Overview
The Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) currently has about 2,000 members worldwide. The scope of the Society includes such issues as environmental, health and safety implications of technology; engineering ethics and professional responsibility; history of electrotechnology; technical expertise and public policy; peace technology; and social issues related to energy, information technology and telecommunications.
     This Society focuses on the impact of technology on society, including both positive and negative effects, the impact of society on the engineering profession, the history of the societal aspects of electrotechnology, and professional, social and economic responsibility in the practice of engineering and its related technology.
     SSIT publishes a quarterly journal, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, and sponsors periodic conferences entitled “The International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS).” Membership in SSIT is open to all IEEE members and student members. Affiliate membership in SSIT is available to persons who are not members of the IEEE.

Extracts from “Notes for a History of the IEEE Society
on Social Implications of Technology” by Karl D. Stephan
On a warm April day in 1955, three men walked up to the porch of 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. One of them was Victor Paschkis, a Vienna-born professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University. Seven years earlier, Paschkis, a Quaker, had talked with the Quaker chaplain at Columbia about the incredible dangers of wars fought with advanced technologies such as nuclear and biological weapons. That talk had moved Paschkis to found the Society for Social Responsibility in Science in 1948. Now, he and two other officers of his organization were about to meet with their most famous member, Albert Einstein, to work on an open letter calling for scientists around the world to refrain from using their knowledge for war. Bertrand Russell and Dr. Einstein were already in the process of issuing a similar declaration and in the last month of his life, he and Russell issued the Russell-Einstein Declaration calling for the governments of the world to find peaceful means to settle their disputes.

Committee on Social Responsibility
in Engineering
In the 1960s, Paschkis’s anti-war stance became less unusual as the highly divisive Vietnam War dragged on. A small but growing minority, including a few engineers, vocally opposed the war for a variety of reasons. In 1969, electrical engineers Mal Benjamin and Stephen Unger impressed by Paschkis’s example, decided to do something similar within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
     Around 1971, the plan was to become a “technical group” (the equivalent of today’s Society) within IEEE. Unger recalls that the requirement for starting such a group was to gather signatures of at least one hundred IEEE members. The drive that Unger and his colleagues mounted produced over eight hundred names. Discussions with the IEEE President and other officials led to the decision to form a TAB Committee on Social Implications of Technology (CSIT), rather than a technical group. By 1972, CSIT was up and running, although its administrative structure was somewhat unusual. By the rules of its founding, the vice-chairman of TAB also chaired CSIT, and only the vice-chairman of CSIT could be elected by its members. This gave the TAB officer some control over CSIT’s activities, which allayed concerns about CSIT’s possible behavior.

CSIT’s Stormy Decade
In late 1972, the Vietnam War continued to provoke protests and controversy. In connection with a large IEEE meeting called INTERCON '73 to be held the following March, members of CSIT wanted to sponsor “a session ‘Conversion to a Peacetime Economy,’ a workshop on ‘The Engineer and Military Technology,’ and an ‘Open Forum’.” The IEEE convention manager turned them down. Frank Stoller, who was listed in the minutes as the “Chairman, Working Group on IEEE Activists,” protested that “his attempts to work within ‘the IEEE system’ had produced only frustration and that by design, not by accident.” Eventually, IEEE Executive Director Donald Fink did allocate some space in the meeting’s hotel for CSIT activities, but in an out-of-the-way location.
     One of the landmark achievements of CSIT in its early years was its involvement in the BART case. This case involved three engineers working on the design of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Believing (with justification) that the electronic design of certain safety-critical components was inadequate, they approached a member of BART’s board of directors after their own managers refused to pursue the matter, and the board member made their concerns public. Then the engineers were fired. Later investigation fully validated the engineers’ concerns after the automatic train control system failed on October 2, 1972 and a BART train overshot its station and plowed into the barricade beyond it. In 1974, CSIT was instrumental in persuading the IEEE to file amicus curiae brief in the engineers’ civil suit against BART. This was one of the first times that a professional engineering organization of IEEE’s stature had intervened on the side of engineers in such a public manner.
     CSIT’s efforts to free Enrique Kirberg, a Chilean university rector imprisoned by the Pinochet regime in 1975, eventually led to the IEEE Member Conduct Committee, which eventually took over the task of dealing with ethics cases that CSIT had handled previously.
     In 1978, the Committee decided to establish a monetary award for outstanding service in the public interest. The first recipients of this award were Max Blankenzee, Robert Bruder, and Holger Hjortzvang, the three engineers who went public in the BART case. A year later, a computer engineer named Virginia Edgerton received the award for her efforts to bring attention to a potentially hazardous defect in the New York City police emergency dispatch software system. In 1985, the award was renamed the Carl Barus Award for Outstanding Service in the Public Interest in his honor.
     From the start, most CSIT members wanted their organization to be a Society within IEEE, and accepted committee status only as a compromise. Eventually, the limitations of CSIT’s committee structure became a serious hindrance to the organization. Although CSIT published a newsletter which was sent to a mailing list numbering around 2,000, it collected no dues. For this and other reasons, in 1980 CSIT members mounted another petition drive, collected over 600 signatures, and requested that the IEEE grant them Society status.

