Social Technology: From Social Engineering to Social Media

Social technology is the use of human, intellectual and digital resources to influence social processes. The phrase sounds modern, and today it is most often used as a loose synonym for social media and other "social software". But the term is more than a century old. It was first used by sociologists at the University of Chicago in the 1890s to describe the practical application of social science to the improvement of society, and for much of the twentieth century it was bound up with debates about social engineering, planning and the proper limits of government.

This article traces both meanings and the links between them. It explains where the idea came from, how it was used by reformers, planners and critics, how it was revived to describe the internet's social platforms, and what scholars have said about its promise and its dangers. Along the way it looks at concrete techniques that have been described as social technologies, from the Delphi method to enterprise social software, and at the long-running argument over whether technology shapes society or society shapes technology.

Two meanings of one term

The Wikipedia article on social technology identifies two main historical meanings:

1. Social technology as applied social science. From the late nineteenth century, the term described the deliberate use of knowledge about society to achieve social goals. In this sense it overlaps heavily with "social engineering" in the political sense: the design of policies, institutions and techniques meant to change how people live and behave.
2. Social technology as social software. From the early twenty-first century, the term has been used for digital tools that let people communicate, share and collaborate: social networking services, corporate social media and enterprise social software.

Scholars have also distinguished between two kinds of social technology:

The distinction is useful because it shows what links the old and new meanings. In both, the concern is with means of shaping social life. In the older sense, the means were mostly methods, procedures and institutions. In the newer sense, they are mostly software and devices. Many of the same questions arise in both cases: who designs these tools, for what ends, and with what effects on freedom and equality?

Origins: Chicago in the 1890s

The term "social technology" was first used in the 1890s by two sociologists at the University of Chicago, Albion Woodbury Small and Charles Richmond Henderson. Chicago was a fitting birthplace. In 1892 it had founded the first independent department of sociology in the United States, under Small, and in 1895 Small established the American Journal of Sociology.

In 1898, Small described social technology as the application of knowledge of social life to the achievement of rational social aims. The idea was that sociology should not remain a purely descriptive science. Just as engineering applies physics, social technology would apply sociology to practical problems such as poverty, crime and the organisation of charity.

Henderson took a similar path. In 1895 he used the term "social art" for this kind of applied work, and in 1901 he renamed it "social technology" in an article titled "The Scope of Social Technology". The shift from "art" to "technology" is telling. It signalled an ambition to make social improvement systematic and scientific rather than a matter of good intentions and individual flair.

Broadening the idea (1920s and 1930s)

In 1923, the sociologists Ernest Burgess and Thomas D. Eliot broadened the term to include techniques drawn from psychology and other social sciences, especially in social work. Social work was professionalising at this time, and social technology offered a way of describing the specialised methods that caseworkers and administrators were developing.

Between 1928 and 1935, Luther Lee Bernard pushed the concept in a new direction. He separated social technology from applied science in general and included administration and the setting of social norms within it. Bernard also made a pointed observation: the most developed forms of social technology in his time, such as advertising, were often used for antisocial ends. Techniques that could in principle serve the public good were in practice being used to manipulate people for private gain. That warning has been repeated, in various forms, ever since.

Social engineering and the politics of planning

Where "social engineering" came from

The closely related term "social engineering" has its own history. In 1894 the Dutch industrialist J. C. van Marken used the phrase sociale ingenieurs ("social engineers") in an essay, arguing that employers needed specialists to handle human problems just as they employed technical experts for materials and machines. In 1899 "Social Engineering" was the title of a small journal, renamed Social Service in 1900. Its former editor, William H. Tolman, published a book with that title in 1909, and in 1911 Edwin L. Earp's The Social Engineer set out the modern usage, treating social relations as machinery to be managed as an engineer would handle a technical system. The Wikipedia article on social technology also records the economist Thorstein Veblen using "social engineering" as early as 1891.

The Soviet experience

In the 1930s, both "social technology" and "social engineering" became associated with large-scale socio-economic policy in the Soviet Union. The Soviet economist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky defined social technology as the science of organised production and organised labour. More broadly, the Soviet state set out from the 1920s to reshape citizens' behaviour and ideals, replacing the social frameworks of the Russian Empire and seeking to create a "New Soviet man".

