Science, Technology and Society essays

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Social values and technology

Technology exists in the form of a complex system which continuously evolves, shapes and gets shaped by societal mores, power dynamics, money flows, communication networks and work coordination frameworks. Creation of artifacts and material culture is a pursuit of social facts as much as it is of technological progress. For a holistic appreciation of progress, societal forms of authority, power and privilege - which are deeply embedded in technological endeavours cannot be overlooked. For example, taming the forces of nature to harness energy demands developing a rulebook of coordinated action, institutional hierarchy and public order. These activities and the actors at work, shape the socio-politico economic system with its own idea of progress; forms and quality of human associations and relationships. An imprint on culture gets engineered with the design and adoption of technology. Humanitarian concepts of social equity, civil liberty and cultural pluralism inevitably derives new meaning when technology interfaces with society. In that sense, determinism does not hold water - as there exists a reinforcement mechanism between society and technology. Thus, technology and society cannot be contained in water tight containers for analysis. Cognizance of their symbiotic relationship and having a grasp on the direction of change of one, in consequence of change of another - for which awareness becomes critical, is essential to imagine sustainable social change. Possibilities of change are within the realm of human choice and intervention. For technology to peacefully coexist with the societal aspirations of good life, long range thinking is imperative. Biases and prejudices, which are often intangible, find their ways in tangible designs that go without scrutiny. Political identities of technology need a closer look to make them more suitable for the progress of human beings as a collective. For that, one must be ready to shed deeply held views to have a meaningful dialogue on development through technology. Only then can an egalitarian and equitable society materialize.

Science as a construct

One of the fundamental assumptions of pursuit of science is its objectivity. The very nature of inquiry lies in the fact that it is amenable to juxtaposition in terms of the values it espouses and the positivist reality it discovers. As such, the flow of a temporospatial delimitation of science necessitates it to take advantage of hindsight and question the values of what science stands for. The postcolonial and feminist studies have showed how the biases of science has made its stance weaker and, exposed the contradictions and complexities of the ontological musings. In the article - Putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial by Suman Seth, we learn how the colonial context shaped science. The unequal power/knowledge conditions in the colonial landscape provided a breeding ground for insinuations which created a rift between forms of knowledge hitherto considered to be a whole. Can we comprehend science to be a mission? In the context of African exploration, the author mentions how quinine prophylaxis was more than just a discourse of medicine. It was ‘a tool of empire’ - an artifact whose shadows fall not only in pride of drug discovery but also of racial conquest and superiority. The same is true of bioprospecting of herbs in colonies where abundance and deprivation walk side by side. The biases are nurtured at the altar of claims of modernity and good life - all in the name of science. Globality becomes a defining phenomenon which caters to a new world order of ‘hybrid knowledge’ with an emphasis on paradigms and their incommensurability of epistemological underpinnings. Nevertheless, exaltation of postmodernity has its own pitfall of problematizing criticism and perfection of ambivalence towards better grasp of the world. Particularities of historical value may be a step of faith towards better sciences, notwithstanding the doctrines of universalism like that of human rights.

Travesty of science not only is a subject of geopolitical currents in the shaping of worldview but also in laboratory settings where individuals supposedly operate in a microcosm having an idealized environment of inquiry. In the article - The egg and the sperm by Emily Martin, we witness how cultural stereotypes affect scientific meaning making. Menstruation cycles are deemed an instance of wastage whereas production of sperm a generation. The author asks - “How is it that positive images are denied to the bodies of women?” In the same vein, the egg is hallowed in the conventional feminine passivity in contrast to the agile sperm speeding towards fusing chromosomes. Such notions reify subtle masculinities which negate the authority of feminine within the discourse of science. Terms and conditions of culture deepens metaphorical substance of examples. For scientific thought to be closer to reality it has to shed its “harmony of illusions.” The self-aggrandizement nature of scientific thought can prove to be self-defeating if it doesn’t give due recognition to cultural expectations, egalitarian conventions and revisionist moorings.

Development discourse

Science as a medium of development has complicated connotations to the idea of progress. The very heart of science lies in being progressive i.e. to build upon the footsteps of what has preceded. This implication has also found resonance in socio-economic transformations of societies. It is a widely known fact that the societies are seen to evolve from engagement in agriculture to industries to services to knowledge systems. In this schema of understanding, any transformation which might imply taking a back step is not congruent with science. It would be deemed as regressive - fit for primitive tendencies.

