ABSTRACT
There have been a number of different ways of approaching this task, emerging from academic disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, history and cultural studies. Each has its own contributions to make, and these have, moreover, become fused and commingled in fields such as science studies, science and technology studies (STS), and cultural studies of science and technology. It is not possible for me to sketch the lineages of all these areas here; I shall pick out significant aspects of each, and point towards sources that can provide the detail. Let me pick out one over-arching tenet of these studies, which addresses the issue of contingency already highlighted: Andrew Webster (1991) calls attention to the idea of ‘epistemic relativism’ in studies of science. What this means is that scientific knowledge is located culturally, historically and geographically. This draws our attention to the idea that science is made at a particular time and place – it is not a universal entity, but the product of people (scientists), who are themselves products of the setting in which they do science. To put it another way, science is itself a social practice. The same idea works with technology, too; if we look closely at the invention, development, production, consumption and use of a particular technological artefact (a computer, for example), we can see how each stage is overlain by broader social processes, which it shapes but is also shaped by. Computers have turned out the way they have because they are social and cultural as well as technological objects – and, of course, they are political and economic objects, too (Star 1995). The kind of historical work carried out by Paul Ceruzzi, for example, combined with studies of computer scientists and computer users in situ, adds together to provide a complex and contingent picture of what computers are, what they mean and what they do – and why.