This association has shaped how the term is heard, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Russian philosopher Vladislav Lektorsky, discussing the work of Viacheslav Stëpin, linked social technology to some of the worst episodes of Soviet history, such as forced collectivisation and mass deportations. Stëpin had described modern European civilisation as "technogenic", meaning one driven by the constant production of new technologies, including technologies for managing people.

Popper: piecemeal versus utopian engineering

The best-known critique of large-scale social engineering came from the philosopher Karl Popper. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism, he distinguished between two kinds of social engineering.

• Utopian engineering tries to remake society as a whole according to a blueprint. Popper argued that it tends toward dictatorship, because imposing a single plan on a whole society requires suppressing dissent, and it destroys the feedback that would show when the plan is going wrong.
• Piecemeal engineering tackles specific, identifiable social evils with limited, reversible reforms that can be tested and corrected. Popper saw this as compatible with democracy and with the scientific attitude of learning from mistakes.

The Poverty of Historicism has an unusual publication history. Popper first presented its ideas in a paper in 1936, published them as three articles in the journal Economica in 1944 and 1945, and issued the book in 1957. He argued that because societies cannot be fully described, because history is a unique sequence rather than a set of laws, and because the growth of knowledge is unpredictable, no one can know the future course of history well enough to plan society as a whole. Large-scale experiments also produce unintended consequences while suppressing the information needed to correct them. The book is dedicated to the victims of fascist and communist belief in inexorable laws of historical destiny.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains the logic of Popper's preference. Piecemeal engineering pursues "one specific goal at a time", so that unintended side effects can be spotted and corrected, in the same way that scientists subject theories to critical testing. Large-scale planning to a blueprint is, on Popper's account, "inherently misconceived" because actions have consequences no one can foresee. Popper also favoured what is sometimes called negative utilitarianism in policy: public action should aim to reduce suffering, leaving the pursuit of happiness to private effort. The encyclopedia also remarks that Popper adopted the label "piecemeal social engineering" "rather unfortunately".

Popper's distinction remains one of the most widely used ways of thinking about social technology. It does not reject the idea of deliberately improving society. It rejects the belief that any group of planners can know enough to redesign society from the top down.

Post-war social technologies

After the Second World War, the term was applied to a number of specific techniques for organising groups and decisions.

Group dynamics techniques

The social psychologist Dorwin Cartwright, working in the tradition of group dynamics, applied techniques such as buzz groups (breaking a large meeting into small groups for short discussions) and role playing (having people act out situations to explore behaviour and practise new responses). These are human-oriented social technologies: methods that change how people interact, rather than devices.

The Delphi technique

The mathematician and futurist Olaf Helmer was one of the developers of the Delphi technique, a method for reaching expert consensus. Delphi was developed at the RAND Corporation in the early Cold War, originally to forecast how technology might affect warfare. Helmer, Norman Dalkey and Nicholas Rescher are credited with it, and a 1964 report by Gordon and Helmer applied it to long-term trends in science and technology. Helmer later co-wrote a book titled Social Technology (1966).

How Delphi works:

1. A facilitator assembles a panel of experts.
2. Each expert answers questions independently and, usually, anonymously, so that reputation and group pressure carry less weight.
3. The facilitator summarises the answers, including the reasoning behind them, and shares the summary with the panel.
4. Experts may revise their answers in light of the summary.
5. The process repeats for two or more rounds, until answers stabilise or a deadline is reached.

Delphi has been used for technology and business forecasting, public policy and health. In Latin America, the eLAC Action Plans used a Delphi process with five rounds and 1,454 contributions. In medicine it has been used to develop clinical guidelines and reporting standards. The method has clear limitations: its accuracy is mixed, it can lend false confidence to a panel's shared ignorance, it struggles with interdependent factors, and the push toward consensus can suppress valid minority views. Modern practitioners often treat Delphi as a way of mapping the range of expert opinion rather than as a machine for producing a single correct answer.

A worked example: summarising a Delphi round (hypothetical)

The numbers below are invented to show how a facilitator might summarise a Delphi exercise. They do not come from a real study.

