MASTERARBEIT - Institut für Wissenschaftsforschung - Universität ...

24 research question
of an appealing exterior seems to be at least questionable. It can be
assumed by what material has been collected and published in other
publications that the popularity of zeppelins had reasons that were
more complex. Moreover, I allege that STS as a discipline can make
valuable contributions to this issue. Thus I want to go back right to
the beginning of the Zeppelin discourse and repeat the most basic
questions of them all:
and
»what was it that made zeppelin airship cause
the intense reactions it aroused?«
»how did the technology become a national
symbol?«
»how could its popularity develop so quickly
after many years of ignorance by the public?«
Those questions aim at a core ambition of STS – the explanation of
technology development and its connection to the social. Moreover,
my approach contains an understanding of the process as not being
an isolated one but an intrinsically socio-technical setup, an entanglement
of social and technological factors. Also, a structured analysis
that relies on theoretical concepts is missing so far. What is there
on the issues touched by the questions asked above makes claims
about the phenomenon (such as the two statements by Eckener and
Frank that I mentioned before) without a clear framework of analysis.
Consequently the results are, as for example in the case of Reinicke’s
book on the zeppelin craze [42], somewhat inconclusive. STS methodologies
are well suited for this task. They offer a rich toolkit for the
exact purpose of analyzing the relation of technology and society.