MASTERARBEIT - Institut für Wissenschaftsforschung - Universität ...

introduction 5
The zeppelin became an iconic and celebrated technology that is
remembered and capable of attracting attention until today. This fact
alone makes it wothwhile studying. As already observed by Hecht
[20, 254], »technologies serve[d] as important symbols for national
identity [. . . ]. The relationship between technological change and national
identity went both ways.« Particularly the early setbacks for
the technology and the turn to its success and the incorporation of a
national symbol are very interesting. In my thesis, I want to take a
look at how the perception of the zeppelin and its technological development
proceeded. Most importantly, however, I want to observe
in which way the forming of a shared perception of the technologies
fed back to its development - and also influenced the society in which
it took place. Studying the relation of science, technology and society,
it is of course a focus of my interest whether the perception in society
and the development of the technology were related to each other.
As I found, especially the early days of this technology were a very
interesting history of ups and downs. Particularly the events around
the crash of LZ-4 in 1908 and the national donation following it do indicate
there has been a relation between the two. And while there are
plenty of narratives of what happened and who did what, I found
a conclusive reflection on the basis of theoretical considerations as
social sciences try to give to be missing.
I hope to be able to contribute to this field of literature in a way
that works on this niche that seems still to be empty. Trying to do
so, I will run the risk of just running down the beaten path: narratives
about the development of Zeppelin airships are manifold and a
standard narrative has evolved. However, I do not want to re-tell this
story just once more. Instead, I want to apply theoretical concepts
the Science, Technology, Society (STS) community has developed in
order to gain new insights on the emergence and stabilization of a
technology. Particularly, I want to use a Social Construction of Technology
(SCOT) [2, 3, 40] approach to show how different publics have
been involved into the process of developing this technology and how
this involvement has affected the development of the zeppelin. Albeit
SCOT has been around for more than twenty, almost thirty years, its
basic assumptions are still the same. While there have been some efforts
to broaden its perspective, some aspects are still not a focus of
the theoretical approach. In my opinion, however, SCOT might very
well benefit from connections to other schools of thoughts. In this
work I try to combine it with some recent work by Sheila Jasanoff,
her concept of Sociotechnical Imaginaries (STI) [27, 14]. Thereby I
want to integrate time, a dimension not regarded much by SCOT, into
the set of considerations that play a role in technology development.
Moreover, Jasanoff provides strong arguments on how ’technical’ and
’social’ influence each other. She offers explanations on how social
and technological developments not only influence each other in a