Re: Social construction of technology vs technological shaping of society
Good topic. This isn’t something I particularly hold close to my heart but I do feel strongly about it and is in fact a point I’ve raised many times in the past.
**1) Does society shape the evolution of technology?
**There wouldn’t be any technology without society, so that answers that unless I misunderstood. Perhaps I’m not following your intended context on “society”.
**2) Or does technological evolution pave a path that society follows?
**Both. Ultimately, there’s no true AI in existence. We create machines that are only capable of obeying algorithms that we program in. They only understand what we tell them, incapable of attaining new knowledge and calculating it. They only understand “yes” or “no”, I or 0. That’s what separates actual intelligence from artificial. So we create our own society but as a result, we also suffer the consequences of relying on technology so heavily.
3) Do we drive technology or does it change us?
Again, both. First, we drive it, then, we allow it to change us. For example, most children born within the past 2 generations have a common trend to be far less socially inept than those of us born in the 80s and before. I’m not including everyone, but when we were younger, we had to actually go out, ride our bikes or Power Wheels our friends’ or family’s houses, ring their door bells and actually speak with them face to face. All our social interaction was done entirely in person. No text messages, no Myspace or Facebook or social networking sites (closest thing we had was a chat client called miiRC), no Skype or mobile phone video conferencing, etc. It’s not that we didn’t have technology, we did, but it wasn’t as available to the public as it is today, let alone differences in ease of use being a huge factor as well.