Why I’m Here
The academic field of Science and Technology Studies wasn’t something I stumbled upon by mistake: I was looking for it.
After a number of years working in other industries, with a growing interest in contemporary social, political, and economic issues, I’d started paying closer attention to the evidence around me that the world we live in is changing fast, and not always in ways that are desirable. As our society accepts and becomes used to the developments of modernity, some find themselves lamenting elements of their new lives and missing the way things used to be. Why? How could innovations that we welcome to improve our lives seem like they are creating problems and decreasing our quality of life?
This interested me, and I easily found public figures and commentators in abundance who readily voiced their opinions on these controversies. But vocal demagogues weren’t what I was looking for. If the world truly was heading in the wrong direction, I didn’t want to focus on complaining and pointing fingers, nor on trying to escape new problems by running away or avoiding modernity. No, I would rather try to understand these problems so we can work on them.
Where, I wondered, could I find people working professionally to understand the problems our modern society is creating for itself? Who are the people interested in identifying, understanding, and trying to address the conflicts and challenges posed by modern innovation? As it turned out, answering that question wasn’t easy, and pursuing it led me down a rabbit hole of discovery into networks of researchers, writers, activists, and organizations both past and present.
Discovering STS
Actually, even before this question became clear, I’d begun my exploration toward the answer. A TED talk here, a Radiolab there, and a variety of intriguing new book titles I’d been discovering on book store and library shelves had been growing my interests. This led me to expand my efforts to learn about a variety of topics, and in a montage of exploration I found myself crawling through books, podcasts, and videos on economics, history, sociology, and philosophy.
All were fascinating to me, but to relate it all to the modern world I had to add the topics of science and technological innovation. I learned about endeavors to make science fiction technologies a reality. I learned about information theory and quantum physics and multiverses. And, very quickly, all of the topics started to cross paths with each other.
The philosophy books talked about science, and the science books talked about philosophy. Economics involved ethics and technology involved money. The same names started popping up in all the topics. Plato, Kant, and Marx. Malthus, Luther, and Pascal. And later Einstein, Turing, Shannon, von Neumann, and Wiener. The issues I wanted to work on touched on all of these areas, and a number of important people in history clearly had valuable things to add to the discussion.
So which part did I want to focus on? The broad debates of philosophy? Or the specific issues of technology?
Or, I wondered, was there such a thing as making a living at the intersection of the two?
So one day I sat down in front of Google and typed, “Philosophy of Technology”. Wikipedia absorbed me from there, and a web of clicks subsequently brought me to discover STS.
Is STS What I Think It Is?
“This is it!” I thought. “This is the professional side of my interests. A career in STS is perfect for me!” I immediately attached all of my interests to STS, but I must admit that I came with a certain set of expectations that I projected upon it.
Does STS involve technology and how it affects our modern society? Yes.
Does it objectively try to understand influences and implications, causes and effects? Yes.
Does it bring in ideas and methodologies from a variety of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities? Yep.
“Great!” I concluded, “STS is exactly what I was looking for.”
But while some of what I’m passionate about does indeed fit well into the realm of STS, there are differences as well.
Want to examine the social aspects of research methodology in the history of medicine? STS has you covered.
Want to critique the constructivist school of the sociology of scientific knowledge? STS can handle that too.
These weren’t the interests that had brought me here. So yes, STS does talk about the ways new technologies affects our society. But it’s also concerned with the ways our society affects scientific research and technological developments, with a lot of detailed historical examinations and abstract concepts.
Furthermore, STS is not activism. The goal of STS, it seems, is not to directly advocate for one course of action or another, but rather to create, research, and support ideas that can help us understand and perhaps even better predict the way science, technology and society impact one another. The concept of unbiased, objective research that I appreciate is at odds with the concept of pushing an agenda (even if that agenda is simply to improve quality). If my objective is to make the world a better place, no matter how helpful it is to understand it, research and discussion alone will not be enough. It also takes action to turn ideas into meaningful changes.
At any rate, to me it was clear that I’d discovered a valuable network of people and ideas. If I want to match my personal skills to the topics I am most interested in and passionate about, I need to start by collaborating with others to better understand those topics. If I intend to make a professional living in this area, joining forces with the intelligent and diverse members of the STS community looks to be an excellent path forward.
The Path Forward
I’m now committed to studying Science, Technology, and Society, and I’m going to pursue it in multiple ways. First, I’ll study to absorb as much of the traditional thinking and knowledge in the field as I can. Secondly, I will seek out ways to work together with others in the field who have interests related to my own. Third, I will work to continuously create my own contributions through original writing, creative analysis, and sharing of resources I discover.
The goal here, of course, is to both have a valuable impact through my work, and to make a living. It remains to be seen which of these is the more difficult of the two…
In any case, STS is now my direction. Thank you for reading and welcome to my work!