Sociology of Technology

Catalog description

More than being an intricate, though largely unnoticed, part of our lives, technology has taken on an almost mythical role in our social imaginary. Solutions to our most pressing problems are frequently thought to revolve around technological innovations. Such innovations are touted as unbiased, objective, equalizing, effective. This amounts to technological determinism, a perspective that portrays technology as a force that develops independently from social factors and that, in turn, shapes, or even determines, society’s workings. In this class, we will adopt a social scientific perspective that illuminates how technology is itself deeply shaped by social forces. We will ask what it means to think of technology as “socially constructed,” how we might understand its effects on home, work, and collective action, what role class, gender, and race play in how technologies are designed and used, and whether and how our modes of relating to each other and thinking of our own identities have changed with the advent of social media, algorithms, and big data. Fundamentally, we will ask what kinds of societies we create when we overlook technology’s social underpinnings.