Challenging Convergences in Lay Thought and STS Practice: A Reply to My Critics

Abstract

David Hess and Sujatha Raman have penned what might seem to be fairly damning critiques of my proposal to view technological determinism and permissionless innovation as psychocultural barriers to the democratization of technology. They quickly chop down my suggestion to look to fields like communications and social psychology for help in developing oppositional rhetorical strategies. Some of their concerns are quite reasonable, though I will contend that they are not as damaging to my proposal as they suggest. Other criticisms, however, appear to be rooted in pretty extreme interpretations of my argument. Whatever the cause of the miscommunication, I relish the chance to challenge the more unfortunate renderings of my position. Furthermore, I will turn a critical eye back toward the commentators. Not only do they neglect the technological or material concerns that I raised in my paper, but also fail to seriously engage with the potential incremental benefits of developing and prudently deploying the communicative tools that I describe. A fairly typical defensive response to any claim that some gap exists in the existing literature or that some practice is missing from current scholarly activity is “Where have you been?” Just such a response is one of the main thrusts of Raman’s (2015) critique: “Battles over some abstraction called ‘technological determinism’ seem a distant memory.” She cites her own work within a rich research community—including responsible innovation, engagement with technoscientific policy regimes, and laboratory interventions—in order to depict my assertion that a preoccupation with nomological forms of technological determinism has continued to infect STS scholarship as out-of-touch with more recent academic realities. Contrary to Raman’s (2015) interpretation of my fairly minor extension of claims already made by other science and technology studies (STS) scholars (see Wyatt 2008; Dafoe 2015), I did not intend to imply that absolutely nothing was being done in the field regarding normative