SSIT’s Early Years
One of the most important changes that took place when CSIT became SSIT was the transformation of the CSIT Newsletter into the IEEE Technology and Society (T&S) Magazine. In the early 1980s, the new Society continued to take part in engineering ethics controversies to the extent possible. However, the IEEE as a whole became more reluctant to engage in actions in support of individual engineers who were trying to uphold the principles of the IEEE ethics code, even to the extent of giving them informal advice.
     While SSIT did not sponsor a stand-alone conference on its own until 1991, in 1984 President Jeff Bogumil worked with the Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) to sponsor a conference called “Electro-culture ‘84.” Held on May 1 and 2, 1984, it featured a well-attended session on “Weapons in Space” concerned with the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) proposals that were then in the news.
     Another controversy that took many of those involved by surprise began with the publication of the June 1989 issue of T&S. The magazine’s editor, Robert J. Whelchel, had received for review an article by an independent scholar named Rachel Maines on an aspect of the history of technology that pertained to women. T&S editors had published historical articles in the past, and this particular subject unquestionably had social implications. Whelchel sent it out for review, the reviews were positive, and when subscribers opened their issues of T&S in the summer of 1989, they found Maines’ article on page 3, entitled “Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator.”
     Maines’ research in the Bakken Library of Electricity in Life had uncovered the surprisingly long and complex history of a device the appearance of which causes movies to receive at least a PG rating even today. While T&S carried many other articles of more lasting importance in that period, it is safe to say that what came to be called “the vibrator article” attracted the most attention, much of it unfavorable. Joe Herkert, the present editor of T&S, recalls that five years after the article appeared, during a job interview he met a prominent IEEE volunteer whose first words to him were, “I want you to know, I think that vibrator article was a disgrace!” Herkert got the job anyway. Terri Bookman, who was then a staff editor for IEEE Transactions, recalls that the article made something of a stir even within her office.
     Norm Balabanian, SSIT President, attended a TAB meeting in the Fall of 1989. When someone brought up the fact of the vibrator article’s appearance in an IEEE publication, Balabanian recalls that many of the Society presidents “went ballistic.” The minutes of the SSIT Adcom meeting of March 17, 1990 record that “at the previous TAB Meeting their upset at the ‘Vibrator’ article’ in T& S resulted in the decision to review all Societies every 5 years”. These reviews got under way the following year, and, not surprisingly, SSIT was one of the first Societies selected for review. Ron Kline, a historian of science and technology at Cornell and SSIT President in 1991–1992, recalls that the review, which he conducted with Vice-President Christine Nielsen, managed to satisfy IEEE that SSIT was in fact doing a creditable job of scholarly and professional service to the technical community. TAB has continued this practice of five-year reviews with every Society and has found it to be a valuable exercise in promoting best practices within the IEEE.

