The Sociotechnological Imagination
Developing a Tool to Help You Deal with Technology
We don’t have many ways to navigate our relationship with technology at the moment. We have ethicists working in technology, but their work is more geared toward how companies should develop technology. Non-academics are left without tools to navigate our connection to technology and are forced to find our own way. I think of how people learned to navigate the crypto-boom that happened a few years ago. There were people who didn’t know what they were investing in when they invested into crypto; people who lost fortunes because they were promised things that never happened. The NFT craze was similar.
For me, as things like ChatGPT started becoming a topic of everyday discussion, I really wanted a tool that gave me a chance to think critically about technology that included not just the technology itself but its potential impacts on society; a tool that leaves the decision to enter into a relationship, and understand the extent of that relationship, with me. This is why I developed the idea of the sociotechnological imagination, and I hope to pass the idea on to you all now.
Origin
C. Wright Mills introduced the idea of the sociological imagination in his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination. Sociological Imagination cemented itself as a concept via the way it deftly highlighted social dynamics and placed the individual within them. It has since become many people’s introduction to sociology. As a framework, the sociological imagination teaches us to connect our personal experiences (biography) with broader sociocultural forces (history), and by doing so we learn to see the ways our experiences relate to larger social forces. This is in service of figuring out just what factors contribute to an issue.
The book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari is an excellent example of the sociological imagination at play. Whether or not Hari intended specifically to employ the concepts of sociological imagination is beside the larger point that the way he describes our dwindling focus, the applications and programs that lend their hand to their contributing focus, and how on a larger view what we need to do as a people, is a work of sociological imagination. He ties his biography, his experiences in recognizing his regressing focus, to the larger forces at play that include different applications and the attention economy (among other things).
Disambiguation Disco
If any of you are hobbyist scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and/or futures studies, then you might be thinking “Sociotechnological Imagination? That sounds kinda like sociotechnical imaginaries.” I’ll lament that they do sound similar and I am concerned about future confounding of the two concepts, if the sociotechnological imagination stays around as a useful concept. I will seek to disambiguate these two concepts now, knowing very well that the problem will rear its head again.
Sociotechnical imaginaries is a concept coined by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, both out of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. What they realized, and described in their 2009 paper “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea”, was that the field of STS had largely ignored “non-scientific actors and institutions”. To this end, Jasanoff and Kim proposed sociotechnical imaginaries as a new analytic tool, and they defined that tool as “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects.” We will see going forward how sociotechnical imaginaries and sociotechnological imagination are sibling concepts, but do not cover the same territory.
Another concept which needs to be made distinct from my sociotechnological imagination, is the technological imagination. This concept has been harder for me to pin down. I’ve seen it referenced in a few places, but nothing that I’ve yet to have access to (thanks academia). From what I am able to find however, the concept originates from the work of cultural theorist and media designer Anne Marie Balsamo, specifically her book “Designing culture: the Technological Imagination at Work”. Her concept technological imagination is described in the book abstract as “a quality of mind that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible.” Yet another sibling to my term yet something different altogether.
The Sociotechnological Imagination
The sociotechnological imagination helps you explore your relationship with technology in the same way that a map helps sailors navigate the seas. An experienced sailor could travel with just the stars as a guide. For the novice sailor, having a robust map, provides a safe direct journey to the destination. I want the sociotechnological imagination to be a cognitive tool that gets you where you want to go in your relationships with technology “safely”. And we use cognitive tools daily. We use design thinking for problem solving with the human at the center of design research, we use continual process improvement for when we know we can get more juice with less squeeze. These frameworks, and the potentially infinite frameworks like them, serve the role of directing the tool-users attention to achieve certain ends. The sociotechnological imagination is no different.
As I mentioned at the start, the sociotechnological imagination starts where Mills’ sociological imagination leaves off. The sociological imagination gets us to the point where we can connect our biography to history. An example is in order here.
I have attention problems that can often get in the way of parts of my life. One way to interpret this is that I need to take more personal responsibility for my attention. Maybe I need to start using tools proven to help such as the pomodoro technique. Using the sociological imagination would help me realize that I am singularly at fault. I would look for the roots of my attention problem in society. This direction would have me looking to, for example, the attention economy and how companies get more money the more that they are able to extract my attention from my own ends. It would direct me to looking at how our diets have changed over the last decades and how my massive intake of sugar, a byproduct of modern society at this point, plays a role in my attention problems and avoiding those sugars becomes an Sisyphean ordeal. It is in the connections between my personal attention problems and societal roots. It is not getting rid of my own responsibility and saying its a social problem, but instead a recognition of the multiple factors, genetic, personal, and societal, that have gotten me and many others to this point.
So, we can connect our personal experience to societal experience. Now we need to see relate this thinking back to technology. The first way to do that is to limit the focus area to something technology related. In the example I provided above we’re already in a technological lens, which means we are now able to orient with the sociotechnological imagination. But let’s say you were thinking about unemployment, you could connect your own unemployment to various sociocultural roots and realize the multi-fold mechanisms at play in your condition, but it is not inherently a technology problem. The first rule for employing the sociotechnological imagination is to center your analysis on a technological problem.
From this technological centering, you can then connect your personal experience with that technology to the social roots of that technology. With just this framing, we would have a more narrow implementation of the sociological imagination. Again, my hope is to give you a way of thinking that will help you navigate this world of technology better. To do that, you also have to delve into the biography of the technology. This means understanding both the development of the technology, its component parts, and its connection to the other things that make it possible. If we used a printer as an example of analysis, this second rule would entail understanding the development of that particular printer, the components which comprise it, and how it is connected to other technologies such as your phone.
The last rule of the sociotechnological imagination is to situate both personal biography and technological biography into larger social forces. This is best mediated through the answering of questions. My friend and colleague Daniel Hulter and I have come up with questions, the answering of which will get you deeper into understanding how these two biographies tie into a social knot.
Questions to Consider
What might the adoption of this technology mean for myself and for society?
What new dynamics might this technology unveil for myself and society?
Does the technology shorten or eliminate any journey or process? And was there any benefit in engaging with that process or journey that is now being lost?
How might this change how I and society relates?
How might this technology change what I value and what society values?