Science, Technology, and Society

• The increasing use of surveillance technologies raises questions about the balance between security and individual privacy.
• Science, Technology, and Society (STS)- is an interdisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand the many ways that modern science and technology shape modern culture, values, and institutions, and how modern values shape science and technology.
• • STS examines how science and technology emerge, how they enter society, how they change through social processes, and how society changes in response to science and technology.
• Biotechnologies:

   Genetic science and engineering opens the possibility of humans taking control of life, itself.

  By altering the genetic makeup of plants, animals and eventually humans, we may change forever our relationship to nature.
• Globalization & Economic Competitiveness:

   The growing scale of economic competition portends a “global culture”, tied together by computers, satellites, and the internet.

  What effects are these developments already having on workers, consumers, and nations? What will the future hold?
• The Internet:

  The emergence and spread of computer-mediated communications is one of the fastest growing revolutionary technologies in history.

  The Internet will likely change how we understand community, personal identity, and the transfer of information around the world.
• Weapons Technologies, Terrorism, and Security:

  The arms race continues, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

  Nuclear weapons, missile delivery systems, chemical and biological weapons, as well as ever-more-destructive conventional weapons present unique and compelling problems for all humanity.
• Science came from the Latin word “Scientia” which means “knowledge”.
•  Science has traditionally been defined as an organized and systematized body of knowledge based on facts.
• These facts are determined by an exact set of procedures popularly known as the scientific method.
• Science is the human attempt to understand the natural world, with or without concern for practical uses of the knowledge.
• Science may be defined as the system of knowledge of the natural world gained through the scientific method.
• George Gore Gillon (1878) - science is the interpretation of nature and man is the interpreter.
• Albert Einstein (1940) - science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.
• Calleja (1987) – science is a scholarly activity whose province is the material world including man, but excluding his nonbiological activities.
• Andrew Fielding Huxley (1974) – science is common sense… the necessary mode of working of the human mind.
• Simpson (1974) – science is not a body of facts, not a method or a technique… science is, or perhaps has, certainly a point of view, as systematic orientation, application to all material aspects of our world, in everyone’s daily activities as well as in a laboratory.
• Posadas (1982) – science is the dynamic cumulative system of verifiable concepts, principles, methods, laws, theories and processes which seek to describe, understand and predict natural phenomena.
• Caoili (1968) – science is an activity concerned with the systematic understanding and explanation of the laws of nature, centering on research toward discovery or production of new knowledge as the end result.
• Campbell (1974) – science is the study of those judgments concerning which universal agreement can be obtained.
• It is derived from “techne” which means art, and “technologia” which literally means systematic treatment.
• Many people regard technology as simply applied science.

  Technology is the human attempt to change the world by creating products that can help people.
• Examples of Technology

   - Smartphones

  -laptop

  -Electrical appliancesmachineries
• Science explores for the purpose of knowing, while technology explores for the purpose of making something useful from that knowledge.
• Science drives technology by making new technology possible through scientific breakthrough.
• Without science, technology could not proceed.
• But technology is not science. Science only seeks to understand nature, no more no less; technology is but the application of what science has discovered, for better for worst.
• What is Society?

  A group of individuals involved in the persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same geographical or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations.
• Science and technology studies or science, technology, and society (STS) is the study of how society, politics, and culture affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these, in turn, affect society, politics, and culture.
• STS assumes that science and technology are essentially intertwined and that they are each profoundly social and political.
• Making life easier, science has given man the chance to pursue societal concerns such as ethics, aesthetics, education, and justice to create cultures and to improve human conditions.
• Scientific knowledge and the procedures used by scientists influence the way many individuals in society think about themselves, others, and the environment.
• Technology alters how we can behave. Society drives technological innovations and scientific inquiry.
• Science gives us insight into what kind or technologies we could potentially create and how to create them, while technology allows us to conduct further scientific research