Introductory Essay
Technological Determinism as a Theory of Society:
Technological Determinism as a Theory of Technology:
Does Science shape Technology?
The technological shaping of Technology
The economic Shaping of Technology
Economic Shaping is Social Shaping
Technology and the State
Case Studies of the Shaping of Technology
The Path-Dependence of Technical Change
deep-seated determinist assumptions might see an indication in these case studies, that the best technology will eventually succeed. There are two answers:
Theorizing the Technology-Society Relationship
Two theoretical approaches:
Shortcomings: Structural exclusion is not acknowledged. Relevant social groups may be pre filtered, not taking underrepresented groups into account. Furthermore is doesn’t take the reciprocal relationship between artifacts and social groups into account, as the following does:
Previous theories often neglected the influence of technology upon social relations.
Constructing Gender; Constructing Color
The same applies to ethnicity and technology but this hasn’t been explored as much, it did shape the way photography and film technology developed.
Langdon Winner: Do artifacts have politics?
Low bridges in New York embody systematic social inequality, that became part of the landscape, not letting black and lower income people travel to recreational spaces in public transport. Similar to big plazas and streets, preventing fighting or demonstrations. Certain newly introduced machines weren’t more cost-effective, but had the ability to alter or destroy workers’ unions. While it does make sense to move away from a technical determinist way that covers up the actors and underlying interests, Langdon calls for a focus back on the things themselves, for they entail sets of consequences prior to any professed use.
Langdon offers a general conclusion: The things we call technologies are ways of building order in our world. Many devices and systems contain possibilities for ordering human activities, like communication, travel, consuming… the number of possible choices is greater in the beginning, but then becomes fixed in material, habit, investments. Technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political founding, that establish a framework. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled in the institutions and practices of politics and in tangible arrangements.
Inherently political technologies:
The belief that technologies are political entails the view that the adoption of a technical system brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a political cast, like decentralization. Most technologies are relatively flexible in their design, arrangement and effects. Certain kinds aren’t and choosing them means choosing a particular form of political life. [contrary to legislative technology that has a cast, some technologies will have an apriori set of consequences that requires and forms society]
Two ways how technologies are inherently political:
So the resulting question is: Are the social conditions predicted required or compatible with a technical system? Are these conditions internal or external? Discussions about this enter into an important sphere of analysis: The arguments stand apart from more common quantifiable claims about economic costs and benefits. The issue raised is about the ways in which choices about technology have consequences on human associations.
When devices are linked to specific ways of organizing power and authority - does this derive from a social response to the things’ properties or is it a pattern imposed by a governing body to further it’s purposes? E.g. the social system of an atom bomb must be authoritarian, the construction of the American railway required an administrative organization at last, with managers and levels, compared to traditional family sized businesses.
If these systems are to work effectively and efficiently, quickly and safely, certain requirements of internal social organization have to be fulfilled. Evidence seems to show, that large technical systems are highly compatible with centralized hierarchical managerial control. But is it right to say that these systems require this control?
To answer this questions, one has to examine how moral claims of practical necessity are played out against moral claims of other sorts. In societies, based on large technological systems, it is common that moral claims other than of practical necessity are being seen as obsolete and idealistic and are eclipsed by the technical imperative.
Politics of the entire community cannot be easily separated from politics of technology. The operational requirements of the usage of plutonium raises the prospect that extraordinary measures would be necessary to prevent it from theft, e.g. high security checks.
-> Once a course of action is underway, reasonings to justify the adaption of social life pop up as spontaneously as flowers in the spring. And those that cannot accept the hard requirements are dismissed as dreamers and fools.
Summary:
devices and systems can provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting - these technologies have a range of flexibility in their material form. For this flexibility it is important to understand their consequences, in order to direct them.
other devices and systems are strongly, perhaps unavoidably linked to patterns of power and authority. The decision is whether or not to adopt, since there are no alternative physical design or arrangements, and no possibilities for creative intervention by social systems - the consequences are inherent.
These two understanding can intersect and overlap.
–> In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way the live to accord with technological innovation at the same time they would resist similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds. For that reasons it is important to achieve a clearer view of these matters.
Donna J. Haraway: Modest Witness @ Second Millennium
Haraway wants to make explicit the “tropic quality” of all material-semiotic processes, especially in techno science. Small objects like chips or genes are simultaneously literal and figurative, the map universes of knowledge, practice and power. Techno science is the globalization of this. Hypercapitalist markets, biosphere programs, entertainment events produce cyborgs. Cyborgs are cybernetic organisms, a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular historical cultural practices. They are not about human and machine, (if these terms ever existed as such) but about specific “historical machines” and people in interaction This is often counterintuitive for analysts, since the term cyborg originally was coined to describe an enhanced man.
Haraway adopts the view of rodents, tools and research material, to look back at her “fellow mammals”
The distinction between nature and culture is sacred in western traditions. The human place in nature seems to be at stake now. But it’s - according to haraway - a mistake to forget, that anxiety about lineages is at the origin of racist and sexist discourse in Europe. The limits between divine creation and human engineering made way for molecular genetics and biotechnology. Couplings across taxonomies are happening daily in genetic laboratories.
On the one hand biotechnology is opposed by those, who fear commercialization and expropriation of animal or plant genetics. But this collapsing of genetics, profit and exploitation is just as much a mistake as the right reduction of biological complexity.
[What follows is an analogy of stem cells as universal and potentially everything and certain techno scientific achievements, but I’m lost here, as always and I cannot be bothered to follow Haraway]
Thomas P. Hughes: Edison and electric light
[Description of the holistic approach to invention and innovation, applied by Edison, not relevant to my interests]
Paul Ceruzzi: Inventin Personal Computing
[Description of the beginnings of the computer “revolution” and an assessment whether it can be titled this way. Spoiler: Yes.]
Eda Kranakis: Constructing a Bridge
This article describes how two architects applied different strategies to successfully innovate suspension bridges.
James Finley, an american inventor of the 18th century, had economic considerations in mind when developing a suspension bridge. His concept involved a patent and mass compatibility. His design was supposed to uncomplicated to build, didn’t need highly skilled workers, no excess materials and a step by step guide for the craftsmen. Finley used an inductive reasoning approach and emphasized the use of experimentation and observation.
