Upon opening the black box and finding it empty : social contructivism and the philosophy of technology

1) Social consequences of the technology: one of the major criticism levelled against the social constructivist is they conveniently removed their priority to study the consequences of technology, which the earlier scholars like Marx, Heidegger and others have done.  The top priority of SCOT scholars was unpacking the black box and describing it rather than understanding the value orientation that technology caused. Because of this, according to Winner, this group of scholars are unaware of the fact that technology itself is political and it leads to power structure and hierarchy.

 

2) Technology/ science relationship: Langdon winner argues that the very root of the conceptual mistake done by the social constructivist is related to their conception of technology is equal to science or there are no boundaries.  This leads them to argue that the sociology of science and its premises can be used for a better understanding of technology and technological change. For example, winner says “As they go about opening the Black box, the historians and sociologists in this school of thought follow methodological guidelines established during the past two decades within the sociology of science, in particular, an approach that studies the sociology of scientific knowledge (Collins, 1983) ".

 

3) Irrelevant social groups: the major defect of social constructivism, according to Winner, is their misunderstanding of social groups involved and not involved in a technological phenomenon. They have labelled them as 'relevant social group'.  The author argues this as a narrowness in both theoretical and analytical understandings.   The dominant narratives are rewritten through this representational understanding, but what about those who are outside of this pale. Does he argue that you can make a dichotomy of cyclists and anti-cyclists, but what about who is out of its imagination? Are we going to reduce and generalise them as anti-cyclist? And still, is the cyclist the referral and central point of debate?  The winner argues that this kind of beurocratic and pluralistic approach still lead us to issues we deal in understanding the technology.

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