Rationality and the use of language

technology assessment for Shaping the knowledge society

Armin Grünwald

pp. 163-177

in: Gerhard Banse, Petr Machleidt, Dagmar Uhl, Christian J. Langenbach (eds), Towards the information society, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

The task of technology assessment (TA) is, generally speaking, to investigate and to reflect consequences and impact of technology and technicalisation for the society and its individual members. Its development since its very beginning in the sixties has followed the path away from ex-post investigations of existing technology towards reflections ex ante in order to enable society to influence technology at early stages of the development. Such considerations ex ante are unrenouncable elements of shaping technology in society (Bijker and Law 1994; Rip et al. 1995; Grunwald 1999a). Applying TA to the challenge of shaping the knowledge society¹ demands for combining both the ex ante and the ex post approaches. The development towards an increasing use of digital technologies is, on the one hand, going on since the early seventies and has already affected many areas of society. This allows the social sciences to perform ex post analyses and empirical research on the impact of those developments. On the other hand, many chances of networking and of global communication are still at the stage to be promised to become realised in the medium or far future (Tauss et al. 1996). TA in this field, therefore, can be leaned on substantial experience but is still facing a large field open for shaping and reflection ex ante. In particular, there are time delays in introducing the information technologies in different zones of the world, for example between the United States, the Western Europe and the Eastern Europe countries. This situation demands for learning effects from one another. It challenges TA to perform international and intercultural comparable studies (see below, section 5).