Social Impacts of Technology: principles of analysis

Ian Miles, November 2007

It is inaccurate to talk in terms of “social impacts of technology”. Technological

development and use happens within society, not outside of it. Technologies are
themselves shaped by social forces, as are the ways in which they are used and
the results of this use; social actors are not (or not all) passive recipients of
influences from an apparently autonomous technology. Let us articulate a
number of fundamental elements of the society-technology relationship.

1 General principles
Societies are complexes of social relationships among social groups (the latter
composed of individuals and subgroups, related together through institutions and
less formalized practices, as well as by factors such as biological relationships,
propinquity, and shared experiences). Societies exist within a material, natural
universe, within which evolutionary processes have brought human beings into
existence. Technologies are ways in which human beings work with the features
of this universe to transform elements of the universe with which they are in
contact – our environments and health, the soil and crops, raw materials and
artefacts, and the material phenomena (from smoke and ink to electrons and
photons) where data is stored and communicated. (Whether we should consider
language and speech to be technologies, or the products of evolutionary
processes working on humans, is a difficult question.) Social relationships may
be mediated by, and transformed by, the use of technologies. Goods are
exchanged; weapons are used; status is displayed through conspicuous
consumption of artefacts; tools are used to gain new resources; and so on.

Technologies thus exist within societies, and there are ways in which we can
think about (particular sets of) technologies as constituting subsystems within the
broader social system. The technology-society relationship, in any case, is a
relationship between a system and some of its components, rather than a
relationship between two distinct systems. This may not always be the case, but
has been the overwhelmingly dominant state of affairs in human history to date.

2 Society and technological development

Certain social actors create new technological capabilities; they and other social
actors identify and attempt to build on opportunities to employ these capabilities
to realise their goals; yet other social actors respond to these actions, making
their own assessment of how changing technological capabilities may be applied
in their interests. All of these social actors are behaving in the context of uneven
access to resources and knowledge, in institutional structures facilitating various
forms of competition and collaboration. Technological change and the outcomes
of this change are mutually produced within these social contexts.

3 Specific Issues around Information Technologies

New Information Technologies (ITs) are particularly interesting in terms of the

evolution of technological capabilities. These capabilities involve the
circumstances (cost, size, speed, etc.) of technologies capable of creating/
capturing data, transmitting/ communicating data, processing/ transforming data;
storing data; displaying data and using information to actuate devices. Among
the notable features are:
• There are remarkable long-term trajectories of increased power in
practically all of the various types of activity to which IT may be employed
– Moore’s law – covering the increasing information processing ability of
computer chips – is just one of many similar “laws” describing paths of
development. The typical consequence of these laws has been to render
new IT products cheaper, more convenient (e.g. portability), more user-
friendly.
• There has been increased digitalisation of information of all types – not
merely the data provided by process control instruments and the symbols
entered from keyboards, but also data captured by photographic and
microphonic devices, and by sensors of all types – so that speech and
music, graphics and video, software code and digital content, can all be
processed, communicated, stored, etc. New IT has thus been able to find
application in all sorts of activity where information is being worked upon,
offering new ways for people to conduct social and economic affairs.
Mobile telephony and digital photography and music are merely three of a
huge number of examples.
• While high-tech innovation requires high-level skills and huge investment,
new IT is highly configurational. One implication is that many fewer
resources may be required in order to achieve new combinations of
hardware and software, and in order to create new informational content.
The scope for “democratising innovation” (von Hippel) is large – but so too
is the scope for a proliferation of diverse applications reflecting the
interests and capabilities of different social groups. Thus new IT may feed
into “postmodernist” fragmentation of cultures and diversification of
lifestyles.
• Some of the configurations created around the new technologies are
highly complex systems involving many of the new capabilities embodied
in the technologies. This has been reflected in the evolution of various
“generations” of new IT – from stand-alone mainframes and then PCs, to
networked and mobile computers, through to pervasive computing and
ambient intelligence (in the near future). Associated with this is the
development of completely new types of platform on which new
applications can proliferate – the Internet and Web in the 1990s, for
 example, and probably locational systems in the near future. Such
developments open up possibilities for new sorts of information, new ways
of using information, and new patterns of social access to information.

