Social Construction of Technology
Social construction of technology (SCOT) is the research program, emerging in the 1980s, that treats technological development as a socially negotiated process rather than as an autonomous engineering progression. Its canonical formulation is Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker's 1984 paper "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts," which introduced concepts like interpretive flexibility, relevant social groups, and closure to analyze how specific technologies came to take specific forms. Noble's archival work preceded SCOT's formal articulation but provided some of its most influential empirical cases, and the two traditions have been in productive dialogue ever since.
In The You On AI Field Guide
SCOT's central analytical move is to refuse the retrospective inevitability that typically frames the history of successful technologies. The bicycle, as Bijker demonstrated, could have taken many forms; the specific shape we now recognize as "bicycle" emerged through decades of negotiation among cyclists, manufacturers, safety advocates, and road regulators. The same analytical approach