Nine experts are asked in which year a particular technology will be widely adopted. In the first round they answer:

2030, 2032, 2033, 2035, 2035, 2036, 2038, 2040, 2045

With nine answers in order, the median is the fifth value: 2035. To show the spread, the facilitator calculates the interquartile range. Taking the lower four values (2030, 2032, 2033, 2035), the lower quartile is the average of the middle two, (2032 + 2033) ÷ 2 = 2032.5. Taking the upper four values (2036, 2038, 2040, 2045), the upper quartile is (2038 + 2040) ÷ 2 = 2039. The interquartile range is 2039 − 2032.5 = 6.5 years.

The facilitator circulates the median, the range and the reasons given by experts at the extremes. In the second round, answers are:

2032, 2033, 2034, 2035, 2035, 2035, 2036, 2037, 2040

The median is still 2035. The lower quartile is (2033 + 2034) ÷ 2 = 2033.5, and the upper quartile is (2036 + 2037) ÷ 2 = 2036.5, so the interquartile range has narrowed to 3 years. The narrowing shows convergence, but it does not prove the panel is right. A careful report would also record the reasoning of the expert who still answered 2040, since minority views are sometimes correct.

Other uses in the late twentieth century

The term continued to appear in books on a range of topics. Burke and Hornstein's The Social Technology of Organization Development (1972) was an early management text applying the idea to organisational change. Rainer Knopff and Tom Flanagan's Human Rights and Social Technology (1989) examined the use of human rights policy as a tool for changing behaviour. Theodore Caplow's Perverse Incentives (1994) looked at how social interventions can produce effects opposite to those intended.

In 2011, Paul Leibeseder published a review of the concept, arguing that social technology is best understood as the application of social science knowledge to specific purposes, including government decision-making.

A modern human-oriented social technology: the nudge

The clearest recent example of social technology in the older, applied-social-science sense is the "nudge". In their 2008 book Nudge, the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein defined a nudge as an aspect of "choice architecture" (the setting in which people make decisions) that predictably changes behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing economic incentives. "Nudges are not mandates," they wrote. They called their approach "libertarian paternalism": steering people toward choices that are likely to benefit them while leaving them free to choose otherwise. Those who design the setting are "choice architects".

Familiar examples include the image of a fly etched into the urinals at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, which improved aim and reduced cleaning costs; making a desirable option the default, which increases how often people choose it (one study found more consumers chose renewable electricity when it was the default); and placing healthy snacks near checkouts.

Governments took up the idea quickly. In 2010 the UK coalition government set up the Behavioural Insights Team inside the Cabinet Office, headed by the psychologist David Halpern. The team reported that reminder letters telling people that most others in their area had already paid their tax increased taxes paid within 23 days by more than £1.6 million, and that sending a text message ten days before bailiffs were due to be sent doubled the number of court fines paid without further action, reportedly saving the Courts Service £30 million a year. The team was partly privatised: in February 2014 its ownership was divided between the government, the innovation charity Nesta and its staff, and in December 2021 it became wholly owned by Nesta.

The evidence for nudging has become a lively scientific argument, which makes it a good case study in the limits of social technology:

Critics also raise ethical objections that echo a century of debate about social technology. Some argue that nudges can undermine autonomy and dignity, or that they amount to psychological manipulation under a friendlier name. Ethicists have asked whether nudges serve distributive justice and whether they fit with the rule of law. Sunstein has defended the approach against these criticisms. The nudge debate shows, in miniature, the pattern this article has traced: a promising technique for shaping behaviour, early enthusiasm, institutional adoption, and then a harder look at both the evidence and the ethics.

Social technology as social software

In the early twenty-first century, the term took on a new life as a synonym for social software. A widely read example is Groundswell (2008) by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, two executives at the research firm Forrester Research, published by Harvard Business Press. The book argued that companies could no longer control what customers thought of them through market research, customer service and advertising alone, because customers were now shaping the conversation through new online media. It recommended tactics including listening, talking, energising enthusiastic customers and supporting customers and employees through social applications. Among its examples was Blendtec's "Will It Blend?" campaign, which spread through Digg and YouTube on a small budget. The book won the 2009 Berry-AMA Book Prize for the best marketing book, and a revised edition appeared in 2011.

Social networking services

Social networking services are platforms that connect people with shared interests, activities or backgrounds. The researchers danah boyd and Nicole Ellison offered an influential definition in 2007: such sites let individuals build a public or semi-public profile, list other users they are connected with, and view those connections within the system.