Claus-Louis-Marie-Henri Navier’s approach was fundamentally different (about 30 years later). He was a salaried employee in the Corps des Ponts et Chausées, and he had dual ties to the engineering and mathematical communities. Navier didn’t attempt to patent a design or conduct experiments, he created mathematical descriptions of the curves and movements of suspension bridges.
Navier’s design was socially shaped in the sense that he employed a set of mathematical tools and techniques which were taught and developed at his own institutional environment.
-> People most readily use the tools that are available and accepted and relevant in their own environment.
What Navier’s theory ignored and what it analyzed reflected goals and priorities stemming from or rooting in his environment. It wasn’t only dictated by the technology but it was also a question of who he wanted to impress [or had to?] and what mathematical issues were currently of concern in the scientific community.
Navier’s bridge was intended to serve as a monument, in accordance to the buildings in the vicinity, contrary to Finley’s approach.
-> The technical features of the designs embodied their knowledge, their goals and their ideas about how the structures would be built. -> The environments shaped the strategies of the two individuals - the environments aren’t all-knowable or one-dimensional, and there is a host of factors, but they do limit the range of strategies that can be chosen to succeed
Three dimensions:
intellectual dimension: Finley adopted an empirico-inductive research methodology and helped to ensure that his findings would be understood. Navier followed a theoretico-deductive methodology that was respected amid his community, ensuring that his research would be considered valuable.
economic dimension: Finley had to sell many bridges to earn a reasonable profit through royalties. Navier was salaried and didn’t have to compete on the market at all, he was striking chords by presenting his bridge as a sophisticated application of theory.
Organizational dimension: They were built within different organizational structures and networks. Finley made use of the patent system. Navier was employed by the Corps des Ponts et Chausées. Finley adapted his design to this organizational context by creating a generic design and a guide. He maximized ease of construction and minimized the need for technical expertise. Navier had to accept design changes by his superiors, but he had strict technical control over the building process. He adapted his design by presupposing highly skilled labor and the ability of control.
-> Both Navier and Finley innovated, but their innovative work wasn’t a transcendent quest for novelty, it was fundamentally structured by their respective environments.
W. Brian Arthur: Competing technologies and economic prediction
End of the 19th century, there were three way to power automobiles: Steam, electricity and gasoline, while gasoline was the inferior technology. Arthur explains this with a theory of increasing return to adoption. The more a technology is adopted, the more it is improved and the more attractive it becomes, eventually having all groups of customers switching to and choosing this technology.
Four key features:
Implications:
If this mechanism is valid, history would have a fossil record of technologies that could have been as good or might have been better. Today, we would see technologies we are stuck with, like FORTRAN or the QWERTY keyboard (another standard couldn’t be found in 1904 because typing teachers opposed change). The fittest technology may not survive, hence the government may need to step in and encourage and protect infant technologies. But this is hard, as there is an obvious cost to exploring large numbers of unknown technological paths.
-> We should be careful in interpreting economic history, we usually look for reasons why a predominant technology is superior, and how this led to adoption. -> Superiority becomes a function of adoption or use
Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch: The social construction of technology
SCOT - developed by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, has several advantages in analyzing users as agents of technological change.
In the approach, relevant social groups are groups who share a meaning of the artifact. This particular meaning can be used to explain developmental paths. These groups might include engineers, consumers and so on, and they aren’t static. Besides a shared meaning of an artifact, they may also share other traits, like women sharing their role on the family.
SCOT emphasized the interpretative flexibility of an artifact. Women saw bikes as dangerous, and rather a mean of transportation, men saw a bike as a sports tool, which could be embedded in the further developmental paths, making a bike even faster. Interpretative flexibility is not indefinite, closure and stabilization occur, but rival technologies can exist side by side. This closure can also be dissolved by new problems emerging.
SCOT emphasizes artifacts as subject to different interpretations along social groups.
Weaknesses:
Shirley Strum and Bruno Latour: Redefining the social link: From baboons to humans
[Not really relevant for my studies, but it opens up interesting dichotomies between complexity and complication in social structures. Society and it’s rules, orders, hierarchies etc. are seen as performative, being performed by actions. Otherwise it wouldn’t have to be renegotiated constantly. Modern industrial societies have stable complicated structures, that are organized and mobilizes on a grand scale, with the help of artifacts and symbols.]
Cynthia Cockburn: Caught in the Wheels: The high cost of being a female cog in the male machinery of engineering
Why do women chose not to become technicians and engineers? Do they even chose or are they pushed and what choice exactly are they offered?
Equal Chances?
“Initiatives to date have been based on the philosophy that women must be given ‘more confidence’ […] I would suggest that women know very well both where we are unwelcome and what we are rejecting. We are not failing. We are on strike” p. 127
Technology: Neither neuter nor neutral
The prevailing belief is that technology is neutral and equally available and relevant to us all. Women just have to reach out and grasp it. But technology is far from neutral, it bears the marks and serves the purposes of the class that owns it. “Industrial, commercial, military technologies are masculine in a very historical and material sense. They cannot readily be used in a feminine, nor even a sexless, mode. Women are not merely failing to enter technology. On the one hand we are being repelled, and on the other we are refusing.” p. 127
To this relates the male appropriation of work - model for the employer is a man, by men’s design. Women’s physiology is seen as defective, not as a norm.
All the Manly Virtues
The norm for the industrial worker in general is male, engineering represents everything that is defined as manly: controlling nature, muscle, machine, dirt, grease, swarf… while any other kind of dirt is seen to be more bearable for women, like blood or vomit. Technical work involves physical risk, masculine patterns of relationships, camaraderie and slander concerning women. Additionally it is embedded in a capitalist business world, it’s competitive and about performance.
-> These values have “developed out of patriarchy, and on the other have developed to make patriarchy what it is in modern society. The relations surrounding technology continually renew and extend male hegemony over the rest of us. The growth of industrial technology has to be seen as part and parcel of the historical development of gender difference. It has been formative in the growth of class relations. But is has also been part of what has made males into ‘men’ and females into ‘girls’.” p. 129
Women’s Values
In women’s work domain it seems as if the social purpose of work is more important, like nursing, teaching and social work. This difference is not immutable, it is the results of hundreds of years, society has constructed gender difference and continues to confirm and elaborate it every day. And much about the feminine gender is good - Cockburn opts for keeping up this concern for feelings and people, and not trading off in order to take on technology: “We don#t want to exchange the society of women for the society of men, to become a kind of de-sexed satellite of a male world”
Moving Forward
Moving forward into the industrial field comes at a great individual cost and cost to the movement by a drain of strong women. And yet, power lies in the economic ownership of the technical forces of production - “we cannot continue to be the passive objects of some technologies (at the receiving end of medical and military technologies, for instance […] we have to learn technical skills. if we are to learn, we have to get in there. It cannot be done at a distance.”
