MARÍA P. ÁNGEL

STS in my Dissertation

In my Ph.D. research project, I trace the evolution of the concept of information privacy in American privacy law scholarship over the past 30 years. During this period of time, information technology has advanced from personal computers and networks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making systems.  Therefore, in order to make sense of the evolution of the information privacy concept without falling into the trap of technological essentialism/determinism, I propose the theoretical concept of “techno-legal imaginaries.” 

I define “techno-legal imaginaries” as the visions of a given legal community about the desirable futures that could be achieved through the regulation of technological innovation. In my view, they have the power to shape how sociotechnical legal problems are imagined and shaped and how they are answered in different legal communities. 

In that sense, “techno-legal imaginaries” can help me to provide a more nuanced, complex, and sophisticated explanation of the evolution of American privacy scholars’ concept of information privacy in the context of the digital age, which takes into account the multiple ways in which the cognitive, the technological, the social, and the legal interact and become entangled. In a broader sense, this concept can serve as a theoretical tool to make better sense of the ideas and regulatory proposals of legal actors involved in the tech policy sphere, as well as of their evolution over time.

This theoretical concept draws on elements and inspiration from several concepts developed in Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) and related fields. First, it builds on the concepts of imaginaries, expectations, visions, and promises proposed in STS literature that addresses the possible interactions between futures and technology.  In particular, it builds on extensive STS literature on “technoscientific imaginaries” (Marcus, 1995), sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009; 2015), and the sociology of expectations (Van Lente & Rip, 1998; Brown & Michael, 2003; Borup et al., 2006; Konrad at al. 2016; Konrad, 2019).

Second, the “techno-legal imaginaries” concept seeks to take the literature on the possible interactions between technology and law a step forward. Thus, while building on the legal-STS body of work about the Legal Construction of Technology (Balkin, 2015; Kaminski, 2017; Jones, 2018), it looks to move the link between the fields of Law & Technology and STS from the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) to the Co-production perspective. In that way, it represents an attempt to account for the dialectical, bi-directional relationship that exists between new technologies and legal communities.

Finally, the concept of “techno-legal imaginaries” claims a place in the scant multidisciplinary literature that addresses the possible interactions between law and futures (or imagination more generally) (Balkin & Siegel, 2006; Tranter, 2011; Susser, 2022), to show how legal actors have visions of desirable futures according to which they understand legal problems and propose legal solutions. 

In developing the concept, I initially relied on a fourth body of literature that has been historically related and intertwined with STS: works in Political, Cultural, and Social Theory that address the individual or collective feelings/beliefs about technological developments (Marx, 1964; Miller, 1965; Nye, 1994; Mosco, 2005; Dourish & Bell, 2011; Nagy & Neff, 2015; Elish & boyd, 2017; Moss & Schüür, 2018; Ames, 2019; Campolo & Crawford, 2020; Crawford, 2021). In that sense, I would initially argue that, unlike the “sociotechnical imaginaries,” techno-legal imaginaries were not particularly animated by “shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff, 2015a, p. 4). Rather, they were underlaid by shared feelings and beliefs about the technologies. However, having advanced part of my research, nowadays my position about the pertinence of this body of literature in my own research and in the definition of my proposed concept is in a state of flux.

References

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