Supervision Forum - Technology Theories in PhD Thesis

The next edition of the SV’s Supervision Forum will take place Thursday 20^th of February 13:00 - 14:00 and will look into how supervisors can better guide their students in dealing with technology theories. 

«Wake up to the full range of technology theories and help your PhD candidates use them in their theses”.

PhD candidates generally have a theory-weak approach to the influence of technologies on their research topics, and the problem increases with the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in society. I will argue that social scientists theorize technologies in a near-sighted way. The field is dominated by theories that explain technology as something that is always socially constructed, and therefore also always available for alteration on the basis of public opinion, law-making, and other social forces. This explanation of technological change is now the normal approach, while theories that stress the inherent agency of technologies and their power to determine human behavior are considered anomalies that must be counteracted or ignored. Consequently, social science lacks awareness of the full range of theories of technology that are available in academia. This leads to two problems: As AI technologies become increasingly important in society, social science becomes decreasingly able to properly analyse their potential for technological change. And as PhD candidates are socialized into the field, they take up the dominant approach and thereby prolong the near-sighted approach to technology and change. Supervisors and candidates alike should therefore wake up to the full range of technology theories.

Lars Nyre is a professor of media studies at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. The lecture draws on insights from the textbook «Teknologi. En teoretisk innføring» published at Universitetsforlaget in 2024.