1 Hansen Hsu STS 632 Inside Technology Prof. Trevor Pinch Spring 2008 Affordances and Theories of Materiality in STS One of the most controversial issues in science and technology studies today is the issue of materiality, whether of technological artifacts or the physical laws upon which they are based. The most prominent view in the field is that of constructivism, represented in science studies by the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), and in technology studies by the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), and in both by Actor-Network Theory (ANT). These paradigms argue that technology’s uses are open to interpretation, and that the process of developing and building technologies are local, contingent, and fully entangled with human social and political factors. These paradigms provide a much needed corrective to technological determinism, the view that technology is autonomous, develops according to its own internal logical imperatives, and has such a driving force on society and human history that people are helpless against it, and must either adapt or reject it outright. Sociologists such as Ian Hutchby (2001b) have questioned whether pure constructivism goes too far, by proposing that technologies are a tabula rasa whereby any interpretation goes, and technologies and their effects are reduced to mere textual representations. Hutchby calls such constructivists as Grint and Woolgar (1997) anti- essentialists, principally opposed to the view that “technological artefacts have any inherent properties outside the interpretive work which humans engage in to establish what those artefacts ‘actually are’.” (Hutchby 2001b, 442-443) Hutchby asks, “what is it that these interpretations are interpretations of?” (449) The key for Hutchby is that not all interpretations of a technology are equally valid; it is not possible to use a chair to fly to