Music, Noise and Conflict: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Acoustic Agency and Ontological Assumptions about Sound

AbstractThe article examines the increasingly important role played by technology in the domain of public security in Germany, illustrating its effects on social life. In order to illuminate developments that govern the adoption of security technologies and render them in their dependencies comprehensible, we present two plausible and consistent future scenarios for Germany 2035. Following Jasanoff and Kim, these scenarios are theoretically conceived as two competing “sociotechnical imaginaries” which implies different trajectories for shaping the future. In these imaginaries, security technologies condition social change, and vice versa, in a mutually interdependent process. On the basis of current literature in tandem with a structured scenario development process, we condensed the present sociotechnical imaginaries into two tangible future scenarios for the field of public security, illustrating its effects on how we live as a society. Our overarching goal is to identify key factors that will mediate future developments, and, by extension, to facilitate discussion on the type of future we find collectively desirable. The analysis of impact factors resulted in ten key factors that play a crucial role for the use of security technologies and serve as a leverage for shaping the future. Projections of these factors lead to two narrative scenarios “To Be Ahead” and “Turn Back The Clock”.

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The Need for Speed – Technological Acceleration and Inevitabilism in Recent Danish Digitalization Policy Papers

SATS ◽

10.1515/sats-2021-0003 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 27-48

Author(s):

Mads Vestergaard

Keyword(s):

Empirical Analysis ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

Technological Development ◽

Point Of View ◽

Technological Determinism ◽

Economic Values ◽

Fourth Industrial Revolution ◽

Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽

Official Policy ◽

The Empirical Analysis

Abstract The article explores whether sociotechnical imaginaries of digitalization as inevitable accelerating development can be traced in Denmark’s official policy papers concerning digitalization 2015–2020. It identifies imperatives of speed, acceleration and agility equal to what has been described as a corporate data imaginary as well as tropes of an imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution and inevitable exponential technological development and disruption. The empirical analysis discovers a shift in the studied period mid-2018, before which inevitabilism is prominent and after which the focus on non-economic values increases and the aim of influencing the development, instead of adapting to it, emerges. The article then addresses how imperatives of acceleration and narratives of inevitabilism may be considered problematic from a democratic point of view employing Hartmut Rosa’s critical diagnosis of the acceleration society and the notion of discursive closure. Finally, it discusses the empirical findings in light of technological determinism and constructivism inherent in the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries and introduces a sociotechnical selectionist theory allowing both for human agency in technological development while also providing a mechanism for explaining the emergence of law-like technological trends, as Moore’s Law, at macro level.

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Imagining Technology and Environmental Law

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199680832.013.14 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth Fisher

Keyword(s):

Potential Role ◽

Environmental Law ◽

Environmental Problems ◽

Limited Resources ◽

Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽

Law And Technology ◽

Starting Point ◽

Chemicals Regulation ◽

The Commons

Understandings of environmental law and technology are often co-produced as part of distinctive sociotechnical imaginaries. This essay explores this phenomenon by showing how Hardin’s famous essay, the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, is capable of being interpreted in two different ways, which provide divergent visions of the potential role of environmental law and technology in addressing environmental problems. The first, and more popular, interpretation characterizes law and technology as instruments for bringing about shifts in morality in light of limited resources. A different reading of Hardin’s essay portrays law and technology in more constitutive terms. Identifying these different characterizations provides a starting point for a richer and more nuanced debate about the interaction between environmental law and technology. This is illustrated by an example from chemicals regulation.

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Surveying the Chemical Anthropocene

Environment and Society ◽

10.3167/ares.2021.120111 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 181-202

Author(s):

Yogi Hale Hendlin

Keyword(s):

Conflicts Of Interest ◽

Chemical Exposure ◽

Risk Assessments ◽

Costs And Benefits ◽

Toxic Chemical ◽

Chemical Safety ◽

Social Fabric ◽

Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽

Financial Conflicts Of Interest ◽

Safety Assessments

Faced with the non-optional acceptance of toxic chemical artifacts, the ubiquitous interweaving of chemicals in our social fabric oft en exists out of sight and out of mind. Yet, for many, toxic exposures signal life-changing or life-ending events, phantom threats that fail to appear as such until they become too late to mitigate. Assessments of toxicological risk consist of what Sheila Jasanoff calls “sociotechnical imaginaries,” arbitrations between calculated costs and benefits, known risks and scientifically wrought justifications of safety. Prevalent financial conflicts of interest and the socially determined hazards posed by chemical exposure suggest that chemical safety assessments and regulations are a form of postnormal science. Focusing on the histories of risk assessments of pesticides such as DDT, atrazine, PFAS, and glyphosate, this article critically reviews Michel Serres’s notion of “appropriation by contamination.”

