constructed, who owns it, what's being done with that information. So it was trying to talk about materiality. And I mean, since that time, there've been all these sociological turns, as they call it, you know, a turn to materiality, you know, in a way, because we were Marxists at that time, we never left materiality. And it's been intriguing for me to see the ways in sociology between, you know, more material, less material sociology. But actually, we all always, because of my background being a labor sociologist, a sociologist of work, I've never strayed from the material. And so that was what we were really trying to get across. And I think your discussion brings that across. Fascinating. One part about the text that I think maybe we didn't cover in quite enough depth, I've got to critique us here, is towards the end where the text turns towards the relationship between gender and technology. And I think the points made that gender and technology are mutually constitutive. What did you mean by this in the text? And I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit more on just how your work has explored the relationship between gender and technology? Well, we were always saying that technology is political. The technology reflects society. It's not the technology is making society. It's the technology actually kind of embeds social relations. I mean, some people have used the metaphor of technology is frozen social relations. We've tried to talk about mutual shaping configuration. We've got lots of ways of trying to talk about this. But to say that actually all of our social relations are embedded in technical relations. And so I was in particularly interested in various perspectives on gender. I mean, one of which, and I was very glad I think it was Eric who picked this up, was that even our definition of technology, even how we think about technology that we think about factories rather than baby bottles, that we think about AI now as technology. And actually, we don't think very much about, I mean, I hate this term kind of legacy technologies, but people don't think a lot anymore and discuss electricity or the wooden desk that I'm sitting at, the chair I'm sitting on, all of the technologies of the material world or in the kitchen or wherever, that there's a whole myriad of technologies and we focus on the new and the exciting as if that's technology, that's what technology is. I guess I'm sort of really struck and I wish the book in a way wasn't as relevant for years. In the sense of such a lack of historical perspective in current discussions of technology, as if we're not living in a world made by the steam engine, electricity, or sewage, all of this kind of infrastructure, and we're going through various technological changes or revolutions, but all of which are, all of which build on and are embedded in previous technologies and the previous technologies as well we've discussed, very much kind of shape the choices that we can make about the directions of future technological developments. So to get to your point about gender, sorry that's a very long way around, so one of the things was actually how we think about technology. The other thing was to talk about how our very identities are formed together with technology and so I very much used Cynthia Coburn's work, early work years on to talk about you know how is it and it's still the case today that certainly in Western affluent society being feminine is somehow seen as incompatible with being good at technology and that we've still got a geek culture. I mean I remember Sherry Turkle describing how many years, decades ago doing a bit of work at MIT and talking about the guys sitting there with pizzas in the middle of the night and how engineering was kind of this caricature of masculinity at MIT and she's writing about the internet revolution. I was at Stanford maybe seven, eight years ago and it was already the beginnings of artificial intelligence discussion and yet the culture of Silicon Valley is still very much that masculine 24/7 way of working. So I was trying to you know talk about how actually the way in which technologies made the culture around technology that all these things are kind of gendered and raised as are the impacts of these things and so I'm you know as I'm sure your listeners will be well aware there's been so much discussion recently about recruitment software being gender biased and raised bias that you know a lot of the technologies that are currently being developed are embedding these old inequalities if you like. I think it's crystal clear that the work continues to have relevance. Louis, I remember we had a chat beforehand about just how well it reads and we're not just saying that Jada because we're having a chat with you right now but like how urgent it almost reads but one of the questions I had was if you were going to produce a third edition of the work what has changed like what would you include now in the social shaping of technology which isn't there in the second or the first edition? Well there's several things I'd say. I'm pleased about the fact that we totally got the story about the military. We totally understood that you know people are now much more understanding actually how much the role of the military plays in terms of the formation of technologies and that's completely clear but I mean I'm very much as I said a sociologist of work and so if you look at both editions there's a very long section on production, on labor, the effects of technology on labor and Donald has spent a lot of time working on military and and kind of military technology. What neither of us was or is really is a communication scholar and so what I didn't think about very much what I didn't really foresee was well two things really the extent to which interpersonal communication that our relationships are so mediated by technology now that it's been a kind of transformation really of relationships and I mean we thought about that a lot in terms of the mobile phone but it seemed sort of trivial then that people were using the phone and now actually with the rise of social media it's a completely different discussion about kind of everyday life and the extent to which people perform identities on the internet and all of that so I'd say the whole social media piece we didn't get and I'd also say that I never foresaw the impact of these things on politics actually the rise of populism and the way in which the influence on elections and on discussions of polity all of those things we didn't foresee then and and how could we have foreseen that but I would say that they would be kind of huge topics now actually