Why and How Technology Matters

Technology matters. Bicycles were instrumental in the political and social emancipation of women (Bijker 1995); photo and film technology induced a subtle form of apartheid (Wajcman 2005); nuclear arms and energy shaped, for example through the non-proliferation treaty, international relations since the 1950s (Smit 2005); the low-hanging overpasses on Long Island discourage since the 1920s the presence of buses on the parkways, thus preventing public transport to the prestigious Long Beach public park (Winner 1980). Politics matters too, to understand technology’s development. The refrigerator got its hum (that is: is now driven by electricity rather than gas) because of the political power play between American electricity and gas utilities in the 1920s (Cowan 1983); gender politics resulted in the contraceptive Pill rather than the male pill (Wajcman 2005; Oudshoorn 2003); the technical development of anti-ballistic missile systems can only be understood by analyzing the dynamics of the international political relations between the US and the USSR (Smit 2005); the Long Island overpasses are deliberately low, because of the racial and social segregation policy that its designer, Robert Moses, maintained: "Poor people and blacks, who normally