In the lecture by Pankaj Sekhsaria on seeing development through differential meaning of innovation, three things stood out. First, the idea of innovation is intricately linked to development. Innovation is a process through which a society passionately imagines ways to do things differently. Social change is driven by a culture of innovation which carries with it a narrative of greater universal happiness, prosperity and well-being. Any status quo, inevitably indicates a stagnation - not just of practice but also of thought. In a traditional sense of human condition, it is unimaginable to correlate dignified life with a stagnant mind. Second, innovation is best witnessed at its rootedness to the context - the thesis of jugaad. It cannot be manufactured at a laboratory devoid of humanistic fervour. The example of automobile assemblage was cited as an innovation which goes unrecognised. The resultant was a design artifact respecting the immediate context of its usage. The front suspension, the tyre rims, the steering, the bed floor - almost all came in being with conscious thought of what is relevant for its day-to-day operational purpose. It embodied the fundamentals of functionalism in its truest sense - with scant regard for fuel efficiency or emissions standards. Third, the wider debate on innovation should not relegate itself to good-bad dichotomy but to a greater acceptance of knowledge in unconventional forms. The example of development of scanning tunneling microscope is illustrative of how the quality control framework of science can be disputed if one were to discover what goes behind the scenes. The notion of ideating superiority of one form of knowledge over another not only limits our choices but also robs away the ability to appreciate diversity in evolutionary processes of cultural ingenuities.

One aspect which Shiv Visvanathan highlighted in his book - A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development, but found missing in Pankaj Sekhsaria’s lecture is the role of violence in the process of development. The nature of violence is such that it demands a metaphysical inquiry to understand its powerplay. It throws up questions from the ethics playbook to redefine politics of altruism, goodness, justice and quality. The role of authority in forming direction of science is particularly emphasised in the text. It shows the spatio temporal fluidity of moral imperatives which guides scientific endeavors - and their rationalizations. Benefit of hindsight enables us to dig deeper into consequences - one of which is to see the development agenda as a genocidal project of experimentation with human values by a laboratory state. If this were to be true - can a post-developmentalism philosophy hold a better answer to challenges like climate change and poverty which plagues the world?

Expertise and knowledge

Scientific knowledge embodies fundamental assumptions which shapes its ethos. These assumptions are problematic as they have a tendency to run against its premise of scientific knowledge being an objective knowledge. First, control and prediction is the purpose of knowledge. Second, measurements and concepts are subject to standardisation. Third, public disclosure of scientific uncertainties would be misunderstood. Fourth, lay knowledge is useless. Fifth, scientific methods and research can simulate reality. On the other hand, lay knowledge is rooted in the cultural ethos of fluid identities and relationships which accept uncertainty and the need for flexible adaptation rather than prediction and control. 

The case of public policy gets complicated when science interfaces society - as their inherent contradictions might get accentuated. Lack of institutional self-awareness and reflexivity of social diktats without scope of compromise severely limits public acceptance, and in worse case scenario - complete rejection. For example, in the context of Covid-19 vaccinations in India, we see how uptake of Covaxin is relatively less due to lack of details on skipping the phase three clinical trials. Reception of scientific expertise in this case could have been stronger if goodwill prevailed over respecting the ability of masses to assess, evaluate and understand. Furthermore, these nuances complexify notions of credibility and trust of expertise and significantly shape public policy outcomes.

This begs the question of how seemingly different worldview can coalesce for universal benefit. In this backdrop, the role of institutions and language as a common currency for knowledge construction becomes paramount. They enable infusion of credibility through deliberate attempts to the discourse of power/knowledge in the structural hierarchies. In relation to AIDS treatment activist movement, Epstein’s paper elucidates the mechanisms or tactics that AIDS activists pursued in forming credibility within the medico scientific complex - “the acquisition of cultural competence, the establishment of political representation, the yoking together of epistemological and ethical claims making, and the taking of sides in pre-existing methodological disputes.” These ingenuities bring to the fore the possibilities of negotiation for wider science engagement and the marked departure from totalitarian propensities of expertise.

Social endorsement and cultural legitimacy are consequential to appraisal of situated knowledge. As such, politics of group dynamics, human empowerment and transformative ideals inform knowledge making at multiple layers of public life.

Standards and Standardization

Standards act as mirrors of reality - though quite messy. To borrow from Heidegger’s thought - performativity of standards allows the possibility to “enframe” aspects of the world so as to make them appear as “standing reserve” - as something that can be summoned when needed. Enactments of repetition emboldens standards to assume an “ordered, regular and stable” identity. Polity and power play a crucial role in the process of standardization as it tends to “amplify certain aspects of the world while reducing others,” thereby effecting inclusion and exclusion of some ideas, thoughts and praxis. The text - Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott illustrates this phenomenon comprehensively. The “utopian social engineering schemes” are driven by four aspects concerning modern statecraft. First, administrative rendering of nature and society simplifications. Second, “a high modern ideology” which envisions mighty state apparatus, confidence in scientific & technical progress and subjugation of nature. Third, an authoritarian state which can deliver on the promises of high modern ideology. Fourth, a toothless civil society which cannot afford to put up resistance against the plans of an authoritarian state. These aspects contribute to production of a form of standards which sacrifices difference and variety, at the altar of convenience and hubris.