the other thing I would say is that I can well remember and it's because of having a background in science studies that we very much understood that a google search engine was giving answers from a particular culture and I can remember going to google I mean you know naively when I was at the internet institution 20 years ago some guys from google came and I remember this kind of conversation where I said do you not think it's a problem that really it's an american search engine and perhaps we should have a european one or other ones because actually different kinds of knowledge might be represented there and I wrote a piece and many other people have about the extent to which things like wikipedia underrepresented women scientists or you know all of these things that we sort of understood that science was cultural and social and was being embedded in these search engines what we didn't foresee and couldn't foresee was the way large language models today would use this same bias data that we spent such a lot of time kind of critiquing that that would just be casually if I can put it like that embedded into large language models which then will reproduce the same forms of partial culturally specific knowledge such an important point and it raises another question I have about this text in terms of the kind of rationale the driving force behind it which I found fascinating because it seems to be critiquing technological determinism not just because it misrepresents a relationship between technology and social change and technological change but also because it seems like you're suggesting that technological determinism promotes a passive attitude towards technological change people sort of see there's not being anything they could do because it's predetermined it's going to happen they just got a role with it so to speak but I think these days people probably have a bit more of a nuanced understanding of technology and technological change in some respects I think a lot of people accept the fact that technology is shaped by economics and society and culture but unfortunately I'm not sure if that's led people to have a more kind of active attitude towards technology and see themselves as being capable of reshaping and influencing technology in the way that potentially when this piece was written it thought if you could get rid of technological determinism maybe people would become more actively engaged in shaping technology how do you think we can help promote people to have a more active relationship of technology and see themselves as capable of shaping it I mean I'm not sure to what extent there's as much understanding as of technological determinism as you say I mean maybe amongst sociologists don't go around saying technology is an addictive it's designed in that way I'm not I mean if you think about I mean just the radio every day you know suddenly we've got Sam Altman saying oh perhaps AI is a little bit of a bubbles suddenly we've got Thuleman talking about psychosis I mean the discussion then quickly becomes one of ethics I think there's a lot of philosophers doing ethics of technology and I noticed that the the recent language is one of design choice so there's been design choices and it and it's kind of a bit unfortunate that those design choices have been made and I'm worrying a bit about both the ethics language and the design choice language because it seems to me they put a lot of emphasis on individual designers and engineers which I think is incredibly important I'm not saying it's not I think engineers have a very important role to play but it doesn't really get at the broader political economy of technology it doesn't really get at well what are the financial incentives to produce these kinds of technologies so that for example I remember again at Stanford 10 years ago having a conversation about AIs being therapists but I mean it was completely obvious that this was going to be a terrible thing and who would take responsibility for this and it was fraught with danger but we see this has been developed and it's been you know it's design choices but it's also because actually there's a lot of money to be made in these things and and that these companies are huge profitable powerful companies that actually will put profit before the social good and so I do think I mean I this is going to stand to kind of negative but I mean you know it's why European discussions about regulation are so so important and why people in Silicon Valley hate them I mean I've literally been at meetings in Silicon Valley where people I mean I'm always the European there joke you know and sort of people say oh well they say we here innovate in Europe all they do is regulate like that is the put down that yeah yeah yeah but I mean actually they're also ambivalent about this because because they need regulation as well they just want to be the ones who determine what sort of regulation and regulation that that won't affect the sort of profit motive but I mean I think the discussions about regulation are very important Australia actually is at the forefront of a lot of this stuff about discussions about regulation of social media I mean my friends in Britain point to kind of Australia as being an exemplar of trying to take on these companies and trying to kind of restrain their worst motives so I think those things are very important I also think that there is much more critique now I mean one of the huge changes I would say is that now there's just there is a proliferation of fantastic STS scholars and other scholars who are writing wonderful things about technology and deconstructing the many women involved in these discussions that are raising awareness about things like recruitment tools things about how these technologies are being used and much more consumer activism about these things so I do think there's a kind of shift in the political activity around these technologies that should make us feel positive to some extent before I ask you about what makes you hopeful I might first ask you what keeps you up at night about the the current technological landscape you've been involved in numerous discussions come across numerous technologies what's the thing that you you worry about most well I don't that's the thing I worry about most but I mean one of the things I remember people writing about and thinking about within STS was what we used to talk about as sociotechnical imaginaries how much technology takes up our ideas of the future and a friend of mine John Markoff who was the tech writer of the New York Times for years wrote wrote a book 10 years ago where he says I just love this quote he says