The upshot of these trajectories of development is that (a) new IT is a complex

evolving phenomenon, and it is important to examine how different capabilities
may be combined in concrete circumstances; (b) different generations of new IT
may imply such substantially different sets of capabilities that it is unwise to
generalise across these phases as if technology adoption in different phases will
have similar “effects”.

The uses of information vary considerably across societies. Farmers and fishers
in remote communities may require all sorts of information and communication
capacity – to know about weather forecasts and the market prices for their
products, to be able to communicate with suppliers, family members, emergency
services, for example. Elderly people in large cities may be more concerned
with information about social facilities and high street prices, and communicating
with remote family members and social welfare services. It is easy to construct
stereotyped images such as these concerning the uses of information in work,
entertainment, personal care, and social affairs, among different social groups.
Some of these uses may “merely” improve the quality of life of individuals, by
enabling them greater access to friends, entertainment, and health services, for
example. Some of these uses may contribute to localised creation and
accumulation of wealth, for example by providing people with information on
investments, educational opportunities, jobs, and the like. Perhaps the greatest
reason for concern about “digital divides” is the possibility that uneven access to
new ITs can thus reinforce existing social inequalities (or perhaps create new
ones).

4 Society and Information Technologies

Different social groups also have different access to resources and knowledge,
as noted. Beyond individual differences in terms of experience, social capital,
and economic and other resources, there are structured variations across social
groups. Although there is evidence to the effect that some of the “classic”
dimensions characterising different social groups are becoming less significant
than in the past, these dimensions retain much of their power in correlating with
social inequalities. They include: social class; ethnicity; gender; national,
regional and urban/rural location; and age, among others; just setting out such a
list immediately implies the diversity of forms of inequality in our societies.
Inequality varies in many ways, for example in terms of its intensity, its long-term
trends, which particular resources are unevenly distributed, the mechanisms that
generate inequality, and so on.

These considerations allow us to understand several features of the social

context of new IT use – the implications rather than the impacts of new IT – and
to pose questions about these implications that are rather more fruitful than
simply asking about what these “impacts” are. To spell out a preliminary
summary:

1. New IT is associated with continual creation of a wide range of new

technological capabilities, which offer scope for new or improved applications
with the potential of meeting a wide range of social interests.
• What is the most useful way of classifying and describing, on the one
hand, technological capabilities, and on the other hand, social interests?
How readily can the two be mapped on to each other (along the lines of a
logic – which might be presented in either direction – such as: social
needs for X are potentially met in improved ways by systems A, B, C,
which are based on improved technological capabilities alpha, beta,
gamma)?

2. Different social groups, varying in terms of resources and quality of life (as
well as other characteristics), vary in terms of capabilities to assess the suitability
of new IT for achieving their goals and needs, and of ways of accessing and
employing the new technological potentials.
• What are the most useful ways of delineating distinct social groups and
identifying on the one hand their advantages/disadvantages and major
quality of life issues, and on the other their degrees of access to
knowledge of new technologies and to these technologies themselves?
How readily can the two be mapped on to each other (along the lines of a
logic such as: social group I has potentially unmet needs for quality of life
improvements in X, Y, Z, but their access to and awareness of systems A,
B, C is constrained by social characteristics i, ii, iii)?

3. The two points above give the bones of a first-order assessment

of technology adoption and use. However, there are second-order
issues to bear in mind, in that the adoption of new technology by one
group may well influence the behaviour of another group – providing
demonstrators and role models, or creating competition and disruptive
interventions into the latter group’s circumstances.
• What are the most useful ways of examining the role of evolving
technologies in intergroup relationships (collaboration, competition, and
beyond)? Short of building an elaborate model of all existing groups and
their relationships, what can be said about the typical relationships that
exist between social groups of various kinds, and the ways in which new
technologies may be used to reinforce transform these relationships?
(along the lines of a logic such as: social groups I and II are in large part
defined by their relationships around specific axes such as working
relations, occupation of territory, possession of wealth, control of cultural
apparatus, and so on; such relationships are characterized by a definable
set of informational activities, and new IT can be employed to shape these
activities in a variety of ways…)
These three points are not exhaustive, but together they should provide a fruitful
and rigorous way of examining what have been termed the “social impacts of
Information Technology”. It will be important to develop the analysis bearing in
mind that we can consider various stages and locations in the invention and
exploitation, and the diffusion, implementation and reinvention of technologies –
in all of these points some of the range of social relations outlined above will
come into play.
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