Socio-Technological System Levels

Summary Description

"Today technology designers must recognize four system levels (Whitworth, 2009):

  1. Hardware systems, based on physical energy exchanges.
  2. Software systems, based on information data exchanges.
  3. Human–computer interaction systems, based on personal semantic exchanges.
  4. Socio–technical systems, based on community–wide exchanges.

In this framework, engineering, computing, psychology and sociology are just overlapping “views” of the same system (Figure 1).

Software depends on hardware, but reducing software to hardware voltages would be like describing World War II in terms of atomic events, both difficult and pointless. Software concepts not only better describe computer systems, they also offer better ways to design them, e.g., software cache prediction concepts revolutionized chip design. Each level emerges from the previous: physical exchanges create information, information exchanges create meaning and human meaning exchanges create communities. Each higher level naturally invokes new performance requirements that flow down from higher to lower levels, allowing the entire system to perform better.

In the following, a socio–technical system is a social system that emerges from a technical base, as opposed to a socio–physical system, that arises from a physical one. Both are social systems, but with a different architectural origin. Technology advances mean that socio–technical systems are now equivalent to physical ones, e.g., the over five hundred million person membership of Facebook exceeds that of many countries."

Source

• Article: The social environment model: Small heroes and the evolution of human society. by Brian Whitworth and Alex P. Whitworth. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 11 - 1 November 2010 (cfr. the Free-Goodness Model

URL = http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3173/2647

We processed this article under the entry: Evolution of Socio-Technological System Levels and the Emergence of the Free-Goodness Model of Human Interaction

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