The era of technical and scientific progress presented mankind with numerous inventions. In machine building, the term technological determinism gained a crucial significance. Utopian ideas in terms of technical implementation of the early twentieth century began occupying the concept of scientific thought (Smith, 22). The concept of technocracy, however, confronted critics of T. Jefferson and R. W. Emerson’s negative approaches but faced with Henry Adams’s improvement of technological devices’ value in facilitating life (Smith, 26).
Lewis Mumford along with Jacques Ellul and Langton Winner contributed greatly to the provision of technocratic perspectives. In Mumford’s work “Technics and Civilization” the point that culture emerged before technics in their evolution, as well as the point that rivalry between peoples and countries provoked the flow of technical thought, are underlined. The notion of the word technique falls into the complex integration of mechanical devices and technologies of mental and organizational activity into society (Smith, 29).
Social shaping of technology (SST) is a debatable theory that contradicts points used in technological determinism in order to emphasize the social factor to provide the unity of form and substance of technologies erected by other than just subtle nature (Russel & Williams, 39).
Before it appeared SST underwent several direct approaches on the internal and external context of historical events to force on SST; economical interest in terms of gaining more productivity and profits; delivery and maintaining scientific insights within closely related sciences. In recent times when progress has drawn to a head, such trends of SST are identified: mutual integration of scientific thoughts in terms of collaboration; growth of idea implementation according to social co-relation of change and productivity; perpetual influx of innovations caused by individuals’ activity. In fact, social sciences and their variations in reciprocal impacts on the technological results determined the socio-cultural nature of shaping technologies.
The framework of technology essence strikes with the philosophical treatment of whether technology has a political coloring. The historical and social artifacts assist people’s life helping to simplify their life. Many devices needed for different uses or various layers of society appeared due to lending demands to politically conscious officials. Moreover, many technological devices serve to stimulate order and action within people.
According to Winner’s theory, one of the requirements for technologies to have political background is the emergence of specific social circumstances; another one concerns the controversial approach that relationships of social and political character do not identify the similarity in their intentions (Winner, 32). In other words, what for the economy is a great source of profit, metallurgical plants, for instance, is for the society harm toward ecology and people’s health respectively. Also, technologies are supported by means of acts agreements and amortization efforts due to activities of politics.
Science is realized by many people through the extent of technologies. Their values can be used a money-making for the tycoons. That is why technocracy is the connection of technological supplements worked out by a group of interested people in order to gain some advantages. James Burnham criticized the current intention of predominant technocracy possession by the elite of technocrats outlining the idea of the capitalist impact on wrong management of technologies fruits. In ‘Self-interested elite’ model he saw the resolving of the problem by governmental and intellectual support.
Thus, new frameworks of economic and social restructuring with a generation of the new elite can provide greater development of technologies. Servants of the power model state that the crucial importance of technology for society and economy tends to confront state restructuring to prevent the current elite of people (Eliot & Eliot, 66). This approach coincides with the theme of the intellectual safeguard program so needed in society.
The scientific thought forestalled its further dimensions. Before the eighteenth century mankind was poorly provided attempts to find out and form the mechanisms to facilitate their life and relationships concept in it. Factories forgot about hand-made labor, many devices proved the efficient and productive work in machinery, medicine, metallurgy, etc. All terms and ideas above served in their historical cut as a factor to force on the nature of technique causing an exponential increase of science.
Such steps as separation of working process between employees and supplying them with contemporary amenities to shorten terms of producing goods are the favor of plenty of mechanisms and devices provided theoretically and practically by means of such streams as technological determinism, the social shape of technologies as well as concepts of technological policy and technocracy (Dickson, 47). These ones fastened the process of new theories and innovations promotion for mankind in the twentieth century until now.
Reference List
Smith, MR, ‘Technological determinism in American culture’, in RM Smith & L Marx (eds.), Does Technology Drive History?: The Dillema of Technological Determinism, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 18-35.
Russell, S & Williams R 2002, ‘Social shaping of technology: frameworks, findings and implications for policy with glossary of social concepts’, in KH Sorensen & R Williams (eds.), Shaping Technology, Guiding Policy: Concepts, Spaces, and Tools, Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 37-131.
Winner, L 1986, ‘Do artefacts have politics?’, The whale and the reactor: a search or limits in an age of high technology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 19-39.
Elliott, D. & Elliott, R. (1976) ‘The Technocracy’, The Control of Technology, Wykeham Publications, London: 51-101.
Dickson, D. (1974) ‘The ideology of industrialization’, Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change, Fontana, London: 41-62.