A self-fulfilling prophecy is, roughly, a prediction that brings about its own truth. Although true predictions are hard to fault, self-fulfilling prophecies are often regarded with suspicion. In this article, we vindicate this suspicion by explaining what self-fulfilling prophecies are and what is problematic about them, paying special attention to how their problems are exacerbated through automated prediction. Our descriptive account of self-fulfilling prophecies articulates the four elements that define them. Based on this account, we begin our critique by showing (...) that typical self-fulfilling prophecies arise due to mistakes about the relationship between a prediction and its object. Such mistakes—along with other mistakes in predicting or in the larger practical endeavor—are easily overlooked when the predictions turn out true. Thus we note that self-fulfilling prophecies prompt no error signals; truth shrouds their mistakes from humans and machines alike. Consequently, self-fulfilling prophecies create several obstacles to accountability for the outcomes they produce. We conclude our critique by showing how failures of accountability, and the associated failures to make corrections, explain the connection between self-fulfilling prophecies and feedback loops. By analyzing the complex relationships between accuracy and other evaluatively significant features of predictions, this article sheds light both on the special case of self-fulfilling prophecies and on the ethics of prediction more generally. (shrink)

Background: Social media technology has provided platforms for enhanced human communication and expanded opportunities for self-expression. Despite the numerous gains, this social networking media, come with myriads of limitations; one being the tendency to be abused and/or misused, especially by young people or the young at heart. This study examined how social networking media influence the sexual behaviours of university undergraduates in Nigeria. -/- Materials and Methods: The survey research method was adopted. A sample size of 396 students was determined (...) using the Taro Yamane’s formula. The study was anchored on the Technological Determinism theory. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire with a reliability coefficient of 0.99 through test-retest method. Data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics with the aid of SPSS v25 software. -/- Results: Findings showed, amongst others that, undergraduates in Nigerian universities are largely exposed to a substantial amount of sexual contents on various social media networks; and that this exposure negatively influences their psychology towards sex as manifested in the area of dating before marriage as a result of indulgence in interactive and romantic sites. -/- Conclusion and Recommendations: The study recommends the introduction of social media education in higher institutions to help enlighten students on the responsible use of these technologies to minimize the inherent weaknesses and maximize the intrinsic values of utilising these media platforms. (shrink)

This brief position paper explores our current confrontation with technology through a model of the accident. Focusing on failure, risk and malfunctioning technology, the paper offers the notion of disasterologies as an alternative approach to technology studies. Such an approach suggests both a less deterministic and instrumentalized drive than is often found in theories of technology and society as well as a less certain role of the subject in its relation to technology. Disasterologies re-imagines the accident as that which eludes (...) the modern subject's mastery over the built environment through scientific knowledge and "technological rationality." By foregrounding when technology fails, disasterologies implies a subject neither entirely in control nor entirely at the mercy of technology, one whose condition of contingency re-opens questions of agency, intentionality, and subjectivity itself. (shrink)

Fringe science has been an important topic since the start of the revolution in the social studies of science that occurred in the early 1970s. The revolution was what Collins and Evans refer to as the "second wave of science studies," while this paper is best thought of as an exercise in "third wave science studies." The first wave was that period which reached its apogee in the aftermath of the Second World War when science was seen as unquestionably the (...) pre-eminent form of knowledge-making, and the role of philosophy and sociology was to understand how it was so and how societies could be arranged to nurture it best; the second wave was "social constructionism" which became folded into post-modernism in... (shrink)

The political economy of the information machine is discussed within the Marxist tradition of Italian operaismo by posing the hypothesis of an informational turn already at work in the age of the industrial revolution. The idea of valorizing information introduced by Alquati (1963) in a pioneering Marxist approach to cybernetics is used to examine the paradigms of mass intellectuality, immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism developed by Lazzarato, Marazzi, Negri, Vercellone and Virno since the 1990s. The concept of machinic by Deleuze (...) and Guattari (1972, 1980) is then adopted to extend Marx’s analysis of the industrial machine to the algorithms of digital machines. If the industrial machine can be described as a bifurcation of the domains of energy and information, this essay proposes to conceive the information machine itself as a further bifurcation between information and metadata. In conclusion, the hypothesis of the society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that society of control pictured by Deleuze (1990) in relation to the power embodied in databases. (shrink)

This article explores the technoenvironmental politics associated with government-sponsored climate change mitigation. It focuses on England’s New Technologies Demonstrator Programme, established to test the “viability” of “green” waste treatments by awarding state aid to eight experimental projects that promise to divert municipal waste from landfill and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The article examines how these demonstrator sites are arranged and represented to produce noncontroversial and publicly accessible forms of evidence and experience and, ultimately, to inform environmental policy and planning (...) decisions throughout the country. As in experimental science, this process requires that some bear witness to the demonstrators, but in a disciplined way. Whether through the extrapolation of facts about technical performance by affiliated third-party consultants, or the orchestration of visitor centers open to the general public, making the demonstrators public involves controlling the ways in which they are interpreted and perceived. However, the unstable publicity of waste management facilities proliferates unofficial accounts as well. These acts of counterwitnessing, as I refer to them, not only potentially dispute the official evidence collected from the demonstrators, they also can pose a challenge to the understanding of technology upon which such government initiatives are based. (shrink)

