Meaning of Technology
Pinch and Bilker (1987) formed the basis of the social construction of technology. They argue that people design and give meaning to technologies, and decided which to adopt and which to reject. An example of this can be found with the smartphone, in a couple of key ways. First, the development of the smartphone itself. The initial concept evolved not from phones at all, but from the adoption of telephone technology for things like pagers, which then became the personal digital assistant. Companies like Palm and Blackberry were producing early smartphones in this format by adding telephones to existing devices that were designed to perform a number of digital functions. Connecting those devices to the world via telephone technology was an innovation. The later addition of Internet access was the next step in this evolution, and came about not longer after other mobile phones were starting to add features like cameras, text messaging and rudimentary browsers.
The social construction relies on three things: flexibility of interpretation, relevant social groups and technological frame (Yousefikhah, 2017), and the adoption of smartphones and later their applications forms a prime example of this theory in action.
The cost of developing these products is high, and only justifiable if there is the opportunity for profit, which in turn means that people have to want them. Certainly, marketers are employed to generate demand but ultimately there has to be some people who find value in this functionality. Indeed, the smartphone is a good example of this because the value in this device, versus its PDA predecessors, was in the ability to network with others, in particular online – combining the technology with another, more popular one. The ability to get online was a key driver of the adoption of smartphones.
But the device also shows how social constructs flow in technology. The developers of the operating systems have opened up those systems to developers. This was a matter of marketing – the more functionality the devices had for people, the more they would be in demand. It was learning a lesson from the failures of Palm and Blackberry, which were mostly closed systems, though both tried to open up later on. But by opening up to developers to build applications, the smartphone surely proves evidence of the social construction of technology.
A lot of apps…
