Unit 1 - Getting Acquainted

Overview

Although technology has always been part of human existence and science has played an increasingly important role in society for the last two hundred years, most of us have a sense that science and technology have recently become an overwhelming presence in modern life. During the last decade, computers have become an unavoidable part of everyday life in America, biotechnologies threaten to revolutionize life as we know it, and familiar technologies like airplanes have become weapons of mass destruction. Understanding the role of science and technology in modern life would seem to be of paramount importance in planning for the future of society and our individual lives. That’s essentially what this course is all about.

There are many ways to understand our lives and the society we live in. Sociology provides one perspective, one way to look at the role of science and technology. This class will provide a sociological perspective on the relationship between society, science, technology, culture, and our own lives. I’ll use lectures, readings in the text, and a variety of activities to demonstrate the sociological perspective. Then I’ll ask you to demonstrate what you understand about science and technology using a sociological perspective.

The lectures complement rather than parallel the text. They provide additional information about some of the sociological ideas presented in the text. You will find more information about each topic by following the links at the end of each lecture. Plan to use information from the text, lectures, Activities, and web links in the writing you do for the group discussions and your own papers. Your text, Society & Technological Change, by Rudi Volti, illustrates a lot of the ways that technology interacts with other elements in society to create social change. The lectures will expand on the sociological ideas used to understand these interactions.

Central Questions

Sociology is basically the study of relationships in society. We look at relationships between different parts of society and at the relationship between the individual and society. While sociology presents only one way to look at the role of science and technology, I think it is a particularly useful way to frame the debates and choices facing us in the modern world. The central questions, as I see them from a sociological perspective, are:

• What is science?

• Why has “science” become our dominant mode of understanding the world and what consequences does that have for the future and for our lives?
• What is technology? How does it relate to culture?
• How do science and technology affect our lives? What are the social mechanisms that allow the rapid spread of some technologies and the disappearance of others? What role do values, norms, beliefs, culture and social structures play in the adoption of technologies?
• And, finally the most important question of all – Who is in control here, anyway?
• Most people believe that we have control of technology and of our own destiny as a species. They believe that with enough knowledge and good will and attention to ethical principles, we can control the direction of technological development and the future of humankind. I’d like to raise some questions about that belief from a sociological perspective. Much of what I know about how the social world works suggests to me that we are not really in control of our technologies and that the future is far more unpredictable than we like to believe. I’ll outline this argument in future lectures and we can discuss it in our Discussion Forums. You will, of course, have to make up your own mind about the direction of society and the amount of control we have over the process of change but I hope our discussions will be lively and thought provoking as you learn more about the sociological perspective.

Course Focus

Note that we will NOT be addressing the ethical issues that surround the adoption and use of technologies. My argument will NOT be about what we should do. While we can examine the ethical issues from a sociological perspective, and we will indeed do that, deciding what to do about technological developments are not the province of sociology or, indeed, of any science. Questions of ethics and morality are best dealt with by philosophers or in a religious context. We cannot settle questions of ethics and morals in this forum and I have no intention of trying. We are after an analysis, an understanding of how science and technology work in a social context. You can then take this information, match it up to your own value system and decide what to do about it as an individual. Let’s avoid terms like “good,” “bad,” “right,” and “wrong.” Let’s look instead at causes and consequences, relationships, information and energy flows. Let’s look at science and the use of technology as human activities.

SOC 204?

You probably noticed that Sociology 204 (Introductory or General Sociology) is a prerequisite for this course. What that means is that I expect you to have a basic familiarity with sociological concepts and ideas.

You don’t need to be a sociologist to do well in the course, but you do need to understand the basics so you can use the sociological perspective in your coursework. Part of your grade will depend on your ability to do so. I’ll be using terms like values, norms, social structure, institution, organizations, social stratification, deviance, and conflict theory that you should have encountered in Soc 204 and that I hope you have an understanding of. I stress the importance of a common understanding of terms used because CONCEPTUALIZATION is a key process in science and in sociology. In fact, it is so important that I’m going to devote a whole lecture to it next week.

If it has been a while since you took a sociology course and you’ve forgotten some of the basics, you might want to get a basic text in sociology from the library or a used bookstore. You can also look up definitions of basic concepts at:

Sociology Glossary

WebRef.org's glossary of over 130 terms.