Cockburn relates the barriers between women and tech to other physical taboos, like getting dirty, spreading legs, exerting muscular force.”
On our Terms
Women shouldn’t deny their social values and turn to industrial sectors that seem to be more humanly useful and malleable. Self-organized collectives of women are already separating out the already difficult relations of technology from those of capitalist employment
organizing Independence
Cockburn asks for woman-only organizations and demands massive increase in resources by the state for women-run initiatives. To counter the ongoing marginalization (despite mutilation), we need to form women’s groups to help each other.
Women-Led, can it work?
More revolutionary than autonomy itself is a situation with women in leadership and majority. Men’s reluctance to participate on such terms would expose the original separatists. Such a strategy is impossible until more women participate and are trained and willing to enter these situations.
Richard Dyer: Making ‘white’ people white
Article on the development of film camera and photography technology, which always favored lighter skin. This is because they were made that way, not because they couldn’t be different. Innovation in photographic media has generally taken a white face as the norm.
Introduction: Technological determinism and production
This part reasserts the importance of production in the contemporary world. Production hasn’t disappeared, but it appears in novel forms.
information society: Capital and labour are replaced as key sources of society by knowledge and information post fordism: identifies a new era in capitalist production, with flexible forms of work and customizes production replacing mass production postmodernity: aren’t concerned with production, the issue is more about transformation of aesthetics, language and culture
They all share a view of technological change as an external force that overpowers pre-existing forms of social differentiation. This determinist view has important consequences for practical politics, as politicians insist, that we must embrace technological change in the name of progress and economic advance.
–> What if this technological determinism is wrong? What if the effects are in fact built into the design of workplace technology and this could be designed differently? Unemployment is seen as unfortunate by product of technological change, but the technology has been designed to eliminate human labour.
The technology of production is in many ways the result of our social relations
The advent of the water mill is a history of a struggle between different social groups who’s place in social orders made them prefer different technologies
Marx has been fundamental in writing on capitalist production. A technicist view presupposes that technology is the prime mover of Industrialization and social change. A different view acknowledged es that Marx sag capitalist-worker relations as a major factor affecting the technology of production. On some pages of the “Kapital”, Marx shows how capitalists shape technology. But the point is - class struggle shapes technology. There have been struggles and resistance of workers who did fully understand the changes to be imposed on them. Furthermore technical automation helped to change the organization of a company, by shifting control to the manager level, away from the shop floor, which was also met with resistance.
The focus on class conflict is not the whole story, there are also social relations that are critical, since there are also divisions within the working class, e.g. between men and women
There are more ways how technology of production reflects male power. Tools have been designed to match male physical strength, hence excluding women - the design of machinery is designed by men with men in mind.
Choosing between technologies is not simply a matter of rational, economic calculations, but also influenced by the personal ambitions of managers and engineers and their efforts to shape organizational context. And also among engineers there a huge differences.
Gendered conceptions of users are fluid and subject to a variety of interpretations, technologies can be examined along their ideas of women. Technology and the potential users are mutually shaped.
There are different priorities that can change how technologies are created, e.g. with participatory design methods or by feminists who take a more active role.
-> Marxism has many blind spots, and it is rooted in the experience of masculinized industrial production it is in many ways ill-equipped to tackle the problems of the new world. But it does offer a diagnosis of what needs changing and of the constraints upon the possibilities of change.
Marc Bloch: The watermill and feudal authority
Bloch recounts the struggle between feudal authority and citizens, who repeatedly had to fight for their right to possess and use hand mills. Incidents were the destruction of hand mills by lord’s officials, citizens demanding a charter that allowed them to domestic milling, or monks paving their parlous with broken hand mills and citizens seizing the monastery years later to bring the broken hand mills back into their homes.
Karl Marx: The machine versus the worker
“The instrument of labour strikes down the laborer.” In this article, Marx stresses how the sole impact of technology is not only to replace workers, but there is also a power inimical. It is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, it is an antagonist of human power. [I understood it as: the capitalist becomes less dependent on workers?] Workers do not work themselves anymore, they just superintend the work of the machine.
-> The working class that depends exclusively on their skills is now down away with.
[Yes, understood]
-> the defenses of workers are rendered useless by new mechanical tactics and they had to surrender at discretion
David F. Noble: Social choice in machine design: The case of automatically controlled machine tools
Text about the ramifications of technical development in automatic machines. The paths were split along record playback and numerical control of machines. Record playback let the intelligence of production rest at the machinist, who made the tape by producing the first part. Numerical control was based upon a different philosophy of manufacturing. Specifications were broken down into mathematical representations, it circumvented the role of the machinist as the source of the intelligence of production.
Drive for automation is not always necessarily altogether rational, though profit usually is the driving force. The important ideology was of control: The distrust in human beings is paramount, but it is more of a reflection of something else: The reality of the capitalist mode of production, a distrust of labor. Elimination of human error means to minimize the dependence on labor by increasing control over production.
Cynthia Cockburn: The material of male power
Cockburn analyzes the “Skilled craftsmen” as a fertile field for class and gender relations. It draws a the unskilled worker as inferior. Cockburn takes a deeper dive into the history of compositors.
Producing Class and Gender:
Attempts of bringing class and gender together have been unsatisfying, Cockburn tries to solve this by looking at processes instead of static hierarchies. She sees struggles as both ordering people along class and gender simultaneously.
Gender and class are being created in relation. Workers forge their class identity in the struggle with capitalists, at the same time men and women define their gender along their relation to the same technology and labor processes. By owning the means of production, the capitals class hast he initiative, by securing access and capability to tech, the men have the initiative - each gains power by defining the other as inferior.
Components of Power /Physical effectivity is acquired
Cockburn assumes a underestimated role of the material for male power. An overtly economist view of gender differences saw women women as a distinct category of labor and capitalism producing an economic advantage of men over women. But there is also a material dimension to this, which comprises the socio-political and the physical (which are often neglected in marxist feminist work).