1990s: SSIT and ISTAS
The first conference to be called the International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) was held at the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute in Toronto, Canada, on June 21–22, 1991. Subtitled “Preparing for a Sustainable Society,” it was chaired by SSIT member Walter Zessner. ISTAS has since become one of SSIT’s most important ongoing activities. Typical attendance figures range from 40 to over 100, and the conference has been held at a wide variety of venues both in the U. S. and abroad.
     In addition to providing a forum where people from many disciplines can come together to discuss wide-ranging topics about technology and society, ISTAS conferences have helped to recruit many SSIT leaders. Unlike most technically-focused IEEE Societies, whose scopes match the primary professional expertise of their members, SSIT draws its members from an eclectic variety of specializations, as well as from professions outside engineering such as political science, science and technology studies, law, medicine, public policy, and history. In the course of interviews for this article, I asked several present and former officers of the organization how each became involved in SSIT. In nearly every case, there was a personal connection, often forged at an Adcom meeting or ISTAS conference, between those who were already active in the organization and the newcomer.

SSIT Since 2000
Around 2001, IEEE as a whole found itself in fiscal difficulties, which impacted SSIT’s financial situation as well. SSIT has never had more than about 2,500 members, which makes it one of the smallest IEEE Societies. IEEE is structured financially so that there is only an indirect relationship between membership figures, dues, and the amount of revenue under a given Society’s control. In addition to rather modest income from dues, SSIT receives an increasing proportion of its revenues from its share of charges that libraries and other institutional users pay for receiving print and electronic publications from IEEE. Changes recently made in the way this income is allocated within IEEE threaten to reduce SSIT’s revenues to the point that its fiscal stability may again be in doubt in the future.
     In 2005, for the first time, three members of SSIT were named IEEE Fellows for their professional activities in the area of technology and society. (For many years, SSIT has counted several new Fellows annually in its membership, but their Fellow status had been conferred through other Societies.) In 2005, this prestigious honor was awarded to Luis Kun, Michael Loui, and Swamy Laxminarayan. Kun, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University, was honored for his contributions to health care infrastructure. Loui, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and current chair of the SSIT Publications Committee, was cited for his leadership in the teaching of engineering ethics. Swamy Laxminarayan’s award was for his work in the social and ethical implications of biomedical engineering. Sadly, Swamy passed away shortly after receiving his award. SSIT’s increasing participation in the Fellows nomination process may contribute to greater awareness and recognition of the organization within IEEE in years to come.
     Especially in recent years, SSIT has reached out to other Societies and entities within IEEE to co-sponsor conferences and other activities of mutual interest. Past SSIT President Brian O’Connell points out that SSIT co-sponsored the April 2–4, 2004, conference “The Hydrogen Economy: Its Impact on the Future of Electricity” with three other IEEE Societies: Power Electronics, Industry Applications, and Power Engineering. Other cooperative work has been undertaken with the Oceanic Engineering Society, the Product Safety Engineering Society, and the Computer Society. On the regional level, there are numerous active SSIT Chapters both in the U. S. and abroad, and through connections with IEEE’s Regional Activities Board (RAB), SSIT officers have benefited SSIT Chapter members through visits and other support. As awareness of ethical and social implications of new technologies rises, it will make sense for more technically focused Societies to participate in further collaborative ventures with SSIT.

Future Directions
In principle, every member of IEEE should find something of interest in the activities of SSIT, since it is hard to think of a technology without social implications. But the same factor that makes SSIT such an interesting mix of people with various technical and professional backgrounds also means that SSIT membership is usually not the primary reason that professionals join IEEE. Besides this difference between SSIT and most other IEEE Societies, there is a basic philosophical difference as well, at least according to some.
     SSIT has made more contributions to the critical-science camp than to the technological-optimism camp. SSIT’s traditional role is as the “loyal opposition” to the technical-progress mentality, which is often the underlying philosophical foundation for nearly everything the rest of the IEEE does. There is tremendous interest in the IEEE at large in the social implications and context of technology, and SSIT could play a much larger role if the Society can figure out a way to reach this larger audience. As awareness of ethical and social implications of new technologies rises, it will make sense for more technically focused Societies to participate in further collaborative ventures with SSIT.
     The most impressive aspect of the SSIT is the passion that its founders, officers, and members bring to the matters they study, write about, and act on. “Engineering” and “passion” are words not often found in the same sentence, but found in a high percentage of SSIT members. IEEE functions mostly through the efforts of volunteers, most volunteers see their IEEE activities as at least indirectly connected with their own professional advancement. But, involvement in SSIT is not a guaranteed way to advance your career! I hope SSIT members will make the best of what the organization has done in the past an inspiration to do even better in the future.                         EMC