Introduction
The sociological theories discussed in this paper are Technological Determinism and Actor-Network Theory. Expressed, technological determinism (TD) is the view that innovation has a significant impact on daily human life. The notion that the online world is transforming society and the economy is one example of how this idea is dominant in campaign discourse and public perception. In the social sciences overall and organization study, TD has a lengthy and contentious history. According to TD’s detractors, technology on its own is socially defined. Social frameworks and technology co-evolve in an innovative process or as a result of the impacts of a particular technology.
An approach to the actor-network theory (ANT) is focused on the phenomenology of relational behaviors. In the early 1980s, technological and science studies were where it began, but since then, it has been studied in a variety of social science subjects (Fong, 2018). Since its inception, ANT has been interested in the act of organization, how social order is established, and the part that inanimate objects and other nonhuman beings serve in that effort. This ANT cohesive link is the main line of linkage to studying human topography. The sociological issue to be addressed in this paper is technology.
All human societies depend significantly on technology, which has both beneficial and harmful effects on people’s daily lives, and that is, in turn, impacted by them. Since the earliest modest commencement of human civilization during the Neolithic Period, comprehensive and specific collections of gadgets and devices have been created by a person over a long period and are made much more accessible. All socio-economic and cultural sectors depend extensively on technology, including business, transportation, communication, health care, armed services, agricultural production, power production, and learning.
The Greek words ‘techne’, which denotes a craft or an art, and logia, which represents a subject of study, philosophy, or reason, are the sources of the word technology. The two phrases collectively denote the art or science of crafting. Technology is, at its core, the application of information, innovations, and scientific breakthroughs to improve and even enliven people’s existence. In summary, it is the use of science to address issues or achieve a particular objective. Technology has long been a prominent topic of study in the natural and social sciences due to its importance in everyday human lives. The purpose of this task is to explore two social theories of technology, technological determinism and actor networks, proposed by academics to explain how technologies relate to individuals’ social, economic, and political actions.
Technological Determinism
Technological determinism is one of the dominant social concepts of technology advanced by academics to understand social advancement and development. What causes social change and improvement, or more accurately, what constitutes the force that propels history, is the crucial question of this concept. A vital component of a contemporary approach to life is technology, which allows individuals to control the environment to meet their fundamental and secondary requirements, which are the foundation for our ability to survive. Technology is unquestionably a representation of people’s values and control over their surroundings. Numerous people have seen it as the primary driver of social change and progress, which has led to the establishment of the philosophical and academic theory known as technological determinism.
Smith and Marx claim that the view that technology is a critical social force has its roots in the early phases of industrialization. According to modernization theory, society and its processes are under more pressure from technology-related changes than from any other source (Roland et al., 2019). Technological determinism advocates claim that since the technology was available before other aspects such as inequalities, it is more critical in explicating models and issues of contemporary civilization in the twentieth century. According to Smith and Marx, this point of view on modernization theory highlights two crucial aspects of this theory (Roland et al., 2019). A soft frame of reference that maintains technological determinism gets to control social change while also categorically responding to societal expectations. The second aspect is problematic viewpoints that regard technological advancement as an independent force completely unrestrained by social constraints.
Therefore, technological advancement is believed to determine social, economic, and ideological activity and promotion. Therefore, any human type of event, societal, financial, or unrealistic, is supported by a significant technological advancement, without which, according to proponents of this school of thinking, it probably would not have happened. For example, the printing machine, which came before the renowned Christian Renaissance of the sixteenth century, created the opportunity for an increasing number of individual Believers to have editions of the Bible in their households as compared to earlier, during which only the religious leaders were granted the luxury of having bibles.