-> Out of fear of essentialism, physical power has often been let aside, but Cockburn sees it as corporal effectivity and technical effectivity, that is both important and doesn’t have to immobilize feminist struggles
Neither biological nor technical strength do not belong to us by birth, it is a social product. Boys are taught to train muscle by activity, and even small physical differences in size and strength are amplified by technology.
The appropriation of muscle, capability, tools and machinery by men is an important source of women’s subordination, indeed it is part of the process by which females are constituted as women. This is happening analogous to the appropriation of the means of production.
Appropriation of Technique: The Hand Compositor was heavy to lift an required stamina and strength. The compositors limited access of capitalists and society to their craft by setting up trade unions, differentiating themselves from other population groups, like young men or women (deemed not capable) or the unskilled worker. They took the initiative to construct their image and hence created class and gender divisions. Interesting though that there were women who opened up their own printing shops and were perfectly capable, but they adapted the shops’ rules to their needs.
Appropriation of the Machine: The Linotype replaced the printing machines, first rendering a lot of comps unemployed but then being leveled out by a rise in demand for comps. During this time the comps ensured that lower skilled employees wouldn’t enter the composing room (but of one female shop in Edinborough). The monotype corporation though splitted tasks onto machines and opened up a window for unskilled men, resulting in a further exclusion of women, since now unskilled men formed an alliance with craftsmen.
Disruption of patterns: The computer based printing process was introduced in the 1960ies and it was a means of smashing costly craft control, it was was more productive and required less manpower. Inputting needed little more than a good typing ability (often possessed by women) - it caused unemployment and trivialized the tasks. The unions didn’t reject the technology but fought for the right to the new equipment, by resisting direct input from outsiders.
Skills and Uses: The purposeful differentiation of skilled workers against unskilled workers is also a construction of gender. Skill is a direct correlate to sexual power, by it’s definition it underrates women’s work and deprives it of virtue. There is also a material aspect to this, units of work are political in their design. A frame or printing doesn’t HAVE to be heavy und requiring strength, it is made this way. Bodily differences are not illusory.They do not have to, but they are made to matter.
Control of Technology: Either capitalists or workers (by improvement and usage) develop technology, so it’s men, engines are hence manufactured in a way that it is too big or too heavy for women to use. There was always a way of lent, of capitalists towards men, and of men towards women. Now a technical new state emerged in which designers and developers are male and dominating, and the worker is lent the machinery by men, again.
Conclusion: Men’s power and patriarchy: Marxist theory so far has often made a distinction between the workplace as being the locus of capitalist exploitation and the family as the place for the disadvantage of women. It reads: Women fill in inferior places provided by capitalism as a result of their family life. Cockburn doubts, that sexual relations at work can be fully explained by family relations, (and as many women are not in paternal relationship) - the gender hierarchies are also created at work and cast their shadows on domestic life. Perceiving private life as political was a breakthrough, but gender relations of work are sexual politics, too. The prevailing use of patriarchy seems like a problem, it is too specific too describe the diffuse and changing forms of male domination and should be reserved to situations where older man, fathers and husbands have authority over women. The class relations in printing are those of capitalism, the gender relations are those of a more pervasive male dominance system: Sex Gender System, in which men dominate women inside and outside family relations, is more andrachy than patriarchy. Seeing bodily strength and capability as being constructed can help in fighting for the right to skills and strengths or challenge existing kinds of power. Identifying the gendered character of technology enables to overcome feelings of inferiority and see it as the result of power-play.
Robert J. Thomas: What machines can’t do: politics and technology in the industrial enterprise
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Jeanette Hofmann: Writers, texts and writing acts: gendered user images in word processing software
Hofmann wants to make word processing programs legible as reified interpretations and definitions of the gendered process of text production in the office.
The User Interface Design: Who commands what and in which way: Which considerations guide the design of user interfaces? To have a computer perform a task, it is not necessary to understand how it works, it is only necessary to know the semantics of commands. Although this metaphor suggests a power relation that doesn’t fit the reality, where the user has to adapt to the computer when it fails, and the program’s instructions permits the writers commands. A user interface is a conceptual guide to the way in which the program operates -> make the program’s language compatible to what a system designer thinks is the average user’s experience. For example a women in her late fifties, as a a secretary. The UI is hence designed accordingly. The user interface therefore mirrors the conceptions of the programmer on the user and the user’s conceptions, it’s a multiple reflection of imagined realities. The division of content generating and typing let developers assume female users, but this didn’t necessarily match the reality.
Two answers to the question of what women are able to do: the writer in the passenger seat:
The antecedents of word processing software had cumbersome slow routines. In the ways, commands were executed reflected a certain distrust of the writer’s instructions by taking an additional step to assure their correctness. The writer was under ongoing supervision and provided with lectures. All actions were guided to prevent errors. No matter how experienced women became, they had to follow the sames assisted path. Writers were not only treated as beginners, they were treated as if they would remain one forever. The writer’s scope and access was limited. All this made typing slow, while it was supposed to increase productivity. Faced with the dilemma between protecting the system and text and optimizing productivity, the developers took the first option. This is how female users of word processing systems are perceived.
The writer in the driver’s seat:
Another type of writing programs was WordStar and WordPerfect - commercially successful program for microcomputers - they did not come from the field of office machines, but hark back to program editors and programmers. The goal of high typing productivity was met different from those before: Typing and editing were modes of writing, and the user alternated between those by using a control/function key. this enabled the user to stay in touch with the keyboard and not interrupt the writing. The downfall was a huge variety of keys and meanings that had to be learnt. Dangerous operations were to be done with keys that were rather far away and there was also a dialogue for deleting tasks and an undo key. The precautions thought tackled mistakes that could happen to any user by accident e.g. as a result of rapid typing. Otherwise a high competence and independence was ascribed to the user. This amount of learning was seen as acceptable - which reveals the developers perception of their target group. They expected secretaries to learn this, since typing was their main activity and they were professionals that could learn.
–> this shows, that technical artifacts can attribute different and opposing characteristics to the same target group –> “technical objects and people are brought into being in a process of reciprocal definition in which objects are defined by subjects and subjects are defined by object” - Madeleine Akrich. While the power to define the other is distributed unevenly between the parties involved, like developers, artifacts and users
Software developers create models of order by means of which reality is formed in order to let these formal models become reality itself. User images can be regarded as part of such ordering models. Their ascriptions participate in the process of defining gender.