The development of these services can be traced through a series of launches:

Adoption was rapid. A Pew survey published in 2010 found that 47 per cent of American adults used social networking sites; a 2013 survey put the figure at 73 per cent. By 2017, Facebook reported 2.13 billion monthly active users and 1.4 billion daily active users. Pew Research Center's 2026 fact sheet on social media, based on a survey of 5,511 US adults conducted between January and June 2026, found that YouTube (84 per cent) and Facebook (70 per cent) were the most widely used platforms, with about half of adults (51 per cent) using Instagram. Use varied sharply by age and education: 79 per cent of adults aged 18 to 29 used Instagram, and LinkedIn was used by 51 per cent of college graduates but only 13 per cent of those with a high school education or less. Those gaps are a reminder that "social technology" does not reach everyone equally.

Corporate social media and social commerce

Corporate social media covers how businesses of all sizes use social platforms for marketing, customer service and public relations. The spread of smartphones and mobile computing also fostered "social commerce", in which buying and selling are woven into social platforms and recommendations from friends or online communities.

Enterprise social software

Inside organisations, social technology takes the form of enterprise social software. In 2006 Andrew McAfee, then at Harvard Business School, coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" in an article in the spring issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review titled "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration". McAfee asked whether businesses finally had "the right technologies for knowledge work", and argued that wikis, blogs and group messaging could turn a corporate intranet into "a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done". One of his examples described an informal improvement to a bank's wiki moving from idea to working prototype "within 64 minutes and without any project definition or planning". He argued that enterprise social software needed six functions to work well, often summarised by the acronym SLATES:

McAfee also recommended easy-to-use software without rigid structure, an informal roll-out on a common platform, and strong, visible support from managers. In 2007 the writer Dion Hinchcliffe proposed adding four more characteristics: being freeform, network-oriented, social and emergent.

Unlike traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure first and expects use to follow, enterprise social software tends to encourage use first and let structure emerge. That is both its appeal and its difficulty. The open, sharing ethos of consumer social media does not always fit the workplace. A 2016 study by Mettler and Winter found that business users' concerns significantly influence whether they share trusted information freely and under their own names on enterprise social systems.

Social technology in activism and politics

Social media has become a major tool for political organising. Social tools can help protests spread across borders and allow activists in repressive countries to reach international audiences. But critics warn of "clicktivism" or "slacktivism": forms of participation that feel meaningful but produce little concrete result. A 2014 study by Harlow and Guo discussed this tension.

The term "slacktivism" itself has a surprising history. It was coined in 1995 by Dwight Ozard and Fred Clark at the Cornerstone Festival, originally with a positive meaning as a contraction of "slacker activism". It later came to mean low-effort support, such as liking or sharing posts, signing online petitions or changing a profile picture.

The evidence on its effects is mixed:

• Reach can be enormous. The Kony 2012 campaign video reached 100 million views in six days.
• Small actions can add up. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross raised $5 million in two days through text-message donations.
• Visibility is not victory. An analysis by the New Statesman found that the ten most-shared online petitions it examined had been unsuccessful.
• High-risk activism is different. The writer Malcolm Gladwell contrasted social media campaigns with high-risk activism such as the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins, arguing that strong personal ties, not weak online ones, sustain dangerous collective action.
• Online support can lead to more. A Georgetown University study found that people who engaged in online activism were more likely to take further, more meaningful actions.

A worked example: the funnel of participation (hypothetical)

The figures below are invented to illustrate how organisers think about online campaigns.

Suppose a campaign post is shared 100,000 times. If 2 per cent of those who share it go on to sign a petition, that produces 100,000 × 0.02 = 2,000 signatures. If 5 per cent of the signers then donate, that gives 2,000 × 0.05 = 100 donors. If each gives an average of $20, the campaign raises 100 × $20 = $2,000.

This simple chain shows why both critics and defenders of slacktivism can be right. The final number of committed participants may be small relative to the initial reach, which supports the critics. But without the initial reach, there might be no donors at all, which supports the defenders.

Does technology shape society, or does society shape technology?

Any discussion of social technology runs into a deeper question: how much power does technology have over society?

