Images of Technology in Sociology: Computer as Butterfly and Bat

Abstract

Images of Technology in Sociology: Computer as Butterfly and Bat B E R N W A R D J O E R G E S More than fifty years have passed since Robert Merton formulated, in his doctoral dissertation on Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, what he later, in his “Shandean Post­ script,” came to call the “kindle cole” principle: the “sociological discovery of the distorting effects of public (as distinct from private) polemics among men of science.”1 According to the kindle cole (or “Hooke-Newton-Merton”) principle of scientific polemics, scientists ought to avoid engaging in public controversies and try to insulate themselves from the responses of the “excitable crowd,” both scientific and other. Social scientists’ attempts to come to grips with computer technol­ ogy provide a fine example of both the inevitability and the calamities of becoming entangled in the “management of meaning out there.” How to solve the dilemma? As Merton demonstrates, “there are almost as many ways to insulate truthseekers from the mob as there are to skin the cat.”' If the remarks offered here on sociologists’ use of computer rhetoric may sound polemical at times, this is not meant to “kindle cole” but rather to draw a slightly different line between sociological, technological, and public discourse than that followed by those whom I shall call “new sociologists of technology.” In a series of essays written some time ago, David Edge looked at the social power of technological metaphors. Drawing on such exam­ ples of Durkheimian social anthropology as Mary Douglas’s Natural Dr. Joerges is a senior research fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung and professor of sociology at the Technische L'niversitát Berlin. This article is based on a paper, “Demonic and Endemonie Images of Technology,” presented at an April 1987 symposium at the Wissenschaftszentrum. The author thanks Johannes Horning for suggestions and advice concerning irony and Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges for the loan of Merton’s On the Shoulders of"Giants. 'Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (1938, numerous eds.), and On the Shoulders ofGiants: A Shandean Postscript, 2d ed. (New York, 1985), p. 27. ’’Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (n. 1 above), p. 145.©1990 bv the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3102-0001 SO 1.00 203 204 BernwardJoerges Symbols and Environments at Risk, he concentrated on images of' society taken “like the cybernetic metaphor . . . from the ‘hardware’ of control technologies,” which then play a role in “establishing and reinforcing moral and social control.”’ In his rather gloomy view, such metaphors serve to foster mainly one reaction to our present-day social problems: to conclude that the existing institutions are defective and more “centralized controls” are therefore needed.1 Edge evokes the “priesthood” metaphor for scientific elites, citing Ralph Lapp’s dark version of the technological predicament: “We are aboard a train which is gathering speed, racing down a track on which there are an unknown number of switches leading to unknown destinations. No single scientist is in the engine cab, and there may be demons at the switch.”5 And he advises one to be wary of control metaphors taken from technological parlance in debates about contemporary “crises.” Whereas Edge’s concern is very much with the conservative, reconfirming role that control metaphors have in public talk, the following comments focus on the uncertain role of metaphors for technology in the professional talk of sociologists.1’ But the overall context is the same: Images of technology, as advanced in the cybernetic sciences, are very much linked to underlying social theo- ’David Edge, “Technological Metaphor and Social Control,” in G. Bugliarello and D. B. Doner, eds., The History and Philosophy of Technology (Urbana, Ill., 1973), pp. 309-24, 310; see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (London. 1970), and Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London, 1975), pp. 230-48. *Edge (n. 3 above), p. 319. ’’Ralph E. Lapp, The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses ofPower (New York, 1973), p. 29. ’’“Metaphor” is used synonymously with “image,” as in images of technology. For some time now', social-science interest in the power...