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A key theoretical focus in the field of technology and science studies is the Social Construction of Technology (with the obligatory technology acronym of SCOT). Despite the technology-driven patterns in IC manufacturing and music distribution cited earlier, there are problems with the perspective that technology itself determines adoption. SCOT proponents are concerned with adopting a reductionist worldview that a society’s technology determines its cultural values, social structure, or history. Many social scientists and SCOT theorists would argue that the determinism arrow should flow in the opposite direction – that cultural values, social structures, economics, and history determine which technologies are created and adopted in a society.

In the SCOT-focused perspective, social constructivists such as Pinch and Bijker argue that technology adoption in a society is affected by a Principle of Symmetry where explanations for an innovation’s failure or success should equally weigh influential factors such as economics, cultural values, and government regulation.²⁰ Despite its technological advantages over AM radio, FM was slow to diffuse in the United States in the 1940s due to efforts by some AM broadcasters and radio manufacturers with economic incentives to promote government regulation that inhibited it. A related area of study is Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that seeks to understand how the roles played by multiple individuals or agencies (the “actors”) influence technology adoption or rejection in a discrete environment or network.²¹

Technologies are not created in a social vacuum – television pioneers Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin did much of their research prior to 1940, but television’s widespread diffusion was delayed until after World War II, as electronics research between 1938 and 1945 focused on radar and sonar technologies used for military applications. A related complication in analysis arises from the unintended consequences of the use of the new tool, product, or service. Few engineers could foresee in the 1980s that putting mobile phones in the hands of drivers would lead to thousands of related auto accidents and deaths in the future. The irony is that, short of the unlikely near-term development of time travel, we cannot know what these unforeseen consequences might be. Nanotechnology, one of the key innovations that are facilitating the creation of ever more powerful CPUs on a chip, has raised questions about its safety when combined with dramatic advances in genetic engineering and biotechnology.²² We will analyze these concerns in Chapter 15 on the future of the digital universe.