The Social Construction of Technological Systems (MIT Press, 1987) was required reading for every science, technology, and society (STS) major at Stanford University in the 1990s, including me. The diverse papers in this volume are unified in their rejection of technological determinism—that is, the idea that technology will have particular and predictable effects. Indeed, for decades sociologists and other social scientists have offered example after example of how technology must be understood in relation to its interaction with a particular social context. So ingrained is this perspective that it figures prominently in the undergraduate curriculum not only at Stanford, but at STS programs across the country.
If that’s the case, then perhaps other commentators have not received the memo. Consider the following headlines from major news outlets: “Artificial Intelligence Wants You (and Your Job),” “U.S. Lost Over 60 Million Jobs—Now Robots, Tech And Artificial Intelligence Will Take Millions More,” and “How Technology is Destroying Jobs.” In fairness, there is surface validity to such claims. Indeed, there are entire occupations that no longer exist, supplanted by technological substitutes—pinsetters, elevator operators, ice cutters, and switchboard operators, for example. Technology, it seems, can indeed destroy jobs and occupations.
By contrast, yet following the same vein of determinism, a frequent counterargument to the narrative of job-killing technology is that, even as technology disrupts some jobs, it also creates new ones. Here, too, headlines are plentiful: “Technology Will Create Millions of Jobs. The Problem Will Be to Find Workers to Fill Them,” “Don’t Fear AI. It Will Lead to Long-Term Job Growth,” and “Technology Has Created More Jobs than It Has Destroyed, Says 140 Years of Data.” Consider the examples, proponents of this approach say, of software engineers, air traffic controllers, genetic counselors, and drone pilots—occupations that didn’t exist until technology enabled their creation.
There is validity to both the “technology destroys jobs” and “technology creates jobs” perspectives. But they also share a problematic deterministic view in which our primary aim is to discern what technology does and will do. Surely, if my well-worn copy of The Social Construction of Technological Systems is to be believed, then the relationship must be more complex. We must understand technology not merely as actor, but also as something acted upon. Or, to our specific focus here, technology is not merely the destroyer of some jobs and the creator of others. Instead, the very rate and direction of technological change is dependent on its interactions with occupational considerations.
Synthesizing Tech
As a scholar, I’ve long believed that we can learn much from historical examples of contemporary phenomena. In that spirit, allow me to reflect a bit on the case of the music synthesizer. Enthusiasts often trace the origins of this technology to the 1960s and the introduction of offerings from companies like Moog and ARP Instruments. From its inception, users remained unsure of what to make of the synthesizer: Should it be sold in music stores or electronics shops? Should it be used to mimic the sounds of orchestral instruments or to make unique sounds of its own?
Of course, this uncertainty and debate is itself evidence of the constructivist perspective. A new technology like a music synthesizer does not come into the world as one thing or another. Instead, it is shaped, interpreted, adopted, and used in ways that reflect both people and social contexts. Here, Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s excellent book, Analog Days (Harvard University Press, 2004) is a necessary citation, though Mark Vail’s Vintage Synthesizers (Backbeat Books, 2000) also provides an important overview. For detailed data on this specific point, see “Who Are You? … I Really Wanna Know,” by Anthony, Nelson, and Tripsas.
In the early 1980s, the introduction of new digital technologies enabled synthesizers to offer much more realistic emulations of orchestral instruments than earlier analog models, and the linking together of multiple synthesizers enabled a single player to sound like an ensemble. Soon, a long-simmering debate—which bears remarkable resemblance to current debates about technology and occupations—began to boil over. The core question: Were synthesists and their tools putting other musicians out of work? In a 1983 cover story, Keyboard magazine, then the leading trade journal for synthesists, termed it “The Great Synthesizer Debate.”
From Imitation to Innovation
Here, I think it’s helpful to remember that such debates are never abstract. Rather, they involve real people with real careers. For example, Don Lewis is a synthesis pioneer. He built his own multiple-synthesizer system, the Live Electronic Orchestra (LEO), in the 1970s. He also consulted with several synthesizer manufacturers, including Yamaha Corp., whose 1983 digital instrument, the DX7, upended the industry. To watch Lewis play LEO is an experience in itself, and the documentary film The Ballad of Don Lewis is entertaining on this front alone. But Lewis’s experience teaches us something more. In the 1980s, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) claimed that Lewis’s use of synthesizers was a threat. AFM members picketed Lewis’s performances and distributed fliers, claiming that he was undermining both employment prospects and pay for musicians. Ironically, Lewis himself was a member of this same union. He disputed the charges and ultimately prevailed in U.S. federal court, but not before losing several years of performance opportunities with LEO. This chapter of the synthesizer story highlights how technological change can place occupation members in conflict with one another.