Whether it pertains to what is not considered, what cannot be determined, what is not allowed to be known, or what is deliberately concealed, absences figure as the constant shadows of what is made present by social research. This article explores the relation between what is presented and what is not by treating it first as a vexing conundrum for representation and then as a vehicle for understanding. The matters under examination include what is written about the social world as (...) well as the methods of writing employed. This article seeks an orientation toward both aspects that attends to the binds, contradictions, and possibilities of depicting what is missing. That involves addressing how authors labor to render absences present, the criteria for assessment, as well as the metaphors that guide activities. (shrink)

Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in (...) subsequent research practice. The proposed theoretical interpretation of technology is examined through a case where a model organism—Drosophila melanogaster—acted as a technology for investigating a contested biological effect of a mechanical instrument: Hermann J. Muller’s experiments on X-ray mutagenicity in the 1920s. The article reconstructs how Muller employed two synthetic Drosophila stocks as tests for measuring X-rays’ capacity to cause genetic aberration. It argues that past scientific knowledge sedimented in the Drosophila stocks influenced Muller’s perception of X-ray-induced mutation. It further describes how Muller’s concept of X-ray mutagenicity sedimented through the adoption of X-ray machines as a ready-made resource for producing mutants by other geneticists, for instance George Beadle and Edward Tatum in their experiments on Neurospora crassa, despite ongoing disputes surrounding Muller’s conclusions. Technological sedimentation is proposed as a potential explanation why sedimentation and disputation may often coexist in the history of science. (shrink)

This article explores the way in which social explanations underpin the names of particular disciplines. Taking the example of pharmacogenomics, it shows how this term has been constructed since it appeared in 1997, the differences and similarities between it and its precursor, pharmacogenetics, and the way in which commercial interests underpin this new term. Drawing on the idea of visions and the sociology of expectation, the article shows how different actors compete to have their preferred definitions of the term accepted (...) by the world at large. (shrink)

In this paper I try to problematize our conception of rational agency and to suggest that this conception is a matter of some practical and political significance. This is done on the one hand by indicating why more attention should be paid to the role of practical know-how, or skill, in the application of general laws or principles to particular cases, and on the other by looking to a Chinese model of efficacious action, where much attention is paid to cultivating (...) the skills required to make the transition from general to particular, albeit at the expense of recognizing the significance of what we would think of as scientific understanding. (shrink)

(1998). Coherence and the jurisdictions of the tribunal of reason. Social Epistemology: Vol. 12, Real Knowing: Situating Social Epistemology, pp. 227-239.

Global environmental science, in its current configuration as predominantly interdisciplinary earth systems analysis, owes its existence to technological development in three respects. (1) Environmental impacts of globalization of corporate and military industrial development linked to widespread use of new technologies prompted investigation of ways to understand and anticipate the global nature of such impacts. (2) Extension of the reach of technology itself demands extension of attempts to anticipate and control the environment in which the technology is to function. Thus as (...) the reach becomes global, the environment in question is also global. (3) Such global studies cannot get far without the development of command, control and information technologies (computers, satellites, automated remote sensing devices) which are crucial for data gathering, storage, and analysis and for the simulation modeling, crucial to theory testing and prediction. This network of dependence on technological development gives the global environmental sciences a rather distinctive epistemological profile, one in which some distinctions that we had thought were clear, on the basis of models of classic laboratory sciences (such as those between experiment and deduction or representation and instrument), turn out to be far from clear. In consequence there needs to be a careful evaluation of the extent to which, or the ways in which, these sciences can provide bases for policy decisions. (shrink)

The paper asks how certain zones of technical practice or technologies come to matter as "the Technological", a way of construing political change in terms of technical innovation and invention. The social construction of technology (SCOT) established that things mediate social relations, and that social practices are constantly needed to maintain the workability of technologies. It also linked the production, representation and use of contemporary technologies to scientific knowledge. However, it did all this at a certain cost. To understand something (...) as socially constructed implies that it can be positioned on a pre-given social grid. Making this understanding stick risks affronting others with the claim that their position is not singular, only ordinary. It also runs the risk of not having purchase on those aspects of technological relationality that overflow the framing context of the social (Callon et al. 2002). Building on the ground prepared by SCOT and relying on the work of (Stengers 2000) and (Simondon 1964, 1989), the paper discusses how technologies could be understood as relational events within the contemporary political space. Developing an account of technologies centred on relationality, this paper outlines an epistemology and ontology of the anomalies of technological events, and suggests how excess could explain the Technological. (shrink)

After recognizing that technologies are socially constructed, questions arise concerning how technologies should be constructed, by what processes, and granting how much influence to whom. Because partisanship, uncertainty, and disagreement are inevitable in trying to answer these questions, reconstructivist scholarship should embrace the desirability of thoughtful partisanship, should focus on strategies for coping intelligently with uncertainties, and should make central the study of social processes for coping with disagreement regarding technoscience and its utilization. That often will entail siding with have-nots, (...) meaning that reconstructivist scholars often will be opposing the behaviors of government, business, and technoscientific elites. Because reconstructivists normally will be outnumbered, we need to devote more systematic professional attention to setting our collective agenda concerning what is most worth researching. (shrink)