Podcast 🎧 & blog: Tech beyond code with a digital sociologist
Implementing new technology, both in the public and private sectors, is often regarded as a matter of developing products and services. In addition to code itself, design thinking has recently come to play an important role in identifying users’ needs and process challenges. But some argue that tech is not just a product – it’s a system, for the modes and scope of the changes it brings to the way we use services, or connect with others.
With a more sociological approach to applying innovation, we can look at citizens beyond their role of users, and at technology beyond just code. The Ministry of Justice of the United Kingdom exemplifies a government organization that has taken this route, with the help of our guest in today’s episode, Lisa Talia Moretti.
In her capacity as a digital sociologist, we discuss the relevance of ethics and a more encompassing view on society toward developing effective public digital services. To not reduce citizens and the complexity of their experience with the government to just users, and design services that actually work for all – with their diverse needs, vulnerabilities, and behaviours in society.
Photo: Lisa Talia Moretti
Technology is not just and app or a website
Implementing new technology, both in the public and private sectors, is often regarded as a matter of developing products and services. In addition to code itself, design thinking has recently come to play an important role in identifying users’ needs and process challenges. But some argue that tech is not just a product – it’s a system, for the modes and scope of the changes it brings to the way we use services, or connect with others.
We tend to think about technology as an app, or a website. “And I think the reason for that is because we have commercialized technology, for us to think about it as being something that provides us a certain value, or service, or product,” Moretti says.
If it is not a product, what is it then?
But by failing to define technology as a system, we design for the user – this mythical, single persona. Sociologists and anthropologists, instead, “can help think about society as a social organism, and that individual behaviour is intricately connected to group behaviour.”
To the end of better designing public digital services, it is essential to understand technology as a system. “A system is made of a group of component parts that are all connected, interacting with one another. And when you mess with a system, or with one of those components, you change the shape of what that system looks like,” Moretti points out.
Seeing it as a system, we grasp the big picture
Let’s go further with an example. “Think about the employment market, so the systems of work. If we start to integrate things like algorithms into recruitment platforms that scan CVs, or look at who is applying for this job, we might also use big data to determine who has been successful at that job in the past,” Moretti says. What happens, though, is that the algorithm becomes part of the job application process – perhaps without applicants even knowing it.
 In this way, “you change the recruitment system, you have changed the system of work. Same for surveillance technologies on the workplace, such as cookies that let your employer know where you are, or what websites you’re looking at. In that case, you’ve changed the system of work.” For this reason, technology is more than a product – it’s a system. By becoming part of an existing system, it brings changes to its shape, power dynamics, and the relationships within it.
Disruption that makes sense – to everyone
Disruptive, as a buzzword, was very much in fashion across blogs, keynotes, and the trade press until a few years ago. But even though that trend has (fortunately) subdued, technology and innovation can indeed bring disruption to the social fabric of systems like recruitment, work, or justice and benefits.
Designing public digital services with all users in mind means this – to push forward development and innovation in government, but without failing to account for the impact it has beyond code and individual behaviour.
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New episodes will be launched every Wednesday.