Social Constructionism Essay

Verification of Social constructionism through analysing Science and Technology Development in 20th Century

20106 박강민

Ⅰ. Background of Research

- Literature Review Whether technology drives social change or non-material elements such as culture cause social change has been a very long-standing question in sociology. There are two main theories about the causes of social change : Technoloy determinism and Culture determinism. In the Technoloy determinism’s view, technology is the most important thing among the factors which cause social change. It is assumed that since technology has its own developmental logic or engineering logic, its evolution takes the same path regardless of specific time and space. On the other hand, non-material elements, especially culture mainly drive the social change in the Culture determinism’s view. For example, it assumes that the Industrial Revolution’s main cause is the Christian ethics and values which highlights the diligence. In these days, many sociologists like Alvin Toffler have been regarding the Technoloy determinism as more dominant

And as the title, this study will analyze science and technology development in 20th century for the verification of Social constructionism. The invention or advent of Internet, satellite and smartphone is selected for analysing. And because it is clear that these 3 factors contributed to social changes, it is critical to find out that the some political or economic or cultural demands which led to science and technology development later already had been being bigger before that development. In other words, this study will show that the power of technology itself did not cause social change, but the social group that created and managed it caused social change and made technology. And all of these are based on the frequency of words and its growth tendency in Google Ngram