Why STS? Why not?
College is for learning – about life, about self, about the world around us – but at a place like MIT, we often forget to look up once in a while and take note of the actual happenings of society. My brain, like so many others, spends hours upon days analyzing and studying the molecular levels of engineering and science. We yearn to understand the intricacies of torque and fluid dynamics; we measure and calculate and experiment with cells and screws and numbers and heat coefficients. We’re inundated with problems of heterozygous genotypes, material resistances, flow distribution over networks, beam strength, design logic. But in the end, in the big picture, what does all this mean? What is all this really about?
Science, Technology, and Society (STS) provided a glimpse of that meaning for me. During the fall and spring of 2002-2003, I enrolled in two classes – STS.069: Technology in a Dangerous World and STS.092: Current Events from an STS Perspective, respectively. In each, we looked at “science and technology” from various viewpoints and attitudes. We questioned and wondered how the amazing developments and inventions of science and technology were affecting both society and ourselves. They are, in one way or another, constantly connected to everything, just as STS encompasses everything past, present, and future. What doesn’t fit? When we study STS, we study the world.
STS.069 examined the events of September 11, 2001 – the effects, the reaction, the results, the causes, and the meaning. And halfway through the class, we suddenly found ourselves asking – how does MIT fit into this grand scheme? What role do we, as technical experts and future directors, have in the safety and dangers of how science and technology shape the world in which we presently live?
Eight of us, seven of whom took 069 the previous term, registered for STS.092, a spring seminar that we all decided to take out of pure and honest interest. Our homework assignments were simple: read the news, find something intriguing or provocative, and write about it. In one five-month period, our topics covered a vast range of interests and news stories: the Columbia shuttle crash, the Iraqi war, the SARS health epidemics, military power, deaths, kidnappings, lawsuits, the media and our news sources, carpooling, and every far-reaching implication, complication, and consequence of that particular event. We discussed, debated, expressed, and argued, and through it all, we slowly but carefully began to understand STS.
At the end of the term, in the final week of classes, our wondrous Professor Rosalind Williams asked us to write one last analysis – this time, about ourselves. The news reports we each found engaging, the concerns about which we felt strongly, the blurbs that we followed from page A2 to A22, the sections of the New York Times we always turned to first – they all told us something about ourselves and our own identities and interests. We detected, somewhere along the way, the answer, or at least an aspect of it, to the original question. We’re beginning to respond to “what does all this mean?”
This site is a part of MIT’s OpenCourseWare website about the same STS courses, but it can also stand alone. The collective eighty 2-page essays that we wrote every week of the spring semester are presented here. They’re cross-referenced, analyzed, and categorized a million different ways because they really cannot fit under one single and specific heading. Read them, think about them, explore them further on your own. Maybe you too will discover something about yourself.
-- Stephanie Chang