Independent Instruments
What happened next with both the occupation and the technology, however, is even more unexpected. Starting in the 1990s, digital synthesizers sold on the basis of their realistic emulation of acoustic instruments began to slip—even as the technology itself was more capable than ever. Today, in fact, the vast majority of synthesizer product offerings are analog, not digital. They feature interfaces that look and function remarkably like those of the 1970s, and not the smooth preset-laden panels of the digital offerings of the 1980s and 1990s. They’re used to make decidedly synthetic sounds. And, for the most part, they’re not used as replacements for musicians in an orchestra performance—though, in fairness, synthesists have certainly displaced other musicians in some cases.
Why? Why has technology in this industry—and probably others—followed a path that distinctly deviates from the oft-told story of technology marching ceaselessly from generation to generation, bowling over occupations, firms, and people who fail to keep pace? It turns out that synthesists, like most occupation members, grew to have less interest in replacing and mimicking others and more interest in establishing their own unique mandate and identity. In turn, they nudged synthesizer technology toward manifestations that best enabled this uniqueness—in this case, analog technologies.
For instance, in 1984, synthesist Malcolm Cecil—who worked with Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, and Joan Baez, among others—commented in a Keyboard interview, “I’ve gone away from the idea of imitative synthesis, and a lot of digital synthesis is still in the imitative era, so to speak. And that’s normal. Any child, as he grows up, the first thing he does is imitate. So imitation is the first way you find out how to do things. Later, you innovate. My feeling is that the stage to reach is innovation, where you’re creating things with the synthesizer that can’t be done on other instruments. That’s why, when musicians ask me, ‘Don’t you think you’re putting guys out of work with these synthesizers?’ I say, ‘No, quite the contrary. I’m giving musicians an opportunity to create things that have never been possible before.’” A decade later, synthesist Klaus Schulze made the same point in the same magazine: “I think every instrument has a purpose. The synthesizer was not made to replace an orchestra. You would never try to copy a violin with a guitar. The synthesizer is an independent instrument and should be played that way.”
Indeed, if one listens to Don Lewis’s music from the 1980s, we do not hear something we’d mistake as a traditional band or an orchestra. Instead, we hear a fusion of sounds, melodies, rhythms, and countermelodies that only a professional as talented as Lewis could create in consort with a new technology. In other words, ultimately it was musicians themselves who decided what a synthesizer is and how it should be used—and thus what implications it held for adjacent occupations.
Understudied Agencies
So, what do Lewis and the great synthesizer debate teach us about contemporary discussions on occupations and technological change? First, the effect of technology is hardly a given. Synthesizers could be used to recreate orchestral sounds or to create new sounds, with very different implications for both synthesists and for other musicians. Far from being encoded into the technology, these applications were shaped by occupation members themselves (and, of course, complementary groups like unions, manufacturers, music schools, and so on).
Second, and relatedly, occupations do more than react to technology; instead, they shape its development, interpretation, adoption, and use. Thus, to reiterate the point, as synthesists crafted an occupational identity around the creation of new and unique sounds, synthesizer manufacturers adjusted both their marketing and their products accordingly.
None of this is to say, of course, that occupations are not disrupted by technological change. Indeed, the music industry and music-related occupations have changed dramatically alongside new technology—and not just in recent years. (Witness, for example, changes that accompanied the introduction of the phonograph and the radio.) It’s also not to say that technology cannot encode certain perspectives and encourage certain outcomes. For instance, the pairing of synthesizer technology with a piano-style keyboard interface encouraged it to be played like a piano and, at times, to imitate a piano. But it is to say that if we really want to understand the relationship between technology and occupations, we’d be well served to spend at least as much time and effort studying work and occupations as we do studying science and technology.
In turn, it’s essential for sociologists to figure centrally in these debates, which often are dominated by technologists (who see the agency and possibility in technology, but perhaps less so in social groups and processes) and by economists (who focus on issues like productivity but can miss the social dynamics that shape long-term trajectories). For if there’s an overarching lesson in the debunking of technological determinism, it’s that diverse perspectives are essential to include. And fittingly, diversity makes for better music, too.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
