Society & Technology: Evaluation
From awareness to evaluation, a key step before society figures out how it wants to adapt a revolutionary technology.
In my last article I explored how societies become aware of new technologies, how they initially react and the period of time that varies around technology awareness. We are in this phase now with Generative AI (like Claude and ChatGPT). In this article, I will look at how we then evaluate technologies. This is the phase before we adapt a technology.
By understanding these phases, we can take a more critical and nuanced look at the major new technologies currently entering into broader society and impacting our sociocultural systems. To see beyond the hype and, hopefully, be a little more pragmatic.
Some new technologies move very quickly through the phases of awareness, evaluation and adaptation. The smartphone is an example, taking less than a decade to move through these phases and become widely adopted and now being adapted, by society. This is rare, but then the iPhone had the Blackberry which laid the ground for it and combined technologies already in widespread use and cultural acceptance.
Technologies, like culture and societies, are not fixed, they are ever changing and evolving. Technologies are not neutral, nor are they deterministic. Once they move into the awareness and evaluation phases, they tend to start reflecting the values, traditions, interests, economics and power relations.
“Technology is not a separate or isolated domain, but a part of a complex and interconnected system that includes culture, society, environment, economy, politics, and history.” — Lindsey Wallace, Anthropologist
As an example, society is currently in the evaluation phase with social media. Our awareness period took nearly 20 years once social media was available to most of humanity. As sociocultural groups became aware of social media and it’s uses, they started to do human things with it. Both good and bad. From the Arab Spring over a decade ago for social organising to other forms of protest through to the rise of influencers and all kinds of fascinating and interesting uses.
“Technology is just a tool. People make things happen, not technology.” — Susan Wojcicki
Society became increasingly aware of the pitfalls and the impacts of social media on societal norms, behaviours, customs and traditions. From cyberbullying to abuse of personal data and privacy. Now in the evaluation phase, society is figuring out how we want to adapt social media to better fit into how we want to govern our society. The primary form of doing this is litigation and laws through political action.
Similar approaches have been taken with other technologies from the telegraph, radio and telephone to railroads, aeroplanes and cars. There’s no way to predict when these phases start or end and sometimes they overlap one another.
The Evaluation Phase of Technologies
The evaluation phase of technologies in society is when we begin to have deeper societal understanding of how a revolutionary technology is impacting us. From political and economic systems, militaries, norms, identity and traditions.
We also start to play with these technologies in different ways. As I’ve written before, play is very important in terms of how technologies mature and evolve. This starts in the awareness phase and continues late into the evaluation phase.
“The most important thing about technology is that it changes people.” — Jaron Lanier
In the evaluation phase we start to consider the positives and the negatives, what aspects we want to keep and which ones we want to toss or modify. Keeping in mind that this varies by cultures around the world. Each culture and society will take different approaches based on environment, political systems and power structures and so on.
Technologies, ever since we started using stone tools and the first inklings of language, have been deeply integrated with our sociocultural systems. It’s why technologies evolve as much as societies evolve. Technologies, like customs, values and traditions (elements of culture), are passed down to generations and like culture, evolve alongside it. Always being modified.
Some of the most important modifications to revolutionary technologies start to happen during the evaluation phase. Not just in terms of the technology itself, but the requirements, rules and social expectations we put around a technology.
Take the smartphone, or mobiles as a whole, for example. In the early days people walked around yelling into their phones and carrying them on their hips. It was a social signal and we sure wanted everyone to know it! Today, we don’t have little headsets with blinking blue lights and we often carry our phones in our pockets, bags and purses. Society evolved new norms around the technology.
The evaluation phase is when social movements start to play a more significant role as they agitate for change in political systems (in democracies) such as regulations and laws. We are seeing this with social media now. This phase too, can take several years or even decades in some cases.
As the evaluation phase nears its end, we enter the adaptation phase. I’ll be exploring this in the next article. This is quite an exciting phase too as we figure out how to change the revolutionary technology that changed us to fit the adaptations we initially made for the technology.