As a result, people could read the Bible independently and spot instances of mischaracterization by the church leaders. Consequently, they passionately and willingly backed the vocal opponents of the Holy Roman Catholic clergy, including Martin Luther, John Knox, Thomas Calvin, and other prominent philosophers and theologians of the day (Kreimer & Vessuri, 2017). In this instance, photocopying technology improvement is directly related to the fundamental restructuring that occurred in the Christian community, especially in European Countries, and its cascading repercussions on other life-related spheres. Smith and Marx claim that the enthusiasm and faith in technologies as a gaining independence force promoted by intellectuals of the Transcendence Age, mainly during the eighteenth century, may be traced to the intellectual legacy of technical determinism.
The two streams of philosophy within the paradigm of technological determinism are vibrant and the other critical. Both contend that science and technology are effective agents of social change. Modernization theory postulates that other societal organizations, including art and religion, alter as technology advances and develops. Computers, for instance, have revolutionized the nature of labor and jobs across all professional groups. Writing letters decreased due to the telephone; however, the internet has significantly changed verbal relationships and, unlike the mobile phone, has left written evidence. Because the automotive revolution made it possible for people to move out of the downtown areas and into the suburban areas, it impacted how people were distributed around the country. However, opponents of modernization theory have criticized this theory for restricting the forces of societal advancement and change to only technological aspects.
Welsh academic Raymond Williams fiercely opposed technological determinism (Walton, 2019). He thought that this concept disregarded the significant influences of hierarchical social structures, their interactions, and the repercussions of social gatherings (Walton, 2019). To demonstrate how a particular social technique is conducted through which choices to transform advancement into a usable technology are established, he used the evolution of broadcasting computer technologies as an example. The need for this type of technology was signified by the urban evolution of society, which is how broadcasting came to be invented. Williams challenged technical determinists for arguing that technology advancement is a predestined occurrence (Walton, 2019). He believed that human choices about technology significantly impact how they are developed and the purposes they ultimately serve.
When radio began to be developed, the notion of making it into something comparable to the smartphone was put forth as an illustration of how this may happen. The fact that the significant American phone network rejected this demonstrates how the character of the technology being developed at any particular period in society is determined by those in power roles. Similar to how a system might not turn out to be what it was initially planned to be since it would be influenced and changed by the societal issues of the day. Economics and political developments may occasionally have an impact on the shapes and purposes of technology, but never in such a way as to be its lone determinant.
Actor-Network Theory
A progressively popular but hotly controversial theory called actor-network theory (ANT) seeks to explain how people interact with non-living things. People contend that ideas from the actor-network concept may help inform healthcare studies, particularly assessments of complex IT technology in healthcare service organizations. The actor-network model was proposed by Callon and Lamers and is based on a sociological study (Stadtfeld et al., 2017). The actor-network theory refutes the notion that society is shaped by human behavior and understanding. Actor-network theory advocates claim that human and nonhuman characters enact and build community life. All of these actors may participate in creating information, continually taking on a physical form. According to this hypothesis, every factor that has a causal impact on the development of scientific claims and theories qualifies as an actor. This includes scientists, background presumptions, research methods, strategies, social norms, and institutions. It is evident that having a happy state of mind is not necessary for an individual to be a performer in this sense; instead, they need to act in a way that some planned activity can explain. The relationships and exchanges amongst actors can therefore take many different forms; some players have the power to change other actors.
A network is a group of actors with permanent relationships and interpretations, which define the roles and responsibilities of the individuals inside the network. A network entails some level of closure as soon as it has developed, preventing new actors or relationships from joining the network and allowing for the collection of scientific evidence that is believed to be the consequence of transmissions within the connection. According to this concept, human tools, agents, and technologies are all products of networks made of various materials, not just people (Scheermesser, 2022). According to this idea, the social is seen as a coordinated network of multiple materials, encompassing people, social organizations, language, machines, and other things, rather than as a space that pertains to humans.
Conceptually, an approach that is based on the actor-network hypothesis helps understand the heterogeneity of actuality and the active function played by technology in this setting. This can be useful in understanding how relationships between various participants in a network result in societal effects. The fact that Actor-Network Theory offers a prism through which to analyze the function of technology in influencing social processes is of utmost significance in this regard.