Despite its seemingly homogeneity, standards are also “spaces of diversity” which allows for continuing formation and reformations of its notions. Loconto and Demortain suggests their interaction in three spaces: standards in the making, standards in action, and standards in circulation. Standards in making is a space where different stakeholders assemble to negotiate construction of standards. It takes into account myriad “values, qualities, knowledge and semantics” which go into making standards. Standards in action evokes responses of users and enforcers upon exposure to standards. The common language of standard might be interpreted and appropriated differently in this space. Standards in circulation enables circulation of standards in “diverse geographic locales and sociocultural contexts.” Such circulation subjects standards to compete in the context of different “practices, competences, and ontologies” - which can further lead to revision of the standards. So, differences can be conceptualized as essential features of standards which make them richer.

Fundamentally, at the receiving end of standards are human beings. People's “work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview” are impacted by standards and standardization. Any aesthetic of appreciation thus remains incomplete without due consideration of cultural, institutional and political implications of standards and standardization upon humanities. 

Querying infrastructure

Understanding of infrastructure has shifted in consonance with the temporospatial politics of what needs to be built and done for human progress. The narrative of it being a support system is more or less persistent -- yet if one were to dig deeper the underlying complexities and contradictions can be unearthed. These can range from notions of plurality to standardization, functionalism to semiotics, practicality to poetry. In the text by Carse, the author delineates the evolving meaning of infrastructure over time -- and the actors and the actants thereof. From a French engineering term, the word infrastructure has been able to find a place in high-sounding political rhetoric of socioeconomic development. More particularly, in the post-war period, it upheld the ethos of “the modernist impulse to universalize, systematize and standardize.” The fascination of bureaucracy only grew stronger with the lessons drawn from development economics which incessantly obsesses itself to create foundations for economic activity and its resultant spillover effects. Apart from establishing the cultural hegemony of Bretton Woods twins, it is still debatable whether creating “infrastructure” enables “take-off.” The aesthetics of infrastructure is another dimension of enquiry wherein one can identify the role of senses, desire and fantasy to sustain its belief. In the article by Larkin, the author signifies how beyond the technopolitics infrastructure can be emotional and evocative in its demeanour -- which sometimes results in palpable definitions of clientelism and citizenship “to continually renew its political effect.” Given the plasticity of the meaning of infrastructure, ethnography serves as a potent instrument for probing. In the article by Star, the author mentions the emerging challenges of such a probe -- in the context of scaling up of study, working with big data and digital/physical interface. As a forward outlook, she proposes “studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indicators.”

Labour & society/technology

Technology is enmeshed with society -- so is society with technology. Social institutions and relations play a crucial role in shaping technological activities and artifacts -- by configuring thought at the stage of ideation and design, and influencing adoption of technology -- or resistance -- thereby having a say in technological “success.” Going by technological determinism's vantage point, technology can take precedence over society. Construed as an independent force effecting social changes -- regardless of the membership of technologists in the society -- technology can sustain a rhetoric of autonomy, self-determination and being an “outsider.” Such reciprocal relationship of interface and interaction between technology and society has profound effects on individuals -- to an extent where “which determines which” remains an everlasting subject of inquiry. In this sense, it becomes pertinent to ask both sets of questions with equal concern and emphasis: how technology causes society and how society causes technology. This allows the possibility of cognizance of the aspect that both can be actively instrumental in shaping each other -- and the lives people live.

A closer analysis of technologies of production throws open the black box of social dimensions implicating labour -- often sold by political quarters as signifiers of advancement and progress. One, technologies are consciously designed to eliminate human labour. In absence of equal bargaining power or genuine welfare state, this can contribute to strengthening exploitative capitalist-worker relationships. Moreover, such eliminations can be conditioned (often with the help of media) to retain unequal power balance between individuals/groups. For example, Cowan delineates how introduction of domestic technologies which sought to make household work less burdensome -- retained “emotionalization of housework” -- thereby upholding patriarchal inequities to the detriment of womenfolk. Two, technologies necessitate propagation of specific forms of occupational structure, education system and political institutions. In the name of cultural orientation, this can result in rendering certain attitudes, beliefs and values dispensable -- thereby totalizing cultures.  For example, Aneesh shows how algocratic modes of organization necessitated giving up communal life by call center workers in India for materialistic pursuits of economic imperatives. Three, technologies require disciplining, deskilling and homogenisation of independent minds for conformity to standards -- effectively leaving no space for creative work. Norms of job control attendant to such requirements are often institutionalized through more technological interventions -- like that of automation.

