Sun, 20 Jul 2003 17:24:01 GMT
media technologies for open communication. While I agree in principle with Fiske in rejecting the technological determinism point of view, I also believe that due to the social construction of communication technologies there ought to be some characteristics of particular technologies that are better fit to serve the designer. My argument is that if a particular technology was designed to serve the corporate interest, most of its features will be driven to maximize the profits. [see the entry on adaptive structuration for this argument] In contrast, if a group of people is about to design technology for open communication and democratic access to information, the… [infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information
SCOT, the social construction of technology, Edinburgh school, admits that there are more than 1 significant group in the construction of a technology, ideally, there are many. one though is the designers, one is the market, and depending on the institution one might be the business oriented marketeers, etc. I'm personally not fond of SCOT as a great model of analysis, because it usually focuses on the development of a paradigmatic technology, instead of showing the plurality of technologies surrounding the paradigm, but that's a whole different discussion I suppose.
I think that technology is never designed to fulfill one interest, but that the contexts, and social milieu might allow that many groups have certain interests in common, but they pursue them in a myriad of ways, and that what comes out of at the end, if interpreted in certain ways, can appear to be singularly oriented toward one interest or collection of interests that is associated with a certain group. The question then becomes how you get at what really occured? and why that might be important.