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Resolving the problem of Algorithmic Dissonance: An unconventional solution for a sociotechnical problem

10.31235/osf.io/qkve3 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Shiv Issar

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

Black Feminist Theory ◽

Double Consciousness ◽

Black Feminist ◽

Du Bois ◽

Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽

The Creation ◽

Structural Inequities ◽

Sociocultural Systems

In this paper, I propose the concept of “algorithmic dissonance”, which characterizes the inconsistencies that emerge through the fissures that lie between algorithmic systems that utilize system identities, and sociocultural systems of knowledge that interact with them. A product of human-algorithm interaction, algorithmic dissonance builds upon the concepts of algorithmic discrimination and algorithmic awareness, offering greater clarity towards the comprehension of these sociotechnical entanglements. By employing Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness” and black feminist theory, I argue that all algorithmic dissonance is racialized. Next, I advocate for the use of speculative methodologies and art for the creation of critically informative sociotechnical imaginaries that might serve a basis for the sociological critique and resolution of algorithmic dissonance. Algorithmic dissonance can be an effective check against structural inequities, and of interest to scholars and practitioners concerned with running “algorithm audits”.

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Normalising Nuclear War: Narrative Scenarios, Imaginative Geographies and Sites of Leisure in 1950s Britain

10.1007/978-3-030-84281-9_4 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 77-102

Author(s):

Jonathan Hogg

Keyword(s):

Civic Engagement ◽

Nuclear Weapons ◽

Social Impact ◽

Nuclear War ◽

War Narrative ◽

Public Representation ◽

Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽

Imaginative Geographies ◽

The 1950S ◽

Civil Defence

AbstractThis chapter offers an interpretation of British regional civil defence activities in the 1950s. I argue that the persistent social impact of nationwide sociotechnical imaginaries of nuclear weapons cannot be fully understood without considering the localised social, geographical and discursive contexts in which civil defence was located and enacted. This chapter traces the ways in which a wider (officially maintained) sociotechnical imaginary appears to have been embedded in and intertwined with these localised contexts. After discussing the bespoke narrative scenarios created to frame civil defence exercises and offering analysis of their public representation, I focus on sites of leisure and forms of civic engagement linked to civil defence activity. Lastly, I turn to imaginative geographies to explore how sociotechnical imaginaries became localised in this era.

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The Digital Architecture of Time Management

Science Technology & Human Values ◽

10.1177/0162243918795041 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 44 (2) ◽

pp. 315-337 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Judy Wajcman

Keyword(s):

Time Management ◽

Design Rationale ◽

Digital Architecture ◽

Human Thought ◽

Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽

Technological Artifacts ◽

The World ◽

Perception Of Time ◽

Existential Problem

This article explores how the shift from print to electronic calendars materializes and exacerbates a distinctively quantitative, “spreadsheet” orientation to time. Drawing on interviews with engineers, I argue that calendaring systems are emblematic of a larger design rationale in Silicon Valley to mechanize human thought and action in order to make them more efficient and reliable. The belief that technology can be profitably employed to control and manage time has a long history and continues to animate contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries of what automation will deliver. In the current moment we live in the age of the algorithm and machine learning, so it is no wonder, then, that the contemporary design of digital calendars is driven by a vision of intelligent time management. As I go on to show in the second part of the article, this vision is increasingly realized in the form of intelligent digital assistants whose tracking capacities and behavioral algorithms aim to solve life’s existential problem—how best to organize the time of our lives. This article contributes to STS scholarship on the role of technological artifacts in generating new temporalities that shape people’s perception of time, how they act in the world, and how they understand themselves.

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