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4.3 tying together sociotechnical imaginaries and scot 37
we choose to live in it. Knowledge and its material embodiment
are at once products of social work and constitutive
of forms of social life.“ (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 2) The
idea is to explain the developments of society and technology
as two sides of the same coin. This borders on thick
description and answering ‘how’ questions, rather than
answering ‘why’ questions with clearly explicated causal
chains.« [3, 69]
Yet while these concessions open SCOT in terms of conceptually integrating
technology’s influence in society, the temporal dimensions remain
very implicit. Hence Jasanoff’s concept of imaginaries remains
very relevant to my work in order to integrate the anticipatory aspects
imaginaries raise and their consequences as well as power. Ulrike
Felt adds to the explication of an aspect of sociotechnical imaginaries
that is very crucial and was not mentioned by Jasanoff before. In
her recent contribution »Keeping Technologies Out: Absent presences and
the formation of national technopolitical identity« [14], she is particularly
concerned with the question how sociotechnical imaginaries build up
over time. This aspect is very helpful answering the ’how’-question
just referred to by Bijker. It enables us to see and take notice of
changes imaginaries undergo over time. In her conceptualization of
how discourses about sociotechnical imaginaries stabilize, Felt speaks
of »memory practices« [14, 11]. She describes the discourse as a series
of rehearsals in which different perceptions of a technology are ’tried
out’. Each ’performance’ is then evaluated and remembered during
following discourse rehearsals. This way, the rehearsals lead up to a
finished play, a studied performance that has proven reliable and can
be stuck to over time. Those construction processes are called assemblages
in her approach: Out of several interpretations and pieces of
imaginaries, a stabilized ’assemblage’ is formed. Also, the experience
from a discourse emerging in a specific socio-technical setting can easily,
as is demonstrateD, influence and/or support another. This way,
technological cultures can form over time and evolve through the experiences
they make during this process. This piece is particularly
important as we will see that the imaginaries carrying the Zeppelin
phenomenon were themselves „standing on the shoulders of giants“
if one wants to alienate the expression; important discourses prior
and parallel to the development of Zeppelin’s airship played a big
role. Proceeding with the efforts of relating sociotechnical imaginaries
to SCOT, assemblages might be presentable as an alternative notion
for the actual process of stabilization and thus in its details provide a
further level of analysis SCOT does not dive in too deeply.