Social determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone determine individual behavior (as opposed to biological or objective factors).
Consider certain human behaviors, such as having a particular sexual orientation, committing murder, or writing poetry. A social determinist would look only at social phenomena, such as customs and expectations, education, interpersonal interactions, and memes, to decide whether or not a given person would exhibit any of these behaviors. They would discount biological and other non-social factors, such as genetic makeup, the physical environment, etc. Ideas about nature and biology would be considered to be socially constructed.
Socialdeterminism is the theory that society is an autonomous force that changes technology.
Social theories of science and technology do not in general attempt to be predictive, like physical theories; they play a different kind of role.
For example, one important role of recent social science theories of technology, such as Actor-Network Theory, is to serve as an antidote, or vaccine, against naive theories such as technological determinism; if you achieve a better understanding of the social aspects of technical work, then you are less vulnerable to confusion, deception and manipulation.
Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.
Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws.
If probabilistically determined events do have an impact on the macro events, such as whether a person who could have been historically important dies in youth of a cancer caused by a random mutation, then the course of history is not determined from the dawn of time.
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