Science and technology as social

Science and technology as social 

processes.he successes of science, in its alliance with technology are unquestionable.  They have provided us with a great capacity to explain, control and transform the world.

 The importance of science and technology increases to the extent that the world enters into what has been called "the knowledge society", that is, societies in which the importance of knowledge is constantly growing by its incorporation  to productive processes and services, for their relevance in the exercise of popular participation in government processes and also for the proper conduct of personal and family life.

 The enormous cognitive capacity of humanity must exert an increasing influence on the lives of societies and people.

 That is why the reflection on science is a subject to which modern thought, especially that of the second half of this century, has devoted special attention.

 This essay is aimed at people who study science (natural, social, technical or other) or are interested in them to present a certain image of science as it emerges from contemporary debate.  Teaching and learning science requires a certain "epistemological vigilance" that prevents our epistemic acts from being driven by approaches that simplify and misrepresent the real nature of scientific praxis.

 The thesis that animates my presentation is this: we need not only know about science but about science.

 As I believe, the relevance of this approach is extended to people who are mainly engaged in technological activity.  Science and modern technology are inseparable;  consequently, they have become almost indistinguishable activities.  It is difficult to know what people who work in a research-development laboratory of a large industry do: do they do science or do technology?  Perhaps they simply do "technoscience", an activity where the old limits are blurred.

 In any case, any discussion about science is relevant to technology and vice versa.  After all, it is about knowledge and its social significance.

The Domain of Science and Technology

 Modern technology supported by scientific development (technoscience) exerts extraordinary influence on social life in all its fields: political, military, cultural economic.  The Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century and the Industrial Revolution initiated in the 18th Century were relatively independent processes.  The transit we live from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century is a period deeply marked by scientific and technological development.

 The first thing a student who joins studies in the fields of science and technology must know is that he immerses himself in one of the territories that largely define world power.

 The image of science as an activity of isolated individuals who eagerly seek the truth without other interests than cognitive ones, sometimes transmitted by textbooks, does not coincide at all with the social reality of contemporary science.  To a large extent, the scientific and technological development of this century has been driven by interests linked to the eagerness of world hegemony of the great powers and the demands of industrial development and consumption patterns that are produced and disseminated from the societies that have marked the  Advanced in modernization processes.

 That is why states and large transnational corporations are among the greatest protagonists of contemporary science and technology.
 During the nineteenth century, the so-called academic science related to the professionalization of scientific work and the consolidation of scientific research emerged as a relevant function of the university (the paradigm is the German University of the early nineteenth century).  In this process, the image of science also crystallized as a selfless search for the truth to which I alluded before.
 But the science-society relationship has undergone abrupt changes in this century.  However, until just two decades ago an approach prevailed today is considered unsatisfactory.  The idea was that you had to invest heavily in basic research, which would eventually generate technological innovation and this would favor social development.  Following this idea, much money was invested in this period between the Second World War and the 1970s.  The economic crisis experienced by world capitalism forced us to reconsider this approach and move to a much more leading model of technical-scientific development.  This is what is typical of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution characterized by the leadership of microelectronics and the prominence of Biotechnology, the search for new forms of energy, new materials, among other sectors.
 Nowadays, there is little scientific practice far from the interests of application for economic or other purposes, which has implications in the scientific activity, in the life of scientists, the institutions that host them and their relations with society.  Business psychology and ideology are present in the world of science.  It is not for pleasure that the ethical problems associated with science and technology constitute daily concerns today.  It has been said that the accumulated power is so much that the question: what can be done?  has been displaced by what should be done?
 But that extraordinary power is very poorly distributed worldwide.  The vast majority of scientific and technological capacity is concentrated in a small group of industrialized countries.  The scientific and industrial revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries developed in Europe associated with the economic, political and cultural change experienced by those societies since the Renaissance.  During the following two centuries some countries managed to actively join these processes, including the United States, Russia, and Japan.
 Most of the world, however, hardly participates in the definition and execution of technical-scientific courses.  It has been said that world science is even more concentrated than world wealth.  Latin America, for example, has very little participation in science and technology: just over 2% of the scientists and engineers who carry out research and development tasks on the planet and just over 1% of the resources that are invested for that purpose.
 Especially since the sixties, it has been insisted that the exit of underdevelopment forces to create capacities in science and technology.