Social construction of technology

The Racialization of Print

Readers since Thomas Jefferson have believed it possible to judge entire races of people based on a single book, yet no one has attempted to explain the orig...

Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software

Choice Outstanding Academic Title Software is more than a set of instructions for computers: it enables (and disables) political imperatives and policies. Nowhere is the potential for radical social and political change more apparent than in the practice and movement known as

They Thought What?

Unpacking the history (and present) of science

Social construction of technology

Social construction of technology (SCOT) is a theory within the field of science and technology studies. Advocates of SCOT—that is, social constructivists—argue that technology does not determine human action; rather, human action shapes technology. Additionally, they also argue that the ways a technology is used cannot be understood without a thorough understanding of how that technology is embedded within its respective social context. SCOT is a response to technological determinism, and it is sometimes known as technological constructivism.

About — Every Object an Archive

We interview people about their experiences with technological objects that were once everywhere, but are now being replaced or redesigned. We are interested in the physical experience of living with these objects, their handfeel and relationships to our bodies. We are also interested in how they shaped our habits, relationships, and ways of being. Technologies are more than physical objects: whole worlds of infrastructure, process, policy and culture are built around them.

Eryk Salvaggio: Critical AI & Culture | Glossary — Cybernetic Forests.

Stochastic Flocks, Systems From Nowhere and other citable terms for describing AI systems without borrowing from cognition, by Eryk Salvaggio.

The Myth of the Paperless Office

Over the past thirty years, many people have proclaimed the imminent arrival of the paperless office. Yet even the World Wide Web, which allows almost any co...

Historical pragmatism and the internet

This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.

Social Dramas and Stories about Them

Victor Turner, Social Dramas and Stories about Them, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, Autumn, 1980, On Narrative

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | Meaningness

How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.

Techno-capitalism, Crisis Epistemology, and Disaster Ableism: How (not) to Respond to Generative AI in Higher education (My presentation @ #PhiDisSocCh6)

Introduction Techno-capitalism is a social system dominated by technology-driven capital, in which technological development is a primary vehicle for wealth concentration. Professors are currently …

CSDL | IEEE Computer Society

Operation Voder: AT&T, Bell Labs, and the Labor of Techno-Utopia at the 1939 New York World’s Fair

This article explores the labor demands of the Voder, the electrical speech synthesis machine developed by Bell Labs for AT&T’s 1939 New York World’s Fair exhibit. The article situates the Voder within the historical context of the fair, with the United States emerging from the Great Depression and political tensions escalating across the globe. By examining the decision to incorporate the machine’s young female operators into the exhibit, the article argues that AT&T executives used Voder operators to normalize a new vision of technological utopia that relied heavily and conspicuously on the infrastructural labor of women. Moreover, the article highlights the previously unacknowledged engineering contributions of Voder operators in the years before the fair, writing women into the origin story of a machine that laid critical groundwork for speech recognition and voice encryption technology.

Weizenbaum examines computers and society - The Tech

An article from the Tuesday, April 9, 1985 issue of The Tech - MIT's oldest and largest newspaper and the first newspaper published on the Internet.

The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov - Public Books

Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber ...

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)

ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [ Multimedia ] ___________________________

Toward a Critical Technical Practice

This is a chapter in Geof Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star, and Bill Turner, eds, Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, Erlbaum, 1997.