Social Shaping of Technology

The article’s discussion of Katherine’s smartphone use can be meaningfully unpacked using the social shaping of technology approach. Smartphones present an interesting case for the social shaping perspective. Smartphones give users a wide variety of affordances with associated consequences and effects.

The article refrains from explicitly labeling Katherine’s smartphone use, but clearly communicates some weariness toward smartphones. In the segment describing Katherine’s use during a car ride, the article clearly is structured to convey that Katherine is rapidly shifting through applications and tabs, thus suggesting that her attention constantly needs to be grabbed by new stimuli. This description conforms to a more a technological determinism model in which the technology is affecting human behavior (her attention span). However, the article does not necessarily place the blame on the technology. The technology may afford Katherine the ability to shift through these applications, but the choice to do so is her own. Thus, the affordance given by the phone allowed her to develop this pattern of interaction.

The article goes on to describe an instance in which her behavior is shaped by social factors through an affordance of technology. The article details how her integral behavior is shaped by the input of her peers through the level of validation she receives through likes.  The article makes special note of how she deletes most of her photos as a result of this social pressure. Several key fixtures of Instagram are mentioned, including the follower system and liking system, which suggest that the application’s features are involved in Katherine’s behavior. By allowing users to interact with the feature of Instagram, such users are free to establish their own social structures with this technology. The technology may allow such users to adjust their interaction to fit said technology, but the exact configuration of this social change lies with the culture that is adapting to the technology. As a result of the validation-based system, users such as Katherine, experience a sort of social anxiety over obtaining more likes because of the pressure from their peers.

I chose to analyze the article using the social shaping of technology framework because as I was reading the article, it became clear that the author neither took a stance firmly toward tehnology affecting users or people affecting the technology. Thus, it was clear that one had to look at the article as communicating in a manner that addressed the interplay between technology and social factors without explicitly placing a cause-effect relationship on one of the two.