Technology and Politics
In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power. To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way “transcends the simple categories of ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ altogether, representing “instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others” (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999). It implies that the process of technological development is critical in determining the politics of an artifact; hence the importance of incorporating all stakeholders in it. (Determining who the stakeholders are and how to incorporate them are other questions entirely.)
The second way in which artifacts can have politics refers to artifacts that correlate with particular kinds of political relationships, which Winner refers to as inherently political artifacts (Winner, p. 22, 1999). He distinguishes between two types of inherently political artifacts: those that require a particular sociological system and those that are strongly compatible with a particular sociological system (Winner, p. 29, 1999). A further distinction is made between conditions internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it (Winner, p. 33, 1999). This second way in which artifacts can have politics can be visualized as a 2-by-2 matrix, consisting of four ‘types’ of artifacts: those requiring a particular internal sociological system, those compatible with a particular internal sociological system, those requiring a particular external sociological system, and those compatible with a particular external sociological system.
As are all typologies, this matrix is a simplification-by-boundary-work – in this case, the two boundaries are drawn between requiring and compatible, and between internal and external. It is this boundary-work that makes the typology useful for avoiding extreme technological determinism, social constructivism, and noetic flatness in conceptualizing an artifact’s political qualities, and for thinking about how these qualities change through time.
Winner's thesis has been criticized by other scholars, including Bernward Joerges.
Read more about this topic: Langdon Winner
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