Standards and Stabilities in Socio-Technical Systems by Raffi Tchakerian

Iuav University of Venice Arts & Design Faculty A paper made for the course History of technological and scientific innovation held by Prof.ssa Raimonda Riccini 17 december 2008 Raffi Tchakerian

Standards and Stabilities in Socio-Technical Systems

Introduction As a conclusion essay to the various seminars held by us students during the course of "History of technological and scientific innovation" this essay is based on the seminar of the "Systems" group and mainly uses the texts of Iskender Gokalp "On the Analysis of Large Technical Systems" and Thomas Maldonados' "La speranza Progettuale", and an ulterior text that I've added is Tom R. Burns "The Sociology of Complex Systems". The aim of this essay is to amplify and highlight the concept of stability in micro and macro technical systems, which in my opinion leads to the standardization of certain systems because of their stability for certain and usually long amount of periods, off course not forgetting

how certain important factors like socio-

economic and politic ones influence, modify, alter or change this systems, thus creating new standards, all this will be demonstrated by examples with present day situations.

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First of all we need to understand the concept of standard or stability that occur in technical systems, Thomas Hughes talked about 3 main phases in a technical system; growth/competitiveness/consolidation and later on in his writing he mentions about a certain decline. For Gokalp the second phase is accelerated development, whereas for my opinion the one that mentions T.Hugh adapts better to what I am aiming to demonstrate. For understanding the concept of stability or standard, other than understanding the complex technical systems it's also important to analyze and understand the social systems themselves which in a way are a key factor of technical systems. An interesting theorical approach in this direction would be the ASD (actor - system dynamics), which emerged in the 1970's out of early social systems analysis, some of the important figures of this theory would be Tom Burns and Walter Buckley, what interests me about this theory above many things is its goal in understanding the "[...]social systems in relation to one another and in relation to the natural environment and material systems; and processes of sustainability and transformation". For Burns, identifies to type of factors that influence social systems and says that social systems are dynamic and potentially unstable, (1) because of exogenous factors change and impact on them, evoking internal restructuring, and (2) internal social processes and dynamics often entail conflicts and innovations, which lead to initiatives and new intended and unintended developments. For what concerns me most would be the second factor, to put it better conflicts and innovations in the internal social processes, the exogenous factors are not for my interest cause above many other things it would be more about cultural elements that affect the social systems. Burns had an interesting approach for the explanation or the analysis of stability in social systems, for him stability must be explained in the face of ever-present tendencies for structures to be changes, reformed, or to evolve. What we so in

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Aitkens' and Gokalps' models as a conclusion was that at the end even though knowing about constant evolutions in the technical systems they based their analysis by acting on pre-defined technical trajectories which at least are stable for certain amount of time, which isn't an impossible thing to achieve. Off course, for some other researches there would be contradicting theories like for Edward Constant, for he says that it's not possible to demonstrate future trajectories in technical systems, not for what regards their development nor their future consequences are determined or predicted. Of the many above-mentioned ways the best way of approaching and analyzing the concept of stability in my opinion would be clearly understandable by the sociologists' Walter Buckley's' method, even though he talks about social systems its clearly applicable also for technical systems, he says there are 2 types of processes, the (morphostasis) and (morphogensis) (also mentioned by Burns), the first one accomplishes a preservative function while the second tends to mutate the organization and the status of the systems. Buckley says that in the second function which is the morphogenesis, even if there is a revolutionary, innovational or deviational act to change the status of a certain stabilized socio-cultural system there must absolutely be a certain type of planning or management of the revolutionary or innovational act itself, or they are useless, start and their effect would parish in no time, living intact the pre-stabilized system. By using Buckley's function we arrive at concluding that if the innovational process and its interaction with pre-stabilized systems and influence on them is done by a controlled manner we could certainly guarantee the outcome thus creating and setting new standards and stabilized systems, Buckley also notes that the original systems are usually remained intact because are hard to innovate, there managing systems are too well preserved that the new innovational acts would be too weak to alter the system in any way.

Format Wars - Betamax, Vhs, LaserDisc Let us get ahead with what would be an idle example of standard or stability. The "Format Wars", a perfect way of seeing technical systems competing one with another to arrive and set new standards, or because the old ones weren't stable anymore or there was a need for innovation, off course in a certain period of time, given that we need to take into consideration that the systems are always

