Digital technology and social change In the epilogue to Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tufekci sums up her thinking about technology and social change in this way:  Attached files are previous works for reference

Digital technology and social change
In the epilogue to Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tufekci sums up her thinking about technology and social change in this way:

Attached files are previous works for reference

One key lesson from the past is that our familiarity with a new and rapidly spreading technologies is often superficial, and the full ramifications of these technologies are far from worked out. Another lesson is that what appears to empower one group can also empower its adversaries, and introduce novel twists to many dynamics.

Historian Melvin Kranzberg’s famous dictum holds true: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Neither are technology’s effects static; everything evolves as people invent, innovate, and appropriate technologies for their purposes. This dynamism does not mean that technology provides a level playing field, where each side is equally empowered and equally able to appropriate technologies for its purposes. Not only social forces determine the transformation—features and characteristics of technologies are relevant and these affordances are sometimes beyond the control of these technologies’ designers. Any analysis must necessarily embrace this complexity and try to avoid the false dichotomies: optimists versus pessimists; utopians versus dystopians; humans versus technology. I am not arguing for some sort of “technological centrism,” but simply for understanding the complex and at times contradictory relationship between different effects of digital technologies. (p. 263)

For your final memo, again choose a digital platform, app, or other contemporary technology that people use collectively and socially in some way. This time, in a 500-600 word memo, analyze the big-picture, macro-level social changes that might be associated with the adoption of that technology.

Think broadly and sociologically about your topic—explain the changes we’ve seen already, and then predict how this technology and society might develop together in the future. Describe the collective groups that might be transformed by adopting this technology— communities, social movements, political campaigns, government agencies, or private corporations. Give particular attention to the role of data and information in social change.

Be sure to think through change as a complex, dynamic, and dialectical process. If everyone adopts this technology, then what? How might different actors innovate or adapt, and how might others respond?

Finally, think back to the beginning of this course. Reflect on how your own thinking about the relationship between technology and society has changed. Draw on (and cite!) any concepts and examples from the class and the readings that are helpful to you in making your own arguments about social and technological change.

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