convincing the observer that the future was just around the corner became an art form unique to Silicon Valley I always thought that was a wonderful quote because if we want to think about utopias we need to think about what's the politics that we would like to have how do we start thinking about that politics and yet when you speak to people today about what future would you like they're very quickly going to talk about technologies what technologies would you like as if technologies are the solution to social problems and what keeps me up at night is really that most of the social problems we have don't have a simple technological solution to them I mean I wish technology was used to solve these problems I mean I think AI for example is will be fantastic in terms of a lot of pharmaceutical developments I mean there's lots of ways in which this technology is going to be fantastic but I sort of have a dream which is that all of those resources in Silicon Valley would just for a week think about how to make affordable housing you know think about some real social problems and how we could use this wonderful frontier technology to solve those problems you know how we're going to set problems that are social problems rather than what is often the case actually a lot of these technologies have to create a market for themselves it's like the problem isn't even there but they think you can think about a possible technology like AI assistance and then you create a market so that people feel that they need these things and just in terms of auto critique I have to say that you know again when I was in Stanford 10 years ago AI assistants were starting to be developed and I interviewed quite a lot of engineers about this and they talked about the fact that these assistants would be able to book restaurants for me and find restaurants and do all of these things that I mean I naively just thought well who on earth is going to want that like surely this is not going to be things I mean I couldn't have been more wrong because I just didn't really understand the creation of markets in that in that way so I mean that's what keeps me up at night how are we going to think about utopias that are that are political and not technological not imaginaries that come out of Silicon Valley but imaginaries that we want to produce a positive futures a better social relations and more equal social relations it's interesting that the kind of you know it's an insult the difference between innovating and regulating because I see a lot of the measures that are being taken in the EU I work on borders and digital border technologies and for me a lot of the efforts around regulation is innovation that's what innovation looks like when we think about entire networks or assemblages and not just individual isolated technologies that's how you innovate to try and create these things in a more positive way a more human-centered way but yeah that is a great point if sorry just but that is such a good point because I also think as you say that our notion of what innovation is is so skewed that again they've captured the notion of what's innovation innovation it's some new app some new AI innovation isn't about new ways of living and working and being that's what we think innovation is really kind of critical thinking about different ways of living Louie and I are involved in this research project around smart home technologies in Japan and one of the things that comes through in this project is just how the idea of smartness is contested so in order for something to be smart then things have to be dumb but then you realize that there's a lot of quote-unquote dumb things that actually still are very effectual and important they play a really important role in people's lives and so what I'm hearing from you is that we maybe need to think about how discussions of technology can also include other considerations other important aspects of our lives so it maybe goes full circle the social shaping of technology I actually I read it in such a hopeful way and maybe that's just the American in me but like I read in such a hopeful way because it seems like it's trying to really emphasize that another world is possible but if that's if we go seek it well absolutely and I mean you know perhaps we can finish with the wonderful Donna Harroway whose work I have always loved and who understood very early on was very excited about the possibilities of science and technology let's embrace you know the wonderful things that techno science can produce while at the same time being its chief critic that was all always let's do both of those things embrace the liberatory potential of these technologies while also always being attuned to the ways in which that they they can be used Judy thanks so much for being on our podcast is there anything we can tell the listener about that you're working on at the moment I'm working on venture capital and how few women are in venture capital and the reason I'm doing that and this is full circle I mean I left you know I've been working on time as you know for a decade and I kind of left the gender and technology area in a way a long time ago and kind of came back to it in a period where I was at the Allenturing Institute and then I started looking into venture capital because I was very interested in in the role of venture capital in AI in sustaining AI in funding AI and even I was shocked by how few women you know I just did a quick gender analysis how the any women investors how the any women led startups particularly in AI software and leading edge technologies and so it's become again a project about well what is seen as the frontiers of technological development you know one of the highest status most exciting technologies and that there's a complete absence of kind of women in this area still you know and this is a new technological revolution so I didn't think I'd have to do this work again it's a different context but I think it's it's very important to do again is is to look at well who is producing the technology and for whom does have an effect I think thank you so much again Judy for your time thank you listener for listening we'll catch you in the other episodes thank you the sociology of everything podcast is created and hosted by Eric Soo and Louis Evers is produced and edited by Eric Soo the views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the hosts and guest speakers and are not representative of any of the involved institutions if you'd like to learn more about the sociology of everything podcast or if you'd like to get in touch visit our website at www.sociologypodcast.com thanks for listening