Today's lecture is on sociotechnical systems.
This term was coined by Rob Kling who was a computer scientist here at UCLA for many
years and who was concerned that we were not really understanding the relationship between
people and technology carefully enough and would study people on the one hand or technology
on the other, and not bringing them together.
Professor Kling felt it was very important that we do this in a unified way.
He said a sociotechnical system includes things like people, equipment, data, resources, documents,
legal arrangements, political forces, pretty much everything you can think of.
It's intended to be a very broad, comprehensive, holistic concept that will allow us to study
technology more fruitfully.
Professor Kling noted that we can actually use this kind of analysis to study a sociotechnical
system before it is deployed and think about some of the implications and the consequences.
This is actually a pretty radical idea in that usually we just develop technology, deploy
it, send it out into the world and then see what happens, but that has turned out to be
the cause of many of the disruptions we are dealing with now.
So, another approach might be to try to anticipate some of the causes.
Even though we know we can't forecast perfectly, there are some things we can study and anticipate
and plan for.
Kling noted that much of what we know about technology comes from what he called pundits.
That is people like journalists who write for Wired, or academics who write popular
books, or commentators like Jaron Lanier who are pretty heavy on provocation, but lighter
on the analysis.
Kling felt we needed to go beyond that to a rigorous sociotechnical study.
This study should be evidence-based, it should not rely on personal anecdotes or boldly-stated
opinions, and it should not reduce the complexity of what we are looking at just to make a flashy
point.
Of course, that is a lot of what happens in the mainstream media, or on blogs, or if you
need to boil something down into a Tweet and he was saying no, we have to do this much
more expansive kind of analysis because we have people and we have technology, and this
is quite a complex system.
Kling did a study of online courses, and I wanted to mention that since we are together
here in an online course, and he noted that online courses are said to be convenient and
accessible, and that is certainly true, but if you look at what actually happens sometimes
there are problems that possibly could have been anticipated.
For example, in the course that he studied the students felt pretty disconnected from
the instructor, and there was a lot of confusion and a lot of frustration, and Kling pointed
out that this was actually fairly predictable in that human communication is inherently
ambiguous.
In person we deal with this through a process that linguists call repair.
If I would say something and you do not understand it you just say what did you mean by that?
Then I tell you, and then we continue our conversation.
This is a lot more difficult in an online course.
Kling noted that the students would send messages to the instructor, but they still felt confused.
Students would report things like usually I e-mail her if I have any questions and her
answer is very ambiguous so I'm not going to ask a second time, and the students would
just stop trying.
Now, we certainly hope that this will not happen in this class and please feel free
to e-mail us, but also to ask for a Skype call, or a voice-based communication, or if
you are local to come into our office and talk to us.
Global disruptions always involve sociotechnical systems.
There is no way of getting away from this relationship between people and technology
which is ubiquitous on the planet.
So, whether we are looking at climate change, or economic inequality, or resource depletion,
there is always a sociotechnical system at the heart of what is going on that we need
to understand.
Alright, let's look at how to analyze a sociotechnical system.
This is going to look a little bit like what we did for the analysis of human wellbeing.
The first question is what are the relevant technologies?
Who are the players or the stakeholders?
What are the consequences?
If there is a disruption, what are the different ways to deal with that disruption, and who
pays?
Let's take an example, the example of fracking.
Fracking stands for hydraulic fracturing, and it is a technique used to obtain natural
gas and some oil.
The basic idea is that you inject a lot of water underground to create pressure to fracture
the rock within which there is gas or oil.
Then when this fracturing has occurred the gas or oil can escape into a well.
Now, we didn't use to do this.
Fracking is actually pretty new.
The reason we're doing it now is that we have pretty much used up all of the easy to get
natural gas and oil, and now we need to try to find other reserves, and fracking is one
way to do this.
If we apply sociotechnical analysis to fracking let's see what we get.
What are the relevant technologies?
Well, they are not all digital technologies of course.
Some of them are things like trucks.
It takes a lot of trucks to transport the millions of gallons of water that are needed
for fracking.
It takes diesel engines to run the generators to power the equipment.
So, we're using fossil fuel to try to get out more fossil fuel.
This is a pretty energy intensive way of trying to get more energy.
Who are the stakeholders?
Well, of course there are the oil companies, the commercial interests, who profit from
fracking.
There is the government.
It turns out that we are subsidizing those companies.
The government has some interest in energy independence, and so from that point of view
it does make sense that we might provide some taxpayer money.
So, consumers and taxpayers are also of course stakeholders.
Then there are the residents of the communities who live near the fracking wells, and that
brings us to the consequences.
Water depletion is a big problem.
Only about 30% of the water can be recovered, so this really, really takes a lot of water
to get out this natural gas and oil.
The process releases toxic chemicals, so benzene and methanol that can affect local water supplies,
as well as methane, a significant greenhouse gas.
Alright, we might ask are there other ways to deal with these disruptions that happen
to local communities, and the environment and so on?
I think we can pretty easily come up with a couple of other ideas.
We could invest those subsidies in greener energy sources, and we could conserve energy.
One of the best ways to deal with an energy crisis is not to use the energy in the first
place.
We will be talking more in this class later about how that might happen.
Okay, who pays?
The taxpayers.
We are already paying for fracking, and although we definitely get some benefit from it, it
is also true that the oil companies sell some of the natural gas and oil to other countries
so we may not be getting complete value for our tax dollars.
And of course the residents in the nearby communities are very affected by the use of
fracking.
Now, in truth there is only about 100 years of gas and oil in the ground that we can get
through fracking.
That may sound like a lot to you, but we are talking about the lifetimes of your children
and grandchildren so it is not really all that distant.
It seems pretty possible that future generations will pay some of the cost of the fracking
that we are doing now to get the fossil fuel.
Okay, so for future reading I highly recommend the work on "General Systems Theory."
It has been around since the 1940s.
It has really withstood the test of time.
It is pretty generic.
It is not that hard to read, and it will give you a good sense of the underlying theory
behind sociotechnical systems.
Thank you.