The Web of Technology and People: Challenges for Economic and Social Research

Abstract

The study of technology and people has gained acceptance as a field for social inquiry, but it has remained outside the mainstream of the major disciplines and is dealt with as an interdisciplinary area of specialization across the social and economic sciences. In addition, this field has been fragmented further by particular technologies and issues, creating journals focused on privacy issues, others focused on education, for example, with a gulf remaining between social scientists on the one hand, and engineers and computer scientists on the other. There are also major regional divides, with academics in one part of the world often knowing little about work underway elsewhere. The world-wide push for technological innovation, therefore, demands that the social sciences build a more intensive and internationally networked effort to sustain research on the social aspects of technology, and bring it to bear on policy and practice.Enthusiasm over the Internet and other emerging technologies should not lull the social science research community into complacency. Ironically, unbridled optimism in the coming digital age, or biotech century, and trends in technological innovation and related research and development (R&D) could undermine the vitality of social and economic research. Any agenda for future social science research needs to place a higher priority on the study of technology, to better integrate work on a wider range of technologies, and to attend to a broad array of issues concerning how people produce, utilize, consume, and govern technologies. Otherwise, technical and social choices are likely to escape critical analysis in a wave of next generation enthusiasm.