The savior of community in today’s communication technology — or so is the general sense on the web — is the social networking tool. The social networking tool provides a place of sociality (Miller and Slater 2002:199-200) on the web: a place where the real and the virtual meet and the opposition between these two types of relationships (Miller and Slater 2002:187) dissolves. The internet today is abuzz with community-building applications, and the ubiquity of sites such as Friendster, The Facebook, Yahoo! 360, and even photo-sharing applications such as Flickr is indicative of the importance of the social side of computing.

Within anthropology, the social side of technology is often framed through social constructionism. Pinch and Bijker, when discussing the social construction of technology, claim that “science and technology are themselves socially produced in a variety of social circumstances” (1987:20). If technology is socially constructed (Pinch and Bijker 1987:18-19), then it is clear that modernity itself — of which technology plays a marker — is “reworked from within” (Arce and Long 2000:2), and that social change is a consequence of the movement of conflicting social systems and not external forces (Arce and Long 2000:11). By accepting this premise, we can then reject modernism as being equated with Western progress, a rejection Kofi Benor Hadjor makes clearly in his definition of modernization; instead, through constant social change, every society, including those in the Third World are constantly modernizing (Hadjor 1992:203).

Within this framework of social change within anthropology, social construction of technology clearly shows how the emergence of new technologies creates “repercussions in the structuring of social action and behavior” (Pelto 1973:12). Yet, technology itself is constantly being influenced by the society in which it lies; Wiebe Bijker claims that technology is “continually reshaped and redesigned by the various social groups involved” (1992:75). Further, “even in the diffusion stage [of a new technology], the process of invention continues” (Bijker 1992:97).

One way to conceptualize this syncretic influential relationship between society and technology is through the creation of narratives. Stories are “used to make sense out of ambiguous situations or to represent sense-making in earlier events” (Orr 1996:12). The creation of narratives, and then sharing and propagating these stories is at the basis of social networks. The graphical representation of such narratives can be done through the social map.

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The example above of a social map of Flickr contacts (using the popular web tool FlickrGraph with the user Vasta as centre tile) is but one way of representing connections within a social group. However, in order to effectively analyze the social construction of technology, it may be more influential to trace connections through “relevant social groups” who share a meaning with the technology or “artifact” (Kline and Pinch 1999:113).

In my own personal social map below, I have tracked relevant social groups to the making and consumption of four interconnected pieces of software released by The Mozilla Foundation. These four pieces of software are not the only products released by the Foundation, but were chosen in the interest of condensing the social map in order to look at a core set of connections between developers, financiers, influencers competitors, and users. It is important to note here that all of these pieces of software are open source, and many users are also developers. For the sake of simplicity in graphical representation, I have separated the developers: it is assumed that they are users as well.

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The pieces of software, or the “artifacts,” are in constant states of flux and are continually being reshaped through various channels. Each social group brings with it its own culture, its own set of practices and interests, similar to Elizabeth Hahn’s observation with cinema viewers in Tonga (2002:260); the technology is then redesigned to accommodate some of these interests and perspectives, but still retains others that are foreign but not alienating.

In this small example of a social map used to trace the social construction of technology, we see the workings of different communities working in a network to create social change, rather than the change coming from an external force. Perhaps this may shed some more light on the question of whether technology is the great connecting or distancing tool.

Sources

Alberto Arce and Norman Long. “Reconfiguring modernity and development from an anthropological perspective.” In Anthropology, Development, and Modernities: Exploring Discourses, Counter-tendencies, and Violence. (eds.) Alberto Arce and Norman Long. New York: Routledge, 2000. pp 1-31.

Wiebe Bijker. “The Social Construction of Fluorescent Light, or How an Artifact was Invented in its Diffusion Stage.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. (eds.) Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. pp 75-107.

Kofi Benor Hadjor. Dictionary of Third World Terms. London: Penguin, 1992. pp 37-38; 95-102; 201-205; 276-279.

Elizabeth Hahn. “The Tongan Tradition of Going to the Movies.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. (eds.) Kelly Askew and Richard R. Welk. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. pp 258-269.

Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch. “The Social Construction of Technology.” In The Social Shaping of Technology: Second Edition. (eds.) Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. pp 113-115.

Daniel Miller and Don Slater. “Relationships.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. (eds.) Kelly Askew and Richard R. Welk. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. pp 187-209.

Julian E. Orr. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca: ILR Press, 1996. pp 1-23.

Pertti J. Pelto. The Snowmobile Revolution: Technology and Social Change in the Arctic. Menlo Park: Cummings, 1973. pp 3-14; 53-96.

Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. (eds.) Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. pp 17-50.