Criticism
In 1993, Langdon Winner published an influential critique of SCOT entitled "Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology." In it, he argues that social constructivism is an overly narrow research program. He identifies the following specific limitations in social constructivism:
- It explains how technologies arise, but ignores the consequences of the technologies after the fact. This results in a sociology that says nothing about how such technologies matter in the broader context.
- It examines social groups and interests that contribute to the construction of technology, but ignores those who have no voice in the process, yet are affected by it. Likewise, when documenting technological contingencies and choices, it fails to account for those options that never made it to the table. According to Winner, this results in conservative and elitist sociology.
- It is superficial in that it focuses on how the immediate needs, interests, problems and solutions of chosen social groups influence technological choice, but disregards any possible deeper cultural, intellectual or economic origins of social choices concerning technology.
- It actively avoids taking any kind of moral stance or passing judgment on the relative merits of the alternative interpretations of a technology. This indifference makes it unhelpful in addressing important debates about the place of technology in human affairs.
Other critics include Stewart Russell with his letter in the journal "Social Studies of Science" titled "The Social Construction of Artifacts: A Response to Pinch and Bijker".
Read more about this topic: Social Construction Of Technology
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
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—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)