The Rise of the Dilettante as the leading figure in software development:
The Xerox star computer was the commercially unsuccessful cornerstone of the apple windows GUI. The functions were reduced to core functionalities, that were ascribed to the intended target group - which wasn’t female secretaries. It was the first computer to make use of the mouse, graphical icons were used to simulate to office environment, to make the electronic world seem more familiar. There was an effort to oblige to the weak memories of people and reduce alienation. This had the downfall of a high sales price and reduced processing capability. The highly reduced functionality was seen as appropriate though because of the target group: managers and knowledge workers who neither have secretaries nor the time or desire to study operating systems. Former word processing programs had a model in mind that didn’t involve the process of composing texts, but just typing whatever was given to the secretary. The new approach originally had men in mind, but was then universalized and ungendered. This corresponds to the re-evaluation of the relation between composing and typing. Instead of the typing being something that women did for others, the medium itself is being reconceptualozed.
–> The meaning of gender and of artifacts are intertwined phenomena, and change of one has implications for the other.
Productive artifacts, changeable gender concepts, insights about an unstable relationship
Programs addressed women or men, but the gender only played an indirect role, as occupations and tasks were the principal concern. Designers asked themselves: What kind of texts are they typing, what can they memorize, which precautions are necessary? The answers prescribed the users actions, in this way, the technologies are productive and contribute to the social behavior and competencies.
–> Software development reproduces traditional socio-technical arrangements
But users diverge from the course of action assumed by system designers
The relationship between gender and technology appears as a context-dependent matter consisting of mutual ascriptions to prospective users and programs. The meaning of gender varies depending on concrete circumstances
The relationship between gender and technology can be illuminated with how questions that ask from a procedural rather than from a structural point of view
James Fleck: Learning by trying: the implementation of configurational technology
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Lucy Suchman: Working relations of technology production and use
Suchman recalls Haraway’s stance on feminist objectivity - which is about limited location and situated knowledge. It suggests that there is no transcendent unlocatable and so irresponsible knowledge, but accountability. According to Suchman the only route to objectivity is through collective knowledge of the specific locations of respective visions.
There is a considerable barrier between different fields of labor, like design and research. This leads to a real irresponsibility for the outcomes, but there should be a responsibility for the process of technology production. There is also a lack of understanding which is interpreted as shortcomings or reluctance. Suchman refers to a project she was involved in, in a law firm, where the litigation department was threatened to be closed down, mostly due to a lack of understanding of their work, which had strong implications and required far more interpretative and judgmental work than attorneys for example would see. By stressing these traits, the department wasn’t closed down, instead the work was rendered more efficient and cost-cutting.
A transformation of technology design entails: –> recognizing various forms of visible and invisible work, locating ourselves in a web of connections and taking responsibility for our participation –> Understanding technology use as recontextualization of technologies, designed at greater or lesser distances in some local site of practice [???] –> acknowledge different powers of actors to control technology –> establishing new bases for technology integration –> valuing heterogeneity achieved through practices of technology production and use, rather than dominance and homogeneity
Tasks of a feminist view:
–> Taking this as a description and directive for constructing alternative forms of technology production and use
Introduction
Technological Determinism and Reproduction
We seem to have unprecedented technological options to enhance our lives, homes and bodies. Reproductive technologies have held out particular promises for women, offering liberation from a previously ordained gender order. Reproduction: Biological reproduction and production and consumption that takes place in the home. The technical changes were accredited with a lot of positive developments and chances for women, to escape their subordination.
-> A social shaping perspective helps us to understand why these technologies cannot be read simply as emancipatory
Domestic Technology
Domestic technology is of considerable economic significance. The conventional view of the industrial revolution’s impact on households and families was challenged by Ruth Cowan. This view sees technology as absorbing much of the household’s role, all that remains is consumption, emotional support and bringing up children, thereby freeing women to enter the labor force. This assumes that women have nothing left to do. Household work still accounts for a big part of working time and the hours spent remained constant between 30ies and 50ies. The promise of labour-saving technology has not been realized in the home. Mechanization gave rise to new tasks which were as time-consuming, like the car enabling shopping, while it was usual to order in the 19th century. The disappearance of domestic servants allocated the entire job to the housewife.
Gender Specialization in household technology
The social organization of the family has structured the technology, but technologies are also shaped by gender relations. Cockburn and Ormrod follow the trajectory of the microwave, that didn’t include women in it’s innovation process, even when they see themselves as kind of scientists. However they were designed by men. Brown and White technologies entail different views, while white goods are portrayed as serviceable and simple to use, brown goods are portrayed as complex, clever technologies that require skills in handling and are purchased by men who see it as an activity of self-expression. Marketing and retailing play a role in framing demand, there is an unclear line between representing, constructing and controlling the customer. Marketing and Retailing too are part of the social shaping of technology.
Gendered inscriptions are reflected in future projections, where an elimination of household labour is not intended. The core aim of smart housing, like controlling of heating, lighting, information, is the integration, so centralized control of functions. A labour-saving, self-cleaning house is not an objective. The men who produce prototypes of the intelligent house ignore the fact that the home is a place of work - for women. The smart house is a deeply masculine vision of a house.
Alternatives to individualized Housework
We need to remind ourselves that things can be different, there were alternative approaches to housework. Victorian feminists sought to redesign homes, realizing that the exploitation of women was embodied in the design of houses. The solution was to socialize household labour and childcare. Kitchenless houses were designed, with cooperative residential housekeeping centers.
The technologies of biological reproduction
Biological reproduction technologies cause excitement and anxiety both. What this obscures is that our choices are highly constrained, we are selecting from a restricted range of technological options that are shaped by political and economic interests. Professional interests, and the role of state or gender, class and race are shaping. The evolution of in vitro fertilization illustrated this, as actually being an unsuccessful technology.
The Sexual Relations of contraceptive technologies
The pill is credited both with enabling women to control their fertility and brought massive social changes for women. But birth control practices are as much dependent on a society’s attitude to sex and women as on effective technologies. The use of birth control required a morality that permitted it. Science was also playing a role in sustaining women’s oppression, by naturalizing sex and gender. The modern deconstruction of gender allows to shift the analysis of Reproductive technologies: They contribute to the stabilization of meanings of the body. Modern bodies are made and remade through science and technology, they are too, technological artifacts. The pill has constructed a universal female body, it actually made women the same. All pill users now have the same cycle length, it homogenized women’s reproductive functions.