Technological determinism

Technological determinism is the view that technology develops according to its own internal logic and then drives changes in social structure and culture. The idea is often traced to Thorstein Veblen, who portrayed machinery as having an independent influence on human thought. Karl Marx is sometimes read as a determinist because he tied technology to the material base of society, though this reading is disputed. William Ogburn proposed in 1922 that societies adjust to major inventions only after a period of "cultural lag". The media theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, the latter famous for the phrase "the medium is the message", are often treated as founders of media determinism, though McLuhan was not a strict determinist.

Scholars distinguish between two versions:

Critics such as the philosopher Andrew Feenberg have questioned the founding assumptions of determinism. The cultural critic Raymond Williams argued that social movements and institutions shape technological and media developments. Langdon Winner coined "technological somnambulism" for the way people sleepwalk through their use of technology, while insisting that they can wake up and take control.

The social shaping of technology

In 1985, Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman published an influential collection, The Social Shaping of Technology. It argued that technology does not follow its own fixed logic but is shaped by economic, political and cultural choices, often made unconsciously. The approach describes innovation as a "garden of forking paths": at many points, technology could have developed differently, and different paths have different consequences for different social groups. This view emerged in the 1980s alongside the social construction of technology (SCOT), associated with Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, and actor-network theory. All three reject the linear model of innovation and technological determinism.

The social shaping approach describes a relationship of mutual shaping. Technology affects society through:

• Affordances: what a technology makes easier.
• Constraints: what it makes harder.
• Preconditions: the skills and resources needed to use it well.
• Unintended consequences: effects no one planned.

The communication scholar Nancy Baym (2015) applied this framework to the mobile phone. Phones afford calling, messaging and searching; they constrain people who are not comfortable with technology; they require preconditions such as paying bills and access to electricity; and they produce unintended consequences such as distraction. In the other direction, the spread of mobile phones in poorer countries was shaped by economics (phones were cheaper than computers plus internet service), politics (regulations that made networks easier to build) and culture (the value placed on mobile communication).

Why this matters for social technology

The debate between determinism and social shaping maps directly onto the two meanings of social technology. The early Chicago sociologists and the Soviet planners both believed that society could be deliberately shaped through technique. Critics such as Popper warned that this belief could become dangerous when applied at the scale of whole societies. Today's debates about social media replay these themes: do platforms inevitably polarise opinion or spread misinformation, or do these outcomes depend on design choices, business models and regulation that people can change?

Most scholars now favour some version of mutual shaping. Social technologies, old and new, have real effects, but those effects are not fixed. They depend on who designs and controls the technology, what purposes it is used for, and how societies choose to govern it.

Concerns and criticisms

Several concerns run through the literature on social technology.

Manipulation

Luther Lee Bernard warned in the late 1920s and 1930s that the most developed social technologies of his day, such as advertising, were often used for antisocial ends. The concern applies with even greater force to digital platforms, which can use detailed data about users to target messages with great precision.

Threats to human rights and autonomy

Some critics argue that social technology threatens human rights because it assumes human behaviour can be predicted and controlled. If people are treated as objects to be managed, their capacity for free choice and their claim to be consulted about their own lives may be ignored. The Soviet experience, as discussed by Lektorsky, is the extreme example.

Determinism and hubris

Social scientists have noted that the concept of social technology is linked to technological determinism, the view that technology has universal effects on social processes. A belief that the right technique will reliably produce the desired social outcome can lead planners and designers to underestimate the complexity of social life and the likelihood of unintended consequences. Popper's critique of utopian engineering is the classic statement of this concern.

Social media harms

The Wikipedia article on social networking services lists concerns including privacy, cyberbullying, social anxiety and misuse. A 2016 University of Pittsburgh study found a correlation between social media use and depression among US adults aged 19 to 32, although a correlation does not establish that one causes the other. Critics have also argued that the loss of traditional media gatekeepers has reduced the reliability of news.

The limits of enterprise social tools

Inside organisations, the hope that social software would transform collaboration has been tempered by experience. Mettler and Winter's research suggests that employees weigh personal and professional concerns before sharing information openly, so simply installing a platform does not guarantee a culture of sharing.

Related ideas

Social technology overlaps with a number of neighbouring concepts:

Common misconceptions

"Social technology means social media." That is one modern meaning, but the term was coined in the 1890s for the application of social science to social problems, long before computers existed.

"Social technology is always manipulative." Many social technologies, such as structured group discussion or careful policy evaluation, are used to make decisions more informed and inclusive. The concern is with how they are used and who controls them.

