Engineering as a Social Enterprise (1991) / Chapter Skim
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Cultural and Sociotechnical Values
Cultural and Sociotechnical Values
Pages 26-38
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From page 26... ...
This agnosticism admittedly may be idiosyncratic, a result of my involvement for many years with prevailingly impersonal themes of demography, economy, and ecology across millennial spans of early Near Eastem history. In that setting it was seldom possible to distinguish values with sufficient clarity to credit them with a significant role either as agencies of change or resistance to change.
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From page 27... ...
It is undeniable that substantial segments of the electorate in most industrialized societies view with increasing indifference or hostility at least some fruits of technology products and processes that engineers have taken pride in creating and probably regard as unambiguously life-enhancing. Contradictory perceptions always tend to be selectively fixated on hardware; conflicts demand and generate their own inanimate symbols.
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From page 28... ...
Those who would address risk as a primarily technical and statistical problem have failed to notice that these increasingly salient issues of distributive justice can independently affect public perceptions of risk, and that variations in the latter can produce second-order effects that sometimes far outstrip statistically based computations of cost or frequency. As one noted student of the subject has recently observed, In becoming a central cultural construct in America, the word [risk]
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From page 29... ...
: insurance rate increases; declining property values; economic disruptions resulting from a cessation of tourism, or from shifts in consumer demand for products believed- whether accurately or not to be somehow associated with other products found faulty or dangerous; and, as was shown at Three Mile Island, persistent effects even on the mental health of the adjacent population. It is simply unrealistic for those advocating new or improved technologies to dismiss such costs from consideration as if they were externalities unrelated to technological risk.
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From page 30... ...
Besides wasting tremendous quantities of water and nutrients, it bypasses expensive treatment facilities with uncontrolled storm drains, fails almost completely to check discharges of heavy metals and exotic chemicals, and has led to spreading eutrophication and contamination of our increasingly precious wetlands and natural water bodies (Tschinkel 1989 nn.
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From page 31... ...
Treatment of very improbable events tends to be capricious and undependable, sometimes dismissing them entirely and at other times elevating them to a supreme and undebatable level of importance. Nuclear weapons and nuclear power are of course representative of this latter category, but so are such other risks as those exemplified by new chemical technologies whose toxic side-effects are not immediately apparent.
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From page 32... ...
But it would be no more correct to exclude them from further, open discussion for that reason than it would be to dismiss them as mere psychological aberrations undeserving of engineering attention. Recognizing that pervasive misunderstandings like these can complicate communications with the public, there is no reason to question the public's reception of new technological innovations that are imposed by governmental action with growing prudence if not suspicion.
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From page 33... ...
Vast webs of long-distance but narrowly focused interactions erode the integrity of primary social units and substitute for a stable sense of place as an ordering principle in our lives. Virtually all our activities and relationships reflect an immensely heightened mobility—not only in our own routine physical movements but in the permanence of our places of employment, access to information, professional and other reference group memberships, sources of style and entertainment, acquisition of credit, capital and other resources, and, not least, the competition we face as a nation.
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From page 35... ...
And indeed there has been as sustained and profound a transformation in labor-saving efficiency in homes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as in most concurrent industrial advances where it is much more celebrated. Yet this outcome results, in a persuasively revisionist historian's view, from many social processes over which householders had very little direct control: Nowadays, the general expansion of both the economy and the welfare system has led fewer people than ever before into the market for paid domestic labor; and the diffusion of appliances into households, and of households into suburbs, has encouraged the disappearance of various commercial services.
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From page 36... ...
Similarly, there was confidence a generation ago in what seemed the natural ascendancy of this country based on the technological primacy it had achieved. Admittedly this had occurred in a context of massive military destruction from which we had largely escaped, but the prodigious success of our own wartime efforts seemed to suggest no limit to what could be attained through selfsustaining technological progress alone.
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From page 37... ...
Since then, of course, the attack on a dehumanizing, engulfing technocratic mastery has broadened and become more direct, as exemplified in the works of Aldous Huxley, Charles Chaplin, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. In many domains of the social sciences and humanities as well, `'the technocratic image is now associated with a political pathology" (Gunnel!
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From page 38... ...
38 CULTURAL AND SOCIOTECHNICAL VALUES Sills, D
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