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exposed to changes, as Burns demonstrated that inner and outer factors tend to mutate this systems particularly the social ones and some are out of predictability and control. Coming back to the format wars, in 1975 Sony released its new magnetic tape format the "betamax", a year later JVC (Victor Co. of Japan) had its own magnetic tape format released dubbed VHS, even if Sony's betamax was more compact, had a neater quality, and it was out earlier then JVCs' format, VHS was on its way to make history, becoming the standard of now more than 30 years. Some would say price, but one of the main reasons that JVC won this particular format war was thanks to the porn industrys' choice of VHS as their main media instead of Betamax. Even if it should appear simple as Sony was well known and its technology was quite compact and of notable quality, not forgetting that it was released a year before then VHS, still name and technology wasn't enough to set a standard but more articulated and complex factors were in the game of deciding, in this case it was the socio-economic factor, it was for the industry to decide as society its target, and not technology. Further on with Format Wars after VHS, we started to see what would have been the unsuccessful predecessor of modern day DVDs, the Laser Disc, which was starting to emerge in around 1980's only to finish in the history books or on collectors shelves, yes, it was simply better, high-tech, with much higher picture quality and an extraordinary audio, nevertheless it was an innovation with weak management system, the leap was too much for the socio-economic factors to support, what society waited was not only maximum quality, but price had an important role to it, people weren't ready to toss back there 100$ VHS players to buy the Laser Disc player for no less then 500$, not only the machines high price was the only problem, even if the movie industry had invested to publish LD movies, the LD's themselves were at an outrages price with prices tagged from 40 to 100$, people preferred still the VHS, which off-course was replaced by the DVD, and here a managed innovational system successfully replaced and took over, it was cheap, it was compact, and most importantly came at an affordable price. Currently we are witnessing another major format war; with new innovative technologies having emerged, Sony's Blue-ray disc and Toshibas HD-DVD are fighting to set today's standards.

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The blue-ray is expensive, even its players come relatively at a high cost, but it has double the capacity of Toshibas' HD-DVD discs which come at a lower cost. What is certain that we can't look back in history to know how the new standards will be set, in one word we can't depend our calculations on the porn industry this time, internet has become the major source of porn, with being cheap, and having almost unlimited amount of media. It's obvious that by new technologies emerging technical systems are becoming much more articulated and depending from other systems which are making it harder to analyze and predict, so what will be or what could be the cause that will decide who will set the new standard. First of all it's not the format itself that needs to be taken into consideration, but the whole system in which it's interacting. To get the maximum out of the new formats, other than the players themselves you need to have a TV that supports the high quality output of this media, to take advantage in the best way possible, if you want to record on blue-rays there need to be digital high bandwidth transmitted TV channels which are only emerging recently and not all countries have or support it, it wouldn't make sense recording normal analog TV shows on this media. Furthermore, will the movie industry affect the outcome of this formats?, at first Warner Bros. had chosen to embrace HD-DVD as their main movie publishing format, but now it has changed to Blue-Ray, so this is a pass ahead for Blue-ray, other major companies such as Microsoft still prefer HD-DVD, another factor with an important role would be the gaming industry, Sony has its Play Station III Gaming Console which comes with a blue-ray player, while Microsoft's Xbox 360 has HD-DVD. It's taking longer than expected for one of this formats to conquer and be the One, even that most disc players are supporting both formats, so the question would be will there be the need of a single standard or it's possible for both to co-exist with one having a higher quality with a high price while the other half the quality for half the price. Even though there are large hopes for Blue-ray, things will only get clearer when the current technology (DVD's) become too old to support and satisfy the societies and the industries needs.

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Standards in the Automobile Industry

What we saw before could be considered a micro technical-system, nothing compared to systems as complex as the world of the automobiles. For years now they go on fossil fuels, we've made great progress with automobile technology over the years, cars are dramatically cleaner, dramatically safer, more efficient, radically more affordable, then they were years ago, but the fact remains that the fundamental DNA of the automobile has pretty much stayed the same. As we talked before, most of the factors that influenced the stability of the systems were those found in the so called "Sociosphere" and the "Technosphere", what we need to consider as a factor of stability control and standard setter should also include largely the "Biosphere" which off course in a hidden manner also played a part in the prior discussed systems. Ambient and sustainability issues are acting on the current stabilized standards, because of this we have seen many breakthroughs in the automobile industry, cars going on water, methane, hydrogen, air, batteries, and on solar energy. Even if as long as fossil fuels exist this standards will be un-alterable, major automobile industries are spending billions of dollars for finding solutions for the current emerging ambient problems, they are even becoming fundamental business propositions, as the growth of this industry is kept by sustainability issues some giants as General Motors understand that they won't be able to grow there business unless they solve this problems and also they take it positively seeing it as great business growth opportunities, and have already started spending all that money to be the first in the market to see the future and to create it thus creating the standards (Larry Burns GM R&D Vice President). As we see again, before new stable systems emerge some of their causes are identifiable yet making the yet to come standard predictable in one manner or the other.

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Bibliografia

Burns, Tom – (2006), The Sociology of Complex Systems: An Overview of Actor-SystemDynamics Theory in "World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution", Vol.62, no. 6, september, pp. 411-440. Gokalp, Iskender – (1992), On the Analysis of Large Technical Systems in "Science, Technology and Human Value", vol. 17, n.1, inverno, pp. 57-78. Maldonado, Thomas – (1970), La spranza progettuale. Ambiente e società, Torino, Einaudi, pp. 100-108.