Social Scientists As Historians

Social scientists are technology's historians. Social scientists merely study the effects of new technologies as they are unleashed on the world. Universities open up new schools, departments, disciplines, and certainly new topics within disciplines as technology and reality march on. Take for example the following – two decades after television became a common amongst US households, David Phillips found evidence for a Werther effect like phenomena that linked suicides in real life to television suicides, and later still Robert Putnam linked heightened social alienation to television, and now there is a slew of literature detailing negative impact of violence on television. Of course, nobody ever thought that they might want to research the impact of something before it is released.

Perhaps social scientists can write their own epitaph. We wagged our fingers and scribbled furiously. We also made some money doing it.

p.s. On occasion, social scientists produce knowledge that is directly useful to Capitalism. For instance, through the work on fundamentals of persuasion.