Social technology

"Social technology" is defined as applying the used technologies for specific purposes especially social ones: to ease social procedures via social software and social hardware, which might include the use of computers and information technology for governmental procedures, etc. It has historically referred to two meanings: as a term related to social engineering, a meaning that began in the 19th century, and as a description of social software, a meaning that began in the early 21st century.

The term "social technology" was first used at the University of Chicago by Albion Woodbury Small and Charles Richmond Henderson around the end of the 19th century. At a seminar in 1898, Small spoke of social technology as being the use of knowledge of the facts and laws of social life to bring about rational social aims. In 1895 Henderson had coined the term "social art" for the methods by which improvements to society are and may be introduced. Social science makes predictions and social art gives directions.

In 1901 Henderson published an article titled "The Scope of Social Technology" in which he renamed this social art as 'social technology', and described it as 'a system of conscious and purposeful organization of persons in which every actual, natural social organization finds its true place, and all factors in harmony cooperate to realize an increasing aggregate and better proportions of the "health, wealth, beauty, knowledge, sociability, and rightness" desires.' In 1923, the term social technology was given a wider meaning in the works of Ernest Burgess and Thomas D. Eliot, who defined social technology to include the application, particularly in social work, of techniques developed by psychology and other social sciences.

In 1928, Luther Lee Bernard defines "applied" science as the "collection of norms or standards, built up on the basis of observation and experiment and measurement, which is capable of serving as a means to the control of our relationships to our world or universe". He then tries to separate this from social technology saying that social technology also "includes administration as well as the determination of the norms which are to be applied in the administration". In 1935 he wrote an article called "The Place of Social Sciences in Modern Education". In this article, he writes about the nature of an effective education in the social sciences to reach effective education by the willing masses. It would be of three types: Firstly, "a description of present conditions and trends in society". Secondly, "the teaching of desirable social ends and ideals necessary to correct such social maladjustments as we now have". Thirdly, "a system of social technology which, if applied, might be expected to remedy existing maladjustments and realize valid social ends". The aspects of social technology which lags behind are the technologies involved in the "less material forms of human welfare". These are the applied sciences of "the control of crime, abolition of poverty, the raising of every normal person to economic, political, and personal competency, the art of good government, or city, rural, and national planning". On the other hand, "the best developed social technologies, such as advertising, finance, and 'practical' politics, are used in the main for antisocial rather than for proper humanitarian ends".

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