The challenge of introducing technology into healthcare institutions can be more fully understood by paying enough attention to this molding role. It may also be practical in that it offers a sampling and analysis strategy that is grounded in theory. According to proponents of actor-network theory, interpersonal and technology are intertwined. This theory, according to Lamers and Verbeek, is focused on the thermodynamics of energy (Rabhi, 2017). The actor-network approach makes an effort to understand the development of a stable network of linked interests and how these connections are maintained and created.
Actor-network theorists are also interested in situations where a configuration has been unable to establish root. It presents notions like an actor, and transcription enrolment rates, among others, through which to watch the socio-technical environment and the aspects that require public disclosure in empirical investigation. It also has two main points of view, one conceptual and the other procedural. According to actor-network hypotheses, everything in both natural and social realms is continuously produced by the network of relationships in which it is positioned Turner (Yeom & Shin, 2020). It assumes that nothing exists in fact or forms apart from how those relationships are performed. These theories are deduced from Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism, which retains that all aspects of society depend on a single, profound collection of variables for advancement and change. Therefore, the Actor-Network theory will tie the sixteenth-century Christian Renaissance to a computer system of many causes acting in European nations at that specific moment instead of attributing it exclusively to improvement in digital printing.
Turner asserts that the actor-network theoretical approach, like other mechanical properties approaches, explains the overall quality of support or management of computers and obliquely diverse interactions that structure and reconfigure various actors (Stadtfeld & Block, 2017). This includes people, machines, institutions, objects, social networks, living organisms, spatial configurations, modules scale and volumes, and social inequality. According to the actor-network theory, creating a verifiable reality, hypothesis, or belief reduces putting these players in a reliable network. In this respect, it is assumed that scientific models, facts, and perceptions result from translations inside well-established networks.
Summary and Conclusion
Society and advanced technologies are inextricably linked; hence challenging to separate them. While social change and progress are necessarily brought about by technological advancement, as antiquity has demonstrated, social constructivists contend that the social environment plays a crucial role in determining how technology progresses. In other terms, technology has influenced society and society influences technology. Moreover, considering the diversity of the social and ecological realms, attributing social growth and transformation to a specific set of elements appears oversimplified and limited. Therefore, various social, democratic, and ideological aspects might justify societal change and evolution even while technological breakthroughs are essential for social progress and advancement. When examining the relationship between society and technology, it is impossible to govern the potential of fate, so a significant social occurrence may logically overlap with an important technological innovation that has also played a vital role in the events. For instance, the development of screen printing might quickly have occurred at the same time as a religious revival thought that had its day in the 16th and 17th centuries.
References
Fong, W. (2018). Depoliticization, Politicization, and Criminalization: How China Has Been Handling Political Prisoners since 1980s. Journal Of Chinese Political Science, 24(2), 315-339.
Kreimer, P., & Vessuri, H. (2017). Latin American science, technology, and society: A historical and reflexive approach. Takuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 1(1), 17-37.
Rabhi, H. (2017). The Weblog Genre. International Journal Of Actor-Network Theory And Technological Innovation, 9(2), 1-21.
Roland, A., Smith, M., & Marx, L. (2019). Does technology drive history? The dilemma of technological determinism. The Journal of Military History, 59(4), 728-790.
Scheermesser, M. (2022). The pivotal function of nonhuman actors in the acceptability of the body technology, actibelt®: a reconstruction based on actor-network theory. Nanoethics, 16(1), 81-93.
Stadtfeld, C., Hollway, J., & Block, P. (2017). Dynamic Network Actor Models: Investigating Coordination Ties through Time. Sociological Methodology, 47(1), 1-40.
Yeom, H., & Shin, Y. (2020). Academic and social adaptation and social achievement goals and relationships according to peer network characteristics using social network analysis. Korean Association For Learner-Centered Curriculum And Instruction, 20(13), 823-845. Web.