The social agency of technological artifacts

Abstract

Authors have, in various ways, attempted to account for the fact that technological artifacts are not neutral to society but are capable of significantly influencing or transforming the social context in which they are used. Technological artifacts may influence behaviors, attitudes, cultural beliefs, and modes of social organization in ways that are often not directly related to their intended functions. That they may do so has been observed in fields ranging from philosophy to technology studies to psychology to ergonomics. In this section, an attempt will be made to arrive at a typology of ways in which artifacts have been claimed in these various fields to affect their context of use. I am only aware of one previous typology of this kind, which has been presented by Richard Sclove (1995).19 My typology will incorporate some of his distinctions, but will also move beyond it. To conceptualize the (often unintended) influence that artifacts may have on their context of use, I will employ the notions of affordance and constraint.20 Artifacts, I claim, may affect their context of use in two ways. They may, first of all, afford, enable, allow, induce, stimulate, cause, necessitate or require certain events or states-of-affairs. For example, in vitro fertilization techniques allowed a distinction to be made between genetic motherhood and biological motherhood, and consequently required a renegotiation of the social status of motherhood and new social definitions of the social roles that genetic and biological mothers were expected to play. I will say that IVF techniques afford these events and states-of-affairs. Secondly, artifacts may discourage, prevent, constrain, prohibit or disallow, or outlaw events or states-of-affairs. For example, Winner (1980) has claimed that certain overpasses in New York were built to prevent bus access to Long Island, thus discouraging poor blacks from frequenting its public parks. In my terminology, the overpasses constrain certain events or states-of-affairs from taking place. It should be added immediately that affordances and constraints are not objective features of artifacts. Rather, the affordances and constraints that an artifact possesses depend on the setting or context of use in which it is used. For instance, the constraint imposed on the mobility of poor blacks by the overpasses in Winner's example depends not only on the material context of the bridge (e.g. buses that are too high to fit under them), but also on the social context (e.g. the fact that many blacks are poor and, hence, rely on buses for transportation), and on common beliefs and practices (e.g. the fact that it is not customary to hitchhike from New York to Long Island). Still, it is useful to attribute the constraint of limiting access to Long Island for poor blacks as a constraint to the aforementioned overpasses, and not to the overpasses plus the entire context in which they operate. For these overpasses are still the immediate cause that poor blacks are discouraged from visiting Long Island: it is because of them that buses do not go there. The affordances and constraints I am about to distinguish are distinguished by the type of event or state-of-affairs that they relate to: is it a behavior, a social role, an organizational form, a cultural belief, or yet something else that is afforded or constrained by an artifact? I will argue that it is useful to distinguish five basic types of affordances and constraints in artifacts. They are (1) behavioral (relating to the behaviors of users); (2) user-profile (relating to fixed attributes of users); (3) material and infrastructural (relating to the physical context required for the functioning of the artifact); social (relating to social structures afforded or constrained by the artifact) and (5) cultural (relating to cultural patterns and practices). It may be noticed that some of these types relate to micro-level phenomena (1 and 2), whereas others relate to phenomena that can be either micro or macro (3, 4 and 5). © 2006 Springer.