#sociotechnical

If you find yourself at this page, welcome.

The owners of this site are a bunch of students that have been challenged to go out and wage bloody mayhem upon the IT unbelievers who challenge the righteousness of the Knights of Sociotechnology... by providing them with the course materials from our social media course, posting our ranting and ravings on all matters slightly associated with the topic and, along the way, entertaining &, we hope, illuminating you. 

Our Social Media course lecturer, PJ Wall, is trying to get us techno-heads to use the latter a bit more. Our first answer to everything is “I know an app for that”. So he is challenging us to put some social media platform together to try and get us to grasp the challenge of using the technology to deliver the course content to our classmates & the wider public.  

But not just content. No, he’s not content with just content.

He’s pushing us to be aware of the social aspects, the political implications and the cultural norms under which we operate. We must look at how these influence the deployment of technical systems, that by ignoring them you dramatically increase the chances of failure. A technocentric view will give you a great technical system but will irritate your users who have to worship at the wonderful technoaltar you built. 

A sociotechnical viewpoint, on the other hand, looks at the people as an integral part of the overall system. And the order of the words, socio before technical, shows that without understanding the people, without respecting their culture and without understanding the political environment in which you offering will operate, you will most likely fail....or at least irritate a lot of people.

You are welcome to accompany us on our journey. We will post items that we find illuminating, we will post dry course minutes, we will post questions & look for answers, we will post...and by it grow.

Tim Berners-Lee on the huge sociotechnical design challenge

In a speech discussing ethics and the Internet, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has tasked the technology industry and its coder army with paying continuous attention to the world their software is consuming as they go about connecting humanity through technology.

Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices in addition to architecting systems that respect…

It was a zombie and I pushed him in front of the train.

We're coming full circle where statements like this will be acceptable again. Previously you needed burning bushes, a marinade of religions, some handy mushrooms and a cross. Now you get medication, pidgin Latin words and be homeless. 

If I said that, I would be on schizophrenic drugs with my own bijou padded cell.

But in another 5 years it will be true. Your eyes will see it with no pixilation, no bad green-screen-Flash-Gordan-sparks, no dodgy shadow around the edges. And what then? How will we tell what is real and what isn't? Or worse, will we see only what someone wants us to see? Religion with filters? State with propaganda? Hackers with hysteria?

What a strange question. I'm Irish of course. But then I think a bit more. Yes, yes, there is a strong Irish aspect but what other influences are there that I've not really recognised?

What prompted this was an article in Wired about nation states and how our online societies are blurring our identities. So a quick analysis of my browsing habits over the weekend indicates that, while liberal leaning, my news is a healthy mixture of fact, fiction and lies about international, national and local topics, and my social media engagement is nigh on global (g'wan Sean ya looney!). But this analysis has prompted questions about my engagement at local level and am I using my skills sufficiently to the benefit of my neighbours? And the uncomfortable answer is no, with free cliche "could do better". So that's a challenge; how do I improve local connectivity with social media? More social, less media? Is there an app for that?

CIED directors call for sociotechnical acceleration

Four directors of the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand (CIED) have published a paper in the Science journal calling for sociotechnical techniques to be adopted to speed up changes necessary to tackle climate change. Professors Frank Geels, Benjamin K Sovacool, Tim Schwanen and Steve Sorrell (all directors of CIED) call for different sectors and disciplines to work together on the ‘big…