Transcription
Hi, I'm Janelle Salanga. I'm a Science and Technology Studies or STS student at UC Davis, and today we'll be talking about STS. But first, let's talk about objectivity. What's that about? Objects? No, objectivity.
You've probably heard of it before, especially if you've studied science, law, engineering, or journalism. But try to define objectivity. I'll give you a few moments. Did your definition contain the words "fair," "unbiased," "neutral"? What does neutrality in science and tech sound like or look like to you? Let's find out together.
STS is about asking these questions. It's about understanding how society, politics, and culture impact the development of science and tech. And it's also about how science and tech impact the way that we look at culture, society, and politics.
STS came about in the 1970s, along with other interdisciplinary fields like ethnic studies. This was a result of a growing social consciousness caused by things like the Vietnam War, increased consumerism, environmental awareness, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of nuclear power. At the same time, in academia, scholars like Thomas Kuhn, who wrote *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, which would later become a big part of SCS canon, were starting to question the idea of objectivity in science and technology. And those two threads helped weave the field into what we see it as today.
Today, you can study STS at universities worldwide. You could study SES at MIT, where it's called Science, Technology, and Society. That was actually the first SDS program created in 1988. And now there are programs dedicated to SES at universities throughout Europe and Asia. The National University of Singapore offers the only English-language center for SDS research in all of East and Southeast Asia. It also offers an SCS minor. And you could study SCS at UC Davis, like me.
Donna Haraway, a feminist SAS scholar and a leading voice in the field, argues that there's no such thing as objectivity. Instead, she argues for what she calls "situated knowledges." "Only partial perspective promises objective vision." Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular. To hear away. Objective vision can only be achieved by understanding that we all come from somewhere, and that our knowledge starts from a particular position.
For example, my view on science and tech is shaped by not only my identity as a Filipino but where I grew up in the California Central Valley and my class background. My dad is an engineer in Silicon Valley. When I grew up, I tended to see computers as super positive things. They were where I played Neopets, Webkinz, and the green and white screens with text boxes were how my dad made money. Haraway would argue that these experiences can't be removed from what I make or write.
But through college and my own experiences with social media, I've seen that tech can be damaging, even when it has good intentions. The growing tech industry in Silicon Valley is pushing people outwards, away from the Bay Area, and hiking up rent prices, both there and in the Central Valley. The Central Valley is one of the poorest areas of California, and it's also the region that feeds the most people in the state. The Central Valley is also filled with lots of migrant farmers and immigrants, and higher prices further limit opportunities for those folks. Tech, I've seen, isn't a great equalizer.
That's something Langdon Winner, the chair of the SDS department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, would agree with. In an article from 1980, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", he argues that technologies are influenced by the people who make them. Winner says that technologies are ways of building order, kind of like laws and how they establish a framework for order that lasts for many generations.
One of the examples that Winner gives in his work is the example of bridge structures in New York, which were designed by Robert Moses. He was an architect in the 1900s who was anti-Black and anti-poor. That showed up in his work because he made these bridge structures so low that public transportation couldn't pass under them, meaning that poorer folks, usually Black people, couldn't go to the beach or enjoy other recreational activities throughout New York.
In 2015, it came out that Google Photos' facial recognition software was categorizing Black faces as gorillas. The user experience team had been mostly testing the software on white faces, and so the machine, spinning out only when it was fed, was starting to categorize and misrepresent Black faces as gorillas because they were far from the norm.
But technology has improved since then, right? That shows that people can get better, even if there are occasional mishaps like the Google thing. Or maybe it's not that simple. MIT professor Leo Marx questioned the relationship between technology and societal progress in 1987. He came up with two different ideas of societal progress: the Enlightenment idea and the technocratic idea. The Enlightenment idea states that improved technologies are means to achieve progress. The technocratic idea states that improved technology *is* progress itself.
Here's Marx's answer to his own question: Does improved technology mean progress? Yes, it certainly could mean just that, but only if we are willing and able to answer the next question: Progress toward what? What is it that we want our new technologies to accomplish?
STS is all about causing trouble. It's about looking at science and technology, which are usually considered innovative and progressive, and taking them apart to ask: Who gets to make them? Which agendas get prioritized in research and development? And what counts as science and tech? STS isn't just about asking the "whats" of science; it's about asking who, when, where, and why.
That wraps up our spiel on Science and Technology Studies. Thanks for watching.