Critically analyse the role of science and technology in bringing about social change. (2017)
Science and technology are the most visible agents of modern change, but “role” has to be specified. Is technology an autonomous force that societies must adapt to, or a social product that carries into the world the interests of those who design and own it? The evidence supports the second reading, with an important qualification.
The determinist case at its strongest
- Karl Marx‘s image of the hand-mill giving the feudal lord and the steam-mill the industrial capitalist is the classic formulation, though his own argument runs through the contradiction between forces and relations of production, and relations are social.
- Gerhard Lenski built an ecological-evolutionary typology in which the level of technology — hunting-gathering, horticultural, agrarian, industrial — largely fixes a society’s size, surplus and degree of stratification.
- Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media, 1964) argued that “the medium is the message”: a communication technology reorganises perception irrespective of content.
- Daniel Bell (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 1973) made theoretical knowledge the axial principle of the emerging order, shifting power to a technical-professional stratum.
- The transformative capacity is real. India recorded 21.6 billion UPI transactions in December 2025 alone, a payments infrastructure that has altered the everyday handling of money for small traders and daily-wage households within a decade.
The critique: technology is socially shaped
- Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker‘s social construction of technology (1984) shows interpretive flexibility: relevant social groups contest what an artefact is for, and “closure” is a social settlement, not a technical inevitability.
- Langdon Winner (“Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, 1980) argued that designs embody political arrangements — some technologies suit hierarchical control, others distributed authority.
- India supplies the decisive case. Ultrasound, a diagnostic advance, was absorbed by son preference and converted into sex-selective abortion, forcing the PC-PNDT Act, 1994. The sex ratio at birth was still about 917 girls per 1,000 boys in 2021–23. The technology did not change the value; the value redefined the technology.
- Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology, 2019) and Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality, 2018) show automated systems encoding existing hierarchies while appearing neutral. The Indian analogue is biometric authentication failure in welfare delivery; in Puttaswamy (2018) the Supreme Court upheld Aadhaar for subsidies but struck down its private commercial use — a social settlement imposed on a technology.
The uneven and contradictory record
- Distribution, not capability, decides outcomes. Gains travel along existing lines of class, caste, gender and region, so the same innovation widens as well as narrows gaps.
- Technology often strengthens tradition: caste filters on matrimonial platforms, and rumour circulating faster than correction.
- Yet it also enables assertion. Digital publishing has given Dalit and women’s writing a public reach the older print sphere withheld, which is why the effect can never be read off the device.
Conclusion
Strong technological determinism fails: technology is designed, funded and adopted socially. But a purely social account underplays the fact that once an infrastructure is installed at scale it constrains later choices and acquires causal weight of its own. Science and technology are best understood as conditioning agents — they enlarge what a society can do, while the prevailing structure of power decides what it actually does.