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Please make some observations on the (complex!?) relation between technology, engineering, and social systems.

What we do:
Technology right now is what can be done is done with the engineering needed to build the parts without looking at the social system which means without focusing on the real individual and social needs. Main driving power is economy which engineers often set equal to society.

Of course, this is not the right (the human) way. People have to bend themselves into roles, they don

Well, someone should make an intensive seminar on this topic, I guess this was the more discussed question during my media studies, and still is a very controvert one.

Ok, I am sure that we can find thousand of dissection outside there, but somehow I don

First of all I want to begin my comments with putting technology, engineering and social systems in relation. In my opinion technology is everything the humankind has developed over the years, starting at the beginning of using the brain for creating something new, but not necessarily something materialistic. Maybe the first pioneering technology ever invented is spoken language. Engineering has a strong technical meaning of constructing and inventing new technology. Social systems form the basis of the whole society and are the foundation and medium for technological engineering.

The first of these three having ever existed are the social systems. Social systems are the foundation of all of the mankind. But technology and engineering efforts weld together a social system. Hence the ability of engineering and building technology of any kind lies in the pooling of human beings. Only by communicating and interacting with other people new ideas can emerge. Although engineering of technology was once possible for one person doing alone, today many people are involved in generating new technologies. Most of our new inventions and technological engineering today are based on technologies already developed.

Despite the advantages of new technology a negative effect is the substitution of human handcraft by machines and the need for high educated people for handling these. Every time a new invention and technological progress happens some people will lose their jobs but in other positions new jobs emerge. In this way technology has a huge influence on society and social systems, too. Moreover improvements for one person can result in disadvantages for other people.

With new technology people try to solve problems formerly unsolved or enhance problem solving, but with every new technology new and unknown problems arise. But sooner or later even for these new problems a solution will be found, but having the effect of always bringing new problems up. This process keeps mankind in a constant pursuit for inventing even better high-tech.

The most driving force for technological development was and is -- as sad it is -- warfare industry. Most of the important technological advances are due to a use in military, for example the Internet, mobile communication, etc.. This fact arises out of the structure of social systems and the ambition of mankind to be always better than the competitors.

New technology seams to be cool and useful at first but the danger and disadvantages a technology might have, are not research or considered at the moment of invention and sometimes lead to a burden for future generations.

Use of technology has to be closely considered with all the possible benefits and drawbacks. Well considered application of technology can lead to an enhancement of quality of life in work and in leisure time. Everyone has to decide on his own if a technology is worth using it and comprises more advantages than disadvantages. Technology that is praised by media and companies for the whole society can be a degradation of quality of life. In this case mostly technology rules our life and not the way it should be that we rule technology. Even if it is a trend in society to uses devices for a special purpose and they are said to be helpful, everyone has to decide, if this technology brings more advantages than disadvantages. The most important fact is that we shouldn

The oberservation we can make is that technology develops since the beginning of the mankind. But how does this relate to the social system? The question I asked myself for a while is: What drives the society or manhood so that they never stop at one point, but moving and developing since then? One thing might be that there is maybe this deep instinct of survival. That means that in history the way of living and the practical experienced changed when people figured out that not many of the social system can survive if they keep the way of living. For example they stoped hunting and went on farming. Also we can observe that the social system kept growing and growing, so that today we have a hugh social system in comparison to the tribes and similar groups in former times. Today the social system in which we live consists of millions of people depending which country we live in or in which culture or religion we take part. Those social systems "tell" us how to live our life in generall. The social systems frames the borders of the boxes. It defines for what we get rewarded and what is not accepted within this system. But now we could ask ourselves how and who of the social system comes up with the guidelines and principles of the system? In my opinion the people on the top of a social system -today the politicians and more and more the economics- those who are mainly in charge that the social system survives make their decisions as a result of the same reason like in former times: survival. Today survival does not only mean survival in terms of life and death but it also means that the social systems has to manage the competition or rivalry with other social systems. The success of the social system depends -as far as I can keep track of- on the power and influence which the one system has over the others if it depends in some ways on the others and how it organizes the circumstances within the own social system. And in my opinion this relates to technology, because in history and today we can notice that the countries which have highly developed technology are in a top or at least good position within all social systems in the world.
That means that countries aim to develop technology very fast to succeed in the global competition but for that they need the captital and the respectively trained people. And that is why probably there are always certain things defined by the social system or society which stand for rewardness and richness. Today we are moving into the so called information age and I guess everybody can notice that people who work in this "new, innovative and auspicious information technology sector" are very rewarded for their work in forms of getting lots of money. And it seems that people who have lots of money and who are able to buy all those things which the advertising tells us we would desire, that those people are very rewared in our society. Which is a circle I mean the people aspire for attention and rewardess so they want or at least they believe they want to do certain things, like working in the information technology sector, and the social system of course pushs this desire. So lots of people put their energy into this sector and push the developent of technology forward. At the same time the get lots of money for their work which they can spent for products so the economic get boosted, too. And the result is the social system has more money which they can spent in the further development of technology.
One the other hand technology got not only developed through the economic market but mostly by the military. I think the military of course has a hugh interest to have the most highly developed technology because that means better chance of survival or more efficent weapons. And the country with the stronger military can keep the power over those countries on which it depends and can take their energy sources to use it in its own country, for example to keep the economic system runing and through this to continue the fast development process of new technology, which ensure the success of the military again.
So the goal is to push the development of technology to strongen the own military and the own economic to get more power and influence and to survive in the permanent competion with other social systems on the military and economic field. And again, for this development the social system needs the energy or manpower of its people, and for that reason the social system has to build up or "programm" a society which covers those particular needs.
And the engineering, if we think of engineering as the efficent use of material in the market, it takes place during the whole part of development of technology.