–> There is no pure nature to return to, though. In a world where sex, gender, bodies and sexuality can be altered, we need to engage with technology and argue for different kinds based on social justice. In highlighting the way technologies do not have to be the way they are, the social shaping approach provides scope for human agency and political intervention in creating future technologies.
Ruth Schwarz Cowan: the industrial revolution in the home
Traditional narratives about technology and society usually put grand machines in the foreground, but an important technological revolution has happened at home and this industrialization and it’s impacts are quite peculiar. The basic tenets of traditional interpretations for the industrialization on modern families were: The family as a basic unit disappears, women will have way more time, the household is no longer the place for production, families become smaller. Modern women are in trouble, and the results are role anxieties, divorces, and so on. Many Americans believe this to be true, hence they try to regain family solidarity by learning crafts like baking bread or they dismiss the feminist movement. These reaction root in the sociological analysis of the technological change’s impact on families.
Little evidence backs this theory, as families in England or France have been rather small and had routinely employed domestic servants and there’s doubt whether preindustrial housewives had more pressure on them than today’s women. And it’s hard to compare rural families of 18th century with higher class families of the 20th century. Middle class women of 19th century hardly had to do any chores, in 1950 they bore the weight all by themselves.
Cowan focuses on middle class American women. They were defined as actual or potential readers of several magazines and their non fiction articles and ads were used as sources. Based on these magazines, the most drastic changes occurred between end of 1st world war and the depression, when ironing was replaced with electric ironing, the washing machine was introduced and bathrooms were standardized. Many homes were provided with hot water heating, central heating and wood or coal stoves were replaced. Canned foods and more refrigerated varieties of food were introduced and people increasingly ate outside the home. These were enormous technical changes, no less profound than the change from the hand loom to the power loom. But it feels odd to speak of industrial revolution connected with housework. Though seeing it this way allows for certain questions we readily ask about textile workers - did structural changes occur, were new jobs created? And the answer is yes:
–> Household work, like so many other types of work, expands to fill the time available
The ideologies changed as well, housework was no longer a chore, but an emotional trip. Laundering meant loving your child, feeding was about loyalty and affection, and cleaning was about protective maternal instincts. If these weren’t met, a woman felt guilty or embarrassed. Guilt used to be dealt, when a woman abandoned her child, now she felt guilty for sending her son to school with scuffed shoes.
The predictions about divorces didn’t roll out, there was a negative correlation: The more income a man had, the less likely for a woman to be working. Women in the higher social classes should actually have fewer functions and be more likely to seek paid employment or divorce, but the contrary was true.
What is the link between technical and social changes? According to Cowan these are advertisers. (hypothesis)
This teaches us general lessons:
–> the standard model of the impact of modern technology on families needs a revision, the changes were not the ones the model predicted, the functions of the mother have increased and the dissolution of families didn’t occurred
–> Our standard notions about the changes of work forces under pressure from technological change also need revision: We expect structures to become more highly differentiated - instead, the worker became less specialized, with the American housewife having to fulfill different tasks), We expect managerial functions to increase - but the woman was idealized as both the manager and worker, while she was a manager before We expect the emotional context to disappear - while the work of women has been emotionalized
Anne-Jorunn Berg: A gendered socio-technical construction: the smart home
This study focuses on the home of tomorrow, the smart home and the importance of gender in the innovation process. The questions are:
The aim is to analyze how innovation can be said to be a gendered processes and the smart house can be seen to be a gendered sociotechnical construction.
Focus of research are the
All these concepts do not mention or include or address housework. They all do not differ radically from technologies already in existence, all that is new is the integration itself and linking different appliances.
Housework: Out of Sight, out of mind
For Honeywell, the smart home does more things the way you’d like to have them, which is directed at the owner of the house. The advantages are comfort, security, convenience, energy saving and entertainment. The job the smart home does, does not refer to any real job in the house. NAHB is quite similar in it’s approach, the smart home makes it comfortable and easier to live in, but housework again is invisible. Xanadu does encompass some hints are housework, by increasing comfort and giving families the opportunity to spend more time together, but this is ambiguous. Housewives are considered important, but we are left unclear as to whether their work is meant when they claim, they’ll reduce drudgery.
For the interviews, Berg conducted, it was explicitly mentioned, that the focus would lie on housework, and yet this issue wasn’t addressed and the interviewed were rather surprised about this angle. At honeywell they considered the automatic light switch to be a relief for women with wet laundry on their arms, Xanadu claimed the robot who could serve drinks (while they still had to be poured by someone and serving drinks is hardly housework) or a robot would suggest a menu, which still had to be cooked.
-> The designers and engineers knew little about a women’s work
Woman as a social group: relevant but absent
So who is the target group? A relevant social group according to Pinch and Bijker are groups of individuals for whom an artifact has a shared set of meaning. Consumers or customers should be included in this definition.
Women are a relevant social group in the development of the smart house: They possess skills and knowledge about the home that should be a resource in the design process. Women could be an important target in the marketing of the house.
However, women are hardly included, instead a technically interested male is seen as consumer. The designers have failed to visualize in any way the user/consumer of their innovation. In so far as they have one in mind, it is someone in their own image. They have ignored the fact that the home is a place of work and overlook women, who’s domain they are effectively altering.
Gendered innovation process, gendered technology
There is an absence of women in the innovation process and this sociotechnical construction is not intended to change gender inequality. Technology though is a process, open to interpretation. However, to observe the gendering in the early stages allows to understand what happens subsequently. In this case we witness a technology push, rather than a consumer pull, its inspiration lies not in the practices of everyday life but within a fascination for technology. The gender implications are clear: technology is a masculine domain and an interest in technology is seen as constitutive of masculinity. When technological possibilities lead, the result is a highly masculine concept.
-> The smart home is unlikely to substitute any time in housework. The construct reflects a male idea of the home and responds to male activities. It is gendered in what it leaves out - its lack of support for changes in the domestic sexual division of labour.
