Page 51 - Education in a Digital World

38 Theoretical Approaches

structures and processes. As Slavoj Žižek (1996, p.198) concludes, technology and
society are therefore mutually shaped and mutually shaping:

the way computerization affects our lives does not depend directly on
technology, it results from the way the impact of new technology is refracted
by the social relations which, in their turn, co-determine the very direction of
technological development.

This approach certainly provides more scope for what Wiebe Bijker et al. (1987)
describe as ‘open[ing] up the black box of technology’. In particular this perspective
on technology allows for a better understanding of the influence of the local,
national and international interests on the apparently ‘global’ forms of educational
technology we have covered so far in this book. This moves us beyond the
‘decontextualised’ view of technology that is often pursued in the globalisation
literature and serves only to “edit out the various forces and fields that both bring it
into being, and deploy it” (Schirato and Webb 2003, p.47). Instead, this
contextualised perspective leaves us able to identify these ‘various forces and fields’
and consider important questions of intent and agency. These include the explora-
tion of how educational technologies are developed, implemented and adopted
with specific purposes and practices in mind – not least the purpose of changing
things and influencing society (Miller 2011, p.5). As John Potts (2008, n.p.)
details, this way of thinking therefore offers a ‘dose of social perspective’ on how
technologies are used in society, focusing on factors such as “social need, economic
intention, political control, specific decision-making, the design of content: in a
word, intention”.
These ways of understanding technology are often described as taking a ‘social
shaping’ perspective. Following this line of thinking, it is accepted that there can be
no predetermined outcomes to the development and implementation of educational
technologies. Instead, any technological artefact is seen as being subjected con-
tinually to a series of interactions and ‘negotiations’ with the social, economic,
political and cultural contexts that it emerges into. As a whole, the social shaping
approach therefore highlights the importance of recognising the social and interac-
tional circumstances in which digital technologies exist and through which they
attain their meaning(s). The strength of this approach to technology and education
lies in its ability to allow a number of ‘big questions’ to be asked about technology
that would otherwise be absent from the research agenda for education and
technology. These questions include how individual educational technologies fit
into wider socio-technical systems and networks, as well as what connections and
linkages exist between educational technology and macro-level concerns of globa-
lisation, the knowledge economy and late modernity. These approaches also offer a
direct ‘way in’ to unpacking the micro-level social processes that underpin the use
of digital technologies in educational settings. From both these perspectives,
the principal advantage of the more socially nuanced theoretical approaches should