💡 Social technology

[kesbeacon]

It’s very easy to think of technologies as concerned with the world of Things. I’m typing this on a laptop: that’s a technology, supported by a series of other technologies. It even gets the distinction of being called technology in school curricula. But also, the springs that make my couch comfy are a technology. The yarn I’m fiddling with because I’m bored with this crochet project is technology, too.

I was about to go in depth on analysing dictionary definitions of technology, but honestly it feels like that’s a rabbit hole that isn’t going to be overly useful. So for now I will simply note that this is a concept about practical application of knowledge and science, and is usually applied to tangible technologies.

But we have intangible technology too. Skills can be technology – generations of humans have iterated their knowledge of the topography of knots and fabric, and now I could turn this yarn into a doily or a dinosaur or a dress. The fact I can type, or write, or make a cup of tea, or turn a series of powders and chunks into delicious cookies.

Social structures can be technology. Don’t forget, applying knowledge is not just the domain of the modern hard sciences. The social sciences can do it too, and have been since before we had the concept of  what a social science is. People have been making efforts to refine the systems we live in for millennia (with mixed results! But technology isn’t defined by its outcomes.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about respect, which is found in social species across the animal kingdom. I don’t have the brains or words to ask where evolution ends and technology begins in this case, but we can at least call it a tool, and as part of our social structure design process we’ve been iterating who should receive it, when, and how, in response to a range of aims.

And here we come to the original thing that got me thinking – the resistance many people put up when asked to, as part of the social aim of ‘equality for all,’ respect others (not use certain words or make certain assumptions, tolerate alternative ways of being, see value in all). Does that rhyme with people’s resistance to tangible technological change? It’s a fairly novel* goal, a fairly novel dominant meaning of the word ‘respect’ (respect as equal to equal, not as member of a pecking order), and it requires people to grapple with things they know and things they think and learn new ways of speaking and acting.

More importantly, of course, is whether looking at it in that framework could help us-the-society encourage people to embrace a more egalitarian society and the technological changes we’re making to our ways of speaking, acting, and thinking in service of that goal. I certainly think there’s potential there – I’ve attended so many utterly useless ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘equality and diversity’ training sessions that completely fail to grapple with it as anything other than a problem of compliance. Compliance, imo, is possibly the worst framework to approach teaching anything, let alone a sensitive, delicate social technology.

What if we laid bare the techno-pedagogical aim here? ‘We, as a society, are trying to change for the better for everyone, and here’s the skills that can get us there; come bring your own expertise and experiences to this collective endeavour. It’s okay to find it hard, but society as a whole needs you to not give up on it.’

*Using the word ‘novel’ rather than ‘new’ because it isn’t new, on a global and temporal scale, but it feels novel to many people who are alive today

Postscript: I have immediately failed my ‘300 words’ challenge.