Moyra Doorly: A woman’s place: Dolores Hayden on the ‘grand domestic revolution’
In the last half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, there was a remarkable school of feminists thought that tied together architecture and economics in a cogent social theory. These ‘material feminists’ demanded a grand domestic revolution. They wanted wages for housework and set up new kinds of neighborhood organizations, such as housewives cooperatives and they explored radical new types of buildings. The central object was the socialization of domestic work. All household labour and child care was to become social labour, in neighborhoods.
One idea by Melusina Fay Peirce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman proposed groups of 12-50 women, who would organize cooperative associations to perform all domestic work collectively and charge their husbands for these services. By membership fees they would purchase a building to serve as headquarter and furnish it with mechanical equipment for cooking, laundry, etc. and eventually people with skills would be hired. The private houses were kitchen-less.
Alice Austin described in 1916 a feminist social city that farmers and urban workers planned for the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. Austin developed plans for kitchen-less houses, as he criticized the waste of time of individual cooking. In her plans, a network of underground tunnels linked the houses and provided the infrastructure for dirty dishes to be washed and returned, laundry and more.
These ideas never came into practice, Dolores Hayden describes its ideas as part of a lost feminist tradition that stems from a time of packed urban populations. More paid work for women meant less servants for middle class housewives. While the society seemed to be moving forward, housewives were increasingly isolated in suburbs, while their kids went to school and their husbands to work. Small gadget were cheap enough to be purchased and cemented the housework to be located in the private household and done by women.
The average household was soon equipped with enough equipment to service a primitive village, and today architecture is still a man’s world. Much could be learnt from Victorian architects.
Anni Dugdale: inserting Gräfenberg’s IUD into the sex reform movement
In 1929 the Grafenberg rind, the first intrauterine device (IUD) was introduced at the Sex Reform Congress. The women active in the sex reform movement naturalized a new corporeality for all women through the contraceptive technologies they took up and distributed. The ring was promoted by the women and won their support because it configured the bodies of its users in a way that manufactured the new women’s body - as imagined by the sex reformers.
Gräfenberg’s design was derived from the stem pessary, along with some other doctors that also contributed to the design with their own findings and inventions. There were several doctors, that were seeking to alleviate the misery of working people through liberalization and improvement of contraception and abortion.
Gräfenberg tinkered with the different devices and the outcome is based on a series of contested decisions (as social shaping studies suggest). Social constructivist locate the process of design in the social contexts where they occur, but there is hardly documents available. The analysis perspective lies upon how the Grafenberg ring inscribed the new women’s bodies and desires and thereby constituted the ring as a a contraceptive that could bear the goals of the sex reformers. The new woman’s body was materialized. This stands against a technical determinist vision, but rather sees technologies, bodies and new patterns of sociality as made together.
The interplay of the new ideology of consumption - that replaced social rankings and incorporated the notion that everyone could access pleasure and services - and the dismantling of the patriarchal order and discovery of female sexuality and choice lay the groundwork for an ideology that would absorb the technology in it sexual politics. Gräfenberg positioning his device as both new and scientific and along other contraceptives (which didn’t label the ring as ideal, it was more a matter of personal taste) associated a set of characteristics that could be coupled with the sex reform movement.
–> Gräfenberg thus participated in the materialization of a new corporeal order. The new woman’s body was just as much a fabrication.
Nelly Oudshoorn: The decline of the one-size-fits-all paradigm, or, how reproductive scientists try to cope with postmodernity
The dominance of gynecology over andrology is an example for the institutional and discursive processes of othering in biomedical sciences. A profound change emerged in the subject-object dichotomy in a specific area: Reproductive Sciences. It roots in the othering of the woman and therefore universalization.
The institutionalization of woman as the other
The process of othering is surprisingly recent. Medicine saw male and female bodies as similar, whereas the female body was understood as a lesser version. Only in the 18th century, differences were identified and focused on, like the skeleton and later muscles and veins, cells or brain. There was a clear shift from similarities to differences. It was accompanied by new notions of women and men being not the same, but complementary opposites. The female body became the medical object par excellence and scientists tried to find the ultimate cause of otherness, e.g. the uterus. This eventually led to setting apart women’s bodies in specialism: Gynecology, followed up by clinics, journals, etc. This was not paralleled by a male specialism. The female body was transformed into an easily accessible guinea pig for tests and research. Sex endocrinology integrated the model of the female body as reproductive in their studies and intervened in menstrual cycle and the menopause, including natural features in the domain of medical intervention.
One Size Fits All
As a result, the first means of contraception focused on women. The development was fostered by a feminist who convinced a doctor to develop a pill that would be universal, could be used by women of all races, classes and genders. The One Size Fits All approach relied upon the groundwork of othering, which directed the focus on similarities among women. Women as individual test groups, were replaced with cycles as representation. These discourses constructed women’s bodies as universal.
The cycle of four weeks was a rather arbitrary decision by Pincus, who noted that women would be distressed if their period disappeared. The medication was tested in Puerto Rico, where some pregnancies happened. The fail was accredited to the users, not to the technology.
-> The concept of similarity functions as the cornerstone for the development of universal technologies, the underlying theoretical assumption is that technologies can be made to work everywhere because scientific knowledge is universal.
The pill though, was not adopted worldwide, but by middle- and upper class women in the Western world. It is made for people that can take medication regularly, do not have to hide contraceptives and have access to health control.
The Cafeteria Discourse
In the 70ies, along with critique, a new stance on diversity was developed. Locality and individuality became central concerns in Western culture. Family planning programs were pushed to finding diverse methods, to have the technology adapt to the people and not people adapt to technology. It was thought of as a cafeteria model where people are encouraged to use control, according to their own preferences. This eventually also led the R&Ds to include a new group: men. While contraceptives were so far considered as something women were responsible for - this is now challenged by feminists. Them and governments alike are calling out for contraceptives that are male.
The paradigm, in which men possessed the subject position and women were the target, is changing, with men testing contraceptives on their own sex and women adopting the subject position and being in decision-making position.
Control or Choice?
so how do the cafeteria approach (that emphasizes diversity) and the one size fits it all approach fit together? There are some continuities, for example how global problems are being linked to personal problems. Furthermore the ambiguity of the cafeteria approach is replacing individual choice and control with the control of the state or the health worker (who has to remove a transplant). It also making a difference between those, that can chose and those that are deemed to be controlled with a stricter fertility control.
