Professor Irina Bass: this model comes with a focus on regulation and governance of digital technology. The core question of this module is:

Why is it difficult to regulate and govern digital technologies and their effects, and how might we go about doing it in a responsible manner?

Technology as a social construct

• Any digital technology policy comes with a series of trade offs, we are required to understand and navigate them.
• Technology creates social change, it creates displacements and ways of doing, this impact on society inherently makes technology political in choice because it has a direction, winners and losers. (Winner, 1980) also (Mazucatto “innovation is political”)

The Social Construction of Technology (SCOT)

• Interpretive flexibility: technology is an open process depending on social circumstance which leads to different outcomes
• Relevant social group: technology always has a social group in mind
• Closure or stabilisation: technology always stabilises or has closure
• Reverse salient: technology may have a point of lag in development as it fails to challenge normative assumptions in society

The definition of ‘regulation’

• Regulation = A (set of) intervention(s) that either correct or enable a desired social or economic behaviour, in response to public policy goals and objectives.
• Regulation = The “sustained and focused attempt to alter the behaviour of others according to standards or goals with the intention of producing a broadly identified outcome or outcomes, which may involve mechanisms of standard-setting, information-gathering and behaviour modification” (J. Black et al 2005: 11).