What is Our Goal for This Course?

Our goal is to learn to be effective change agents.
  1. We want to understand technology development.
  2. We want to learn approaches for gaining adoption of mainly beneficial technologies and rejection of mainly harmful ones.
  3. We want to learn how to facilitate responsible and respectful public discourse about technology development, adoption, and rejection.

What is the Social Problem We Will Attempt to Solve?

Societies must make good decisions as rapidly as possible about whether to adopt new technologies.
  1. "Good" technologies must be adopted rapidly.
  2. "Bad" technologies must be rejected rapidly.
  3. Decisions must be made in a manner that maintains/enhances the quality of the social fabric.

What Constraints Hinder the Solving of this Social Problem?

Technology is Flawed
  1. Because all science is flawed, all technology is flawed.
    1. It is impossible to collect objective, value-free data (see: critique of positivism)
    2. It is impossible to interpret data in a totally objective, value-free manner (see: critique of the Hypothetico-Deductive approach)
    3. It is impossible for the enterprise of science to be undertaken in a totally objective, value-free manner (see: Kuhn's critique of the community of scholars approach).
  2. All technologies have negative consequences for some segments of the population.
    1. From a structure-functionalist approach, experiencing negative consequences related to new technology adoption is not necessarily a problem if, overall, the technology benefits society as a whole.
    2. From a Marxian approach, technology is created by and for the benefit of the powerful elite. Therefore, new technology adoption serves the interests of the power elite.
  3. People do not have a rational basis to make decisions about technologies that are more complex than they can fully understand.
    1. From a human agency (i.e., symbolic interactionist) approach, risk decisions are socially constructed through our interactions with one another.
    2. Socially constructed risk decisions reflect social conditions (i.e., economics, politics, religion, and so on).
The Public is Ignorant, Untrusting, and Skeptical

The public is:
  1. Ignorant (in a complex world, we all are).
  2. Untrusting (we would be both foolish and irresponsible citizens in a democracy if we fully trusted what scientists and government officials tell us).
  3. Skeptical (being cautious is a survival trait).
Therefore, negative information carries disproportionate weight in influencing public opinions. Thus, when the public first hears about a new technology, opponents of it can be effective in stimulating public skepticism.

In What Ways Do Citizens View Technology?

If we understand how citizens view technology then we can better understand their responses to it and perhaps improve our ability to solve the social problem of adoption/rejection of mainly beneficial/harmful new technologies.
  1. The "Classical Greek" philosophy views technologies as inevitable derivations of the immutable laws of the universe. Thus, technology is neither good nor bad, but simply useful or not useful for some purposes.
  2. The Enlightenment philosophy views technology as a move toward progress. The more technology the better. And if a technology has flaws, then new technologies need to be developed to correct these flaws.
  3. The Critical philosophy views technology as a tool of the powerful elite. Technology is developed by and for the benefit of this elite in their quest to exploit resources from the less powerful.
Citizens use all three of these perspectives to view technology depending upon the particular technology under question and their willingness to pursue different interpretations of the anticipated advantages and disadvantages of the new technology.

Change agents have a responsibility to use all three perspectives to fully understand the potential implications of new technology adoption or rejection.

Linkages Among Science, Technology, and Society

If we understand linkage among science, techology, and society then we will be better prepared to act as effective change agents.

Global Linkages
  1. The requirements of maintaining and enhancing societal well-being within a global capitalist economy stimulate the development of new technologies to gain comparative advantage.
  2. Comparative advantage is the relative ratio of efficiency in producing goods and services. When nations specialize according to their comparative advantage and then trade with one another, total productivity increases.
  3. In theory, all nations benefit from specialization and trade.
  4. The rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), as they are enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO), however, have limitations for the well-being of all nations.
    1. Economic leakage can occur from primary, to secondary, to tertiary economies.
    2. Because GATT prohibits subsidizing local industries, nations typified by primary and secondary economies have difficulty sheltering their newly developed higher-order industries for the time it takes them to become competitive in the global market. They therefore have difficulty rising above their perpetual lower-order status.
    3. Because the rules of GATT are written to serve the interests of a world market, acts by individual nations to protect their environmental quality might be viewed as illegal restrictions on trade by the WTO.
Societal Linkages
  1. Andrew Webster notes that members of a society need to understand that all technology is flawed and brings about negative consequences for some segments of the population.
    1. Citizens should recognize the limitations of science and technology.
    2. Citizens should not leave policy decisions about technology solely to scientists.
    3. Citizens need to be very active in the decision-making processes of technology development and policy making related to management of technology.
  2. Ulrich Beck states that society is becoming more risky.
    1. Citizens should recognize the limitations of science and technology.
    2. Citizens should seek technology development that benefits all people and reduces as much as possible the negative consequences of technology development on the most vulnerable segments of the population.
    3. Citizens should engage in reflexive modernization: the ability to recognize linkages among science, technology, and society.
  3. Michael Bell and Diane Mayerfeld state that we have no more hazards or worry about hazards than we had before. Instead, we have a growth of new language for debating about hazards and greater public interest in discussing potential hazards related to technology development.
    1. The real uncertainty at stake in the language of risk is the relationship between power and democracy.
    2. Because the language of risk assessment is in the hands of the elite, most citizens do not have much control over technology production or definitions of its safety.
    3. Citizens need to be very active in the decision-making processes of technology development and policy formation.

What Should Scientists and Consumers Do to Solve Our Social Problem?

The Scientist's Dilemma
  1. The "paradox of science" is that scientists, when they act as proponents of a new technology, feel compelled to state only favorable information about the new technology. When the public inevitably learns the negative information about the technology, however, they lose trust in scientists (where trust is defined as a sense of confidence in the opinions of scientists).
  2. The scientist's dilemma, then, is knowing how much and what information should be communicated to an ignorant, untrusting, and skeptical public.
The Consumer's Dilemma

Because the public has no rational basis for making the correct decision about adopting a new technology (we can never be guaranteed 100% safety), societal decisions reflect in part citizens seeking the opinions of others. Our decisions follow a path of:
  1. Information acquisition.
  2. Social comparison with the viewpoints of others.
  3. Choice shift (i.e., shifting anxiety/responsibility to the group level).
Given that we are ignorant, untrusting, and skeptical, but nevertheless required to make decisions about new technologies, we must ask ourselves for each complex technology that is introduced, "Whom do we trust?"
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