Social Constructionism Perspective Of The Analysis Of The Technology Foresight

This article takes Japan, the country which has successfully carried outtechnology foresight activities for40years, as a typical case, revealing the nature oftechnology foresight in the perspective of technical social constructionism.Technology foresight provides the critical empiricals and cases to support technicalsocial constructionism. Also, clearing the constructive nature of technologyforesight, has important practical significance for raising public and the partners’awareness, as well as carrying out technology foresight activities more effectively.We can conclude from the historical process form technology forecast totechnology foresight that, technology foresight is the advanced stage of thedevelopment of technology forecast, the fundamental difference between technologyforecast and technology foresight is the process efficiency of the latter. The mostessential characteristics of Technology foresight is that, it has to ensure that differentfeedback relationship between the participants experienced an anticipated proceedings.The change process of its idea act as： the early stage of technology forecast thoughtthat technological development has its own internal logic and law："The internalfactors of technology system determine the development path of technology"；Gradually became to,"The interaction of technology， economy and socialdevelopment determines the technology development path";and came to that,assumption is the the basic premise of technology foresight："There are variouspossibilities of the development of technology, the best achieve relies on our presentchoice".In the process of technology foresight, partners form universities, researchcenters, industry, government, technology foresight and even science fiction writershad formed an actor-network which represents the benefits of various communities.They designed and decided with consensus the vision of technology development offuture based on the foundation of two rounds of Delphi experts questionnaires as wellas the discuss on various forums. Activities of foresight have not only determined thecritical domains of future technology development, but also, more important, achieved the combination of personnel, directions, resources and culture, revealed themechanism of actor communication and consultation in foresight activities, and theconsensus mechanism in the process of foresight, as well as the implementationmechanism of the foresight results, which completely revealed the constructive natureof technology foresight.