The cafeteria approach has disrupted the subject object positions but it has been replaced with a focus on a difference between categories of men and women who are more or less considered to be responsible. This remains a critical issue.
Introduction:
Military technology has contributed centrally to the shaping of our world, one if it’s central features, the dominance of the countries of the north over those of the south, is in part the legacy of innovations in military technology in Europe, like the gun-carrying ships. Military concerns also influence civilian technologies, as the Internet stems from the concepts of the ARPANET. Of all spheres of technology, none is more stereotypically masculine than military technology, which is also materialized in the artifacts of war, like a jet cockpit. There is a huge and often discussed involvement of the industry, which is often discussed in the terms of a “military industrial complex” which exaggerates some aspects, but there’s little doubt, that the nature of technology is profoundly affected by the institutions in which it is produced and by those in which it is used.
The fourth part closes with a political remark which underlines the authors’ intention to no remain purely academic in pursuits, but also maintain a critical edge.
Janet Abbate: Cold war and white heat: the origins and meanings of packet switching
Abbate’s take on packet switching - it is often considered as a technology with obvious advantages, but the success was not automatic, it had to be socially constructed. It was never adopted because of purely technical criteria, but always because of it fitted into a broader socio-technical understanding of how data networks could and should be used.
The success of the Arpanet depended on packet switching, but the success of packet switching also relied upon the Arpanet.
[Very very very reduced summary, not really relevant to my studies]
Rachel N. Weber: Manufacturing gender in military cockpit design
Military as an institution has had a historical claim to masculinity, but the inherent masculinity is socially constructed. The bias against women is built in the construction and engineering of design guidelines. The height of the seat and the way handles and operational tools were to be reached, physically excluded women. The decision to change the ergonomics was highly disputed from different sides, as it entailed further costs and delay the purchase of Training Systems. In the end, a bill for further purchase was passed, that had the precondition of a seating suitable for female combat roles.
Donald MacKenzie: Theories of technology and the abolition of nuclear weapons
MacKenzie here conducts a thought experiment, using theories to answer the question, how society could get rid of nuclear weapons. The applied theories are “technological systems theory”, “cognitive perspectives, with tacit knowledge”, “Structural Sociology, including modernization theory, patriarchy theory and Marxism” and “Actor-Network-Theory”.
The dominant risk of the endeavor is obviously the secret circumvention of a state by hiding away weapons.
Assumptions: The process would take 20-30 years, the agreement would include acceptance of monitoring and inspections and it would include a ban on missiles. Also assuming that there is human intelligence and surveillance and a breakout would lead to military action.
Nuclear Weapons from a Systems Perspective:
Systems perspective implies that technologies cannot be understood in isolation, but only in their systemic context. Seeing Nuclear weapons as the products of technological systems poses the question, whether they could be made useless if they were unplugged from a system. Making a nuclear weapon requires quantities of material. The chief problem is the existence of large poorly or not documented stockpiles of these materials. They are subject to decay though and hence of limited value over time. The materials like Tritium are themselves part of technical systems. The cut-off of their production could render weapons useless. Furthermore, weapons would have to be directed towards a target, either by a missile or aircraft. Aircrafts can be intercepted, missiles pose a serious challenge to engineering, for the trade-off between weight, payload and range. Miniaturization places considerable demands on designers.
Nuclear Weapons and tacit, local knowledge
Technical knowledge is seldom fully explicit, even in the most advanced modern science, tacit knowledge is largely a local phenomenon. This challenges the notion, that knowledge about building a nuclear weapon cannot be eliminated. Human knowledge can be lost as a consequence of a prolonged hiatus. Nuclear weapons would have to be reinvented. The spread of nuclear weapons skills didn’t have characteristics of tacit knowledge spread (people moving, face-to-face-learning…) and yet it rather had the character of reinvention, than copying. All took longer than the original innovation, involving hundreds or thousands of staff and knowledge about prior projects did not ease the effort. Also spies knowledge (that was only conveyed in text) couldn’t solve all problems.
The Social preconditions of Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear weapons are not self-evidently necessary, but under certain social conditions they appear so. It appears the risk of major war between industrialized countries is the precondition that needs to be eliminated. Political scientists point out that the rarity of world war since 1945 is due to the existence of nuclear weapons and the high costs which outweigh benefits, but it’s not the vulnerability of the states alone. There are mutual benefits that make war unlikely, like former foes are experiencing in the European Union. The optimist view would suggest that modernization leads to a spread of democracy and trade and warlike influences diminish. A feminist twist suggest that warlike tendencies and male power are associated and hence a weakening of patriarchy implies a weakening of war tendencies too. The role of capitalism is ambiguous though, it is seen both as a force for war and for peace, a perhaps better reasons sees democracies as decisive. Electorates can be in favor of war too, hence democracy is not a guarantee but plausibly a force for peace.
Actor-Network Theory
The theoretical flaw in previous perspectives is the notion of social structures as stable. There is rather an open-ended interaction between a multitude of actors and a social structure is a precarious social and technical outcome. The development of weapons is a heterogenous engineering, both constructing and maintaining technical artifacts and relationships to human actors. The ANT hence suggests extreme caution, as everything is uncertain and reversible. Also, the properties of all actors are relational, the very act of nuclear disarmament might change the way states behave. ANT can also suggest creating counter-networks that give the disarmament some stability. And the theory is also open towards technical innovations changing social possibilities. There is no technical fix but the potential of technical verification shouldn’t be underestimated, as the radioactive materials leave traces. Verification is also a socio-technical process, whistleblowers could play a critical role as societal verifications.
[The discussion part is basically a summary of the good and bad thoughts based on the theories]
Conclusion:
The risk of circumvention of the agreement by secret development of large arsenals thus seems to be limited. The development of small arsenals of crude nuclear weapons is not negligible. So it seems we have to approach the abolition of nuclear weapons as a process: We do not know and shouldn’t pretend to know the solution of all the problems it may throw up. This is not a reason for delay of the start, actions taken now can provide great ease of later stages of the process (e.g. control tritium production). All this ultimately is based on trust, which can be build up or destroyed via interactions. It might become feasible though if we see it as a process. An agreement of this magnitude could be a remarkable declaration of trust and the very process might bring upon some of the social preconditions, like the alleviation of regional tensions or stable democratic governments. Complete elimination until 2005 [sic!] seems unrealistic, but major steps may be possible by then.