susan

The relation between technology, engineering and social systems I think is very complex. Sociological systems and technology (together with engineering) strongly influence one another. At least in the western world technology in some ways changes or affects the way a society works or "is", for instance nowadays computers are an important factor in a lot of peoples lives. Through email and other electronic means of communication technology in that way for instance is used to keep up social connections and is used to build or support human networks. But also does society influence the upbringing of new aspects of technology, needs of a society may be reflected in new products.
Virtual communities, as an example, make usage of technology and engineering for their social system. They exist in some ways only virtually, but despite that, energy is exchanged (even though mostly through other channels than in "real" communities) with the help and support of technology. But also real communities tend to make use of technology for means of communication and other things.

I think that society would look very different without the engineering and technology that is available today. But also technology and engineering would probably be used very different or would produce other outcomes if the social system was another one.
For as all of those models are very dynamic systems, it is somehow hard to say which influences the others more than it is being influenced. (Compares a little to that problem whether the egg was there first or the chicken.)

In class it was argued that technology is very lossy in using more energy than it produces. I can only agree to that in parts, I think for some specific tasks, for instance automated processes, technology can be rather leveled in terms of energy usage / production. But I also agree that technology does not neccessarily make life more efficient.

All of the three, technology, sociological systems and engineering are very much interconnected systems. It will be very interesting to see (and maybe try to influence) of how all of them and their relationships will change and develop throughout the next years.

As everyone else has already mentioned, the three terms technology, engineering and social systems are heavily connected to each other and constantly influencing one another. These relations are highly complex indeed and not easily examined. Engineering can be seen as the way of applying knowledge (technology) to physical systems within our society. Since a society or social system consists both of many different people and a universal knowledge/value base that forms the society's "mind" and technology is a major factor within this common knowledge base nowadays, it is pretty logical, that the changes in technology have a heavy impact on the social system and the other way around. So a drastic advance/change in a culture's knowledge base in form of a totally new technology can actually produce a shift in the social system itself. Same is valid the other way around: once a social system experiences a drastic change in some other cultural part, let's say the government changes from communism to capitalism, this would also have an impact on the weighting of which technologies are being researched.
Like all knowledge in these days of easy data storage and distribution, it is nearly impossible for a certain technology to be extinguished, once it has been developed (which should be another reason for scientists to think twice about what to research and what not to). So what is actually under control of a social system is the actual application of a technology, which technologies the engineering has its focus on and the weighting of the research for new technologies.
The social systems we live in nowadays are highly transcended by technology. Our everyday life is so based on it, that we usually don't even notice it anymore.
Now I was going to mention that I believe there are different kinds of technologies, those that are supporting other main factors of a social system like social contact and those ones that are actually reducing these contacts. A telephone for example helps you communicate, while a tv keeps you rather isolated. However, I would rather say, that most technologies can be used for either supporting factors like social contact or for reducing it. You can either call your aunti in America that you hardly ever see and talk to her(telephone supporting social contact), or you can call your friend next door instead of actually meeting (telephone reducing social contact when meeting would be possible). Same for the tv, you can either sit home alone (tv reducing social contact), or you could meet with friends that like the same type of movies and watch it in a group (tv supoprting social contact). So it seems to me that the way technology influences social systems depends on the way it is used by the members of the system.
Unfortunately it seems like most members of the society don't really spend an awful lot of time thinking about what consequences a strong use of some technology might have in the end. Many societies are on this kind of tech-trip, where every new and fancy technology is engineered for the market and accepted by it without ever thinking or informing the members of the sociey about its drawbacks.
As someone mentioned before, technology is mostly driven by economy, not by social factors. So most companies don't produce products because they are so helpful for some users, but because users will buy them if they produce some specific product. It's all about money. What I think is a little ironic here, is that those people working in the companies only produce for the market to gather as much money as possible to again satisfy their own needs by buying products that were not specifally made to help them, but to sell best on the market.
The influence of social systems by technology is so heavy, that in some areas actually new social systems are created by heavy use of this technology. So information technology has led to the creation of internet communities, where people communicate and even build up hierarchies often without ever meeting one another. An interesting point about those hierarchies is that they are mostly based upon the members' knowledge about a specific topic (the computer networking guru is on the top of the virtual computer networking community). It is quite an interesting step from old days, where the strongest warrior was head of the tribe and the hierarchy was a totally phiysical one to those bodyless net-communities where physical meeting is nothing and kowledge is everything...