"Popper opposed all social engineering." He did not. He opposed utopian, whole-society engineering and supported piecemeal reforms that could be tested and corrected.

"Technology determines social outcomes." Most scholars reject hard technological determinism. Technologies have real effects, but those effects depend on social, economic and political context.

"Online activism is useless." The evidence is mixed. Many online campaigns achieve little, but some raise significant funds or awareness, and some research suggests online engagement can lead to further action.

"Enterprise social software automatically improves collaboration." Research suggests that organisational culture, trust and management support matter at least as much as the software itself.

Frequently asked questions

Who coined the term "social technology"?

The term was first used in the 1890s by Albion Woodbury Small and Charles Richmond Henderson at the University of Chicago. Henderson used "social art" in 1895 and renamed it "social technology" in 1901.

How is social technology different from social engineering?

The two terms have overlapping histories and were often used interchangeably in the early twentieth century. "Social engineering" in the political sense usually refers to deliberate, often large-scale efforts to reshape society. "Social technology" is a broader term that includes specific techniques, such as group discussion methods or the Delphi technique, and, in its modern sense, social software. (The phrase "social engineering" is also used in computer security for tricking people into revealing information, which is a separate meaning.)

What is the difference between human-oriented and artifact-oriented social technology?

Human-oriented social technologies act directly on people and their relationships: procedures, discussion methods, administrative techniques. Artifact-oriented social technologies use tools or devices, such as social networking platforms, to mediate social interaction.

What is Enterprise 2.0?

Enterprise 2.0 is a term coined by Andrew McAfee in 2006 for the use of social software inside organisations. He identified six key functions, often summarised as SLATES: search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals.

Is the Delphi method still used?

Yes. It is used in forecasting, public policy and health, including the development of clinical guidelines. Modern versions include real-time formats without fixed rounds. Its results are best treated as a structured summary of expert opinion rather than a guaranteed prediction.

Did social media cause political change in recent decades?

Social tools can help movements organise and spread, and they have been part of many protest movements. But scholars warn against simple cause-and-effect stories. Outcomes depend on many factors, including offline organisation, the response of governments and the commitment of participants.

Is a "nudge" a social technology?

In the older sense of the term, yes. A nudge is a deliberately designed change to the setting in which people make choices, intended to influence behaviour in a predictable direction. That fits the original Chicago idea of applying knowledge about social life to social aims. Whether nudges work reliably is still debated: a 2022 analysis in PNAS found no overall effect once publication bias was corrected, while other researchers argue that some nudges, such as defaults, can be highly effective.

Should we worry about social technology?

Concerns about manipulation, privacy, autonomy and unintended consequences are well founded and have been raised for a century, from Bernard's comments on advertising to modern debates about platforms. At the same time, social technologies can support better decisions and more inclusive participation. The key questions are who designs and controls these technologies, for what purposes, and with what accountability.

Why the concept still matters

The history of social technology is a history of hopes and warnings. The Chicago sociologists of the 1890s hoped that knowledge of society could be applied to make life better. The planners of the twentieth century tried to apply it on a vast scale, sometimes with catastrophic results, prompting Popper's defence of cautious, piecemeal reform. In the twenty-first century, the term has been revived for digital tools that connect billions of people, raising old questions in new forms.

Understanding social technology means holding two ideas at once. First, techniques and tools for shaping social life are real and powerful, whether they are discussion methods, policy instruments or software platforms. Second, their effects are not fixed by the technology itself; they depend on the choices of designers, users, institutions and governments. Seeing social technology clearly, in both its old and new senses, is a step toward making those choices more deliberately and more democratically.

Sources

• Social technology (Wikipedia)
• Social engineering (political science) (Wikipedia))
• Albion Woodbury Small (Wikipedia)
• The Poverty of Historicism (Wikipedia)
• Delphi method (Wikipedia)
• Groundswell (book) (Wikipedia))
• Social networking service (Wikipedia)
• Enterprise social software (Wikipedia)
• Slacktivism (Wikipedia)
• McAfee (2006), Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT Sloan Management Review
• Karl Popper, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Social Media Fact Sheet, Pew Research Center
• Nudge theory (Wikipedia)
• Behavioural Insights Team (Wikipedia)
• Social shaping of technology (Wikipedia)
• Technological determinism (Wikipedia)