Social Technology Notes and Links
|
|
Social Technology Notes and Links |
|
|
This page is very-much underconstruction -- creating it involves a lot of searching for key phrases and collecting interesting URLs. Currently I use the AltaVista search engine and search for the quoted phrase "social technology". Not all search engines permit searching for quoted phrases, but if you just enter the two words you get millions of irrelevant matches: all the pages that contain one or both of the words, whether or not combined in a phrase. Wading through search engine results is rather labour intensive, so if anybody knows of any good social technology references or URLs, please e-mail me at the address shown below -- I will be grateful for any help.
I am particularly interested in documents you can read online or download.
What does 'Social Technology' mean?
I've been using the phrase 'social technology' for 20 years or so in writing and conversation, to mean the technological or engineering counterpart to the social sciences. But who else uses it, and what do they mean by it?
Because the concept is quite central to my own views of society, I have been using Alta Vista to search for the quoted phrase "social technology" from time to time, partly out of curiosity, and partly to avoid a conflict of terminology.
Until recently the only other use of the phrase that I found was by a group in Finland, North Karelian Social Technology Development Project a project funded by the European Union and the Finnish government. They seem to use it to mean technological aids for the elderly and handicapped, from wheel-chairs to speaking and reading machines, but some other sub-projects seem to take a broader view of the phrase.
Now there are many more web pages that include the phrase, from which I've collected just a few examples and quotes:
There are few academic institutions using the phrase, but one is the Institute of Social Technology at Suranaree Technical University in Thailand, which includes a School of Information Technology and a School of Management Technology.
Scholars and academics using the phrase 'social technology' include:
The most widely cited paper using the phrase 'social technology' in the title is Sproull, L. and Faraj, S. (1995). "Atheism, sex, and databases: The Net as a social technology." In B. Kahin and J. Keller (Eds.), Public access to the Internet, published by MIT Press, from whom I'd like to quote --
People on the net should be thought of not only as solitary information processors but also as social beings. People are not only looking for information; they are also looking for affiliation, support and affirmation. ...
If we view people as social actors, then we should view the net as a social technology. A social technology is one that makes it possible to find people with common interests, to talk with them and listen to them, and to sustain connections with them over time.
A more recent work that also uses the phrase in the title but takes a less favourable view of the Internet is Kraut,R. Lundmark, V. et al, "Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?", published in the September 1998 issue of the American Psychologist, which can be read online.
A professional futurist who often writes and speaks about social technology is Ian Pearson, futurist for British Telecommunications. His home page is here , and his work may be seen here , or downloaded from his home page.
Further notes and references, together will clickable links whenever I can find them will be added to this page.
Please visit
home page
if you have not already done
so.
New: Social Technology through Diagrams
New: Social Techs novel online
The main Social Technology page.
Find Compatibles, the key page, with the real solution to all other problems explained
Technological Fantasies , a page about future technology
Social Tech a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.
Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following blogs:
Social Technology the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.
Find Compatibles devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.
Technological Fantasies devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.
Sex-Politics-Religion is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.
I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.
Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceeed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an upopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.
By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of Find Compatibles, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.
As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transporation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.
In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.
I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.
This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maiintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at an earlier version of this page, rather longer, and at an overview of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.
Type in this address to e-mail me. The image is interesting. See Status of Social Technology
Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, Douglas Pardoe Wilson
I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.