Framework of Socio-Technology Analysis and Prescriptions for a sustainable society: Focusing on the mobile technology case

Abstract

As 21st century society has evolved into a technology-centric society, the impact of innovative technologies on society continues to increase. The importance of innovative technologies to society is evidenced by the existence of various analytical methods, study results and actors. When we analyze the impact of technology on society, we often predict its future impact based on how technology has affected past and present trends in society. Analysis on the impact of technology on current trends in society is usually conducted by experts, but users, developers, or citizens might also participate. This study proposes an analytical framework termed ‘Socio-Technology Analysis and Prescriptions’ (STAP) that can be used to analyze the impact of innovative technologies on society and prescribes solutions to any associated problems in order to contribute to a sustainable society.When analyzing the impacts of technology on society, analysts can investigate the effects of technology on society based on a framework developed according to a specific theory. STAP is based on the comprehensive conceptual framework model from three Science and Technology Studies (STS), these are Technological Determinism (TD), Social Construction of Theory (SCOT), and Actor–Network Theory (ANT). This study adopted not only the perspectives of these three theories that describe the relationship between technology and society, but also takes a critical view of these theories in the process of creating the conceptual model of STAP. In order to verify a draft of STAP, this study extracted and applied keywords to find previous studies which relate to the impact of mobile technology on society using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology as part of the framework. A prominent feature of the SLR process is its use of natural language processing technology, which is an application of AI technology.In a test case, we successfully analyzed the impact of mobile technology on society through STAP showing it is possible to systematically analyze the impact of technology on society through our framework. The framework allowed us to identify the underlying causes of major problems and then present solutions.