84
Television and Everyday Life
TELEVISION AS A SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM
In popular accounts of technology, inventions of the late nineteenth century,
such as the incandescent light, the radio,
the airplane, and the gasoline-
driven automobile, occupy centre stage, but these inventions were embedded
within technological systems. Such systems involve far more than the so-
called hardware, devices, machines and processes, and the transportation,
communication and information networks that interconnect them. Such
systems consist also of people and organizations. An electric light and power
system, for instance,
may involve generators, motors, transmission lines,
utility companies, manufacturing enterprises and banks.
(Hughes, 1989, 3)
Seeing technology as a system involves, above all, seeing technology as both a
material and a social phenomenon. Relations between objects and artifacts;
relations between people and institutions; the power of the State and the politics
of organisations; the embeddedness of the systemic relations of technology in
a constantly vulnerable
environment of social, political and economic structures:
all of these elements define a framework from which new technologies emerge,
old technologies are discarded, and from which all technologies are produced
and consumed.
Systems are not just analytic constructs. As Mackenzie (1987) points out,
systems and networks should not be taken simply as given; they are not
unproblematic features of the world. Nor should it be assumed that the term
‘system’
be taken to imply stability and lack of conflict. Systems…hold together
only so long as the correct conditions prevail. There is always the
potential for their disastrous dissociation into their component parts.
Actors create and maintain systems,
and if they fail to do so, the systems
in question cease to exist. The stability of systems is a frequently
precarious achievement in the face of potentially hostile forces, both
social and natural.
(Mackenzie, 1987, 197)
Pursuing this analogy, John Law (1987) talks of technology as being constituted
by ‘heterogeneous elements’, themselves the product of the work of
‘heterogeneous engineers’. There are a number of points to be made here. Law
prefers the term ‘network’ to system. His argument relates both to Thomas
Hughes’ notion of system and to another perspective available within the
sociology of technology which sees technology as being socially constructed
in a similar way to science (see Woolgar, 1988 for a review). In relation to the
systems
metaphor, Law suggests that it tends to underestimate the fragility of
the emerging system in the face of the conflictful environments and conditions
in which it is embedded (though Mackenzie’s formulation does seem to take
The tele-technological system
85
this into account). In relation to the construction metaphor, he argues that the
privileging of the social which it demands (and the dependence of all other
elements on the social) mistakes the complexity of the relationships that need
to be understood if the emergence of new technologies is to be explained:
‘Other factors—natural, economic, or technical—may be more obdurate than
the social and may resist the best efforts of the system builder to reshape them’
(Law, 1987, 113). However, one can grant this
and still privilege the social;
indeed one must do so, since the natural, the economic, and the technical, in
their obduracy or their malleability, have no significance except through social
action. And it is possible to frame the problem of technology in these terms
without resorting to constructivism (with its inevitable relativist corollaries).
The sociotechnical system is therefore just that: a more or less fragile, more or
less secure, concatenation of human, social and material
elements and relations,
structured in, and structuring of, social action, and embedded in a context of
political and economic (and physical) relationships. From this point of view
the notion of network does not add much to that of system.
2
And indeed since
many of the elements that one would need to include within the model of the
socio-technical system are themselves systems or systematic (the family, the
organisation, the knowledge and practices associated with the design and
production of artifacts, etc.) I will stay with it in my own account.
Two interrelated points, however, need to be made. The first follows directly
from an observation made by Law. It is that an explanation
of technology rests
on the study both of the conditions and tactics of system building. ‘Tactics’ are
important. Technology emerges in these accounts as a result of the potential
space created within a network for the actions of individuals. Tactics suggest a
reactive-active mode of action undertaken within a superordinate structure,
yet at the same time, potentially at least, also affecting and defining that
structure. The military analogy is pertinent. But as Law points out in a footnote,
‘we are all heterogeneous engineers, combining as we do, disparate elements
into the “going concern” of our daily lives’ (Law, 1987, 133). This
opens up a
number of fascinating and important questions, not least the awareness of the
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