Implications of labour & society/technology are wide-ranging -- for modalities of work not only fetches bread and butter for individuals but also goes on to define notions of identity and limitations of human potential.

Ownership

One of the fundamental premises of profits in a neoliberal world is the proprietary relationship of an individual to their enterprise and its constituents. Such relationship bestows exclusive powers to access, benefit, consent, conserve, control, permit and of rights to the individual, and prevent “tragedy of anticommons.” Markets provide an institutional framework for transacting such relationships as they come with implicit guarantees concerning identities of authorship, claims and/or stewardship of participants -- a strong insurance against contingent liabilities -- in case of breach of trust. Nonetheless, markets are not perfect as they embody politics of inclusion and exclusion through their mandate of efficiency, price discovery and “packaging” -- particularly when they defy community logics of “quasi-sovereignty, collective authorship, and ethical capacity.” (Hayden 2003) In this regard, it is not just markets which go about constructing new normatives of knowledge performativity -- networks of actors, their perspectives, standards-setting agenda and legal-economic representations, play an equally critical role. Birch, in his essay on Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy, shows how values and valuations (which feed into pricing for ownership) are established by processes like “financialization, capitalization and assetization” -- notions far away from materiality or intrinsic property of an artifact -- embodying discursive assertions of expectation, hope, promise and speculation. Ontological morality of markets relies on managing reputations and sentiments with the assistance of corporate and governmental nexuses -- portraying a chimera -- inoculating itself from subjective judgements of social realities. 

The definitive design of ownership as an ideal of exclusivity is most notably challenged by the open access movement. Lessig, in the article on The Creative Commons, casts light on the controversial role of copyrights in restricting creativity and freedom -- thereby ushering in an “owned culture -- where the ability to cultivate culture is a function of the permission you can get from the culture owners.” He proposes an architecture which decouples the author from the publisher, enabling option for the freedoms to be granted, and contributing towards a “free culture” which can unshackle rights of people to produce and distribute culture as they deem fit. This is monumental not only for the cultural repercussions in fostering inclusivity and diversity but also to decimate monopolies in the knowledge industry and its homogenizing tendencies.

Triple Helix

The Triple Helix framework provides a conceptual ground to locate the interactions between university, industry and government in pursuit of innovation. Offering a standard-like heuristic, it proves to be a widely regarded transformational toolkit -- for theory and practice of knowledge systems. The “spheres of activity” embodied by the agents (i.e. university, industry and government) can be largely understood in terms of the functional properties. For example, the industrial sector operates as the site of production; the government ensures upholding of contractual obligations, stable interactions and lawful exchange (read law and order), and the university provides new knowledge and technology. This implicates on the lines of “synergy” -- where the objectives of “wealth generation, organized knowledge production, and normative control” reinforce each other to solve problems. Context-dependent pressures ensure that the framework remains dynamic -- in a sense, it constantly mutates and evolves based on concurrent integrations and differentiations of the agents. As such, the geographical configurement of the triple helix can also be pursued as an active ingredient in strategy for regional development. A study in Netherlands and Germany, which used this framework as an analytical tool, found out that (i) medium-tech firms contributed more to the synergy than high-tech firms (which can be attributed to embeddedness of the firm in society) and (ii) knowledge-intensive services tend to uncouple from regional economies (which can be attributed to footlooseness - where location of a firm does not play a critical role). (as cited in Smith and Leydesdorff, 2014) These findings highlight how the framework can become instrumental in shaping public policy narratives with its potential contributions to insights. 

Nevertheless, the Triple Helix framework is far from perfection. When evaluated in terms of structural, cultural, and epistemological moorings of technoscience vis-a-vis development discourse, its imperfection becomes glaring. As argued by Amir and Nugroho (2014), in the context of Global South, the framework ignores the import of local conditions and sociocultural historicities while propounding change. A technocratic and class-biased tunnel vision of that proportion could potentially result in catastrophic outcomes. Situated within the paradigm of neoliberalism, the framework largely excludes voices of those at the bottom-of-the-pyramid. By disengaging with the realities of social context it resembles more of a “political rhetoric” than a genuine model of innovation. The larger questions of “ways of knowing” remain unaddressed -- for its excessive obsession with academia as a space of knowledge production. Thereby the critical role of business firms, government bodies, public institutions, citizens, and consumer groups in knowledge production is almost dismissed. A fluid and accommodative framework which gives due consideration to sociocultural relationships, local embeddedness and epistemological reflexivities can prove to be a better alternative to the Triple Helix framework. This would be akin to a multi-helix framework -- where non–triple helix agents coexist and co innovate.

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