CULTURAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE,
COMPLEXITY, AND THE INTERNET
Department of
Mathematics
265 00 Rio-Patras
http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour/
This text focuses on a bunch of totalizing concepts such as cultural
studies of science, chaos, complexity and the Internet. Seemingly unrelated,
what all these concepts have in common refers to the ways knowledge (mostly
scientific but experiential as well) is constructed, articulated, and
communicated through social and cultural mediation. In particular, all these
constructions manifest a dichotomous disposition: science and society in cultural
studies of science, order/simplicity and randomness/complexity in
chaos/complexity, virtual communities (communicational diffusion) and social
seclusion (informational barriers) on the Internet. An interesting similarity
in all of them is that a totalizing claim of a self-organized global uniformity
(allegedly settling the strain between the poles of the corresponding
dichotomies) is challenged by opposing evidence of a resisting locality or an
emerging differentiation. Our aim is to review some of the current debates on
these concepts with respect to the problematic of various tensions rooted in
them. In fact, it is just this problematic of controversies what puts together
our treatment of these concepts, which is ineluctably incoherent and fragmentary.
Social Constructivist and Cultural Studies of
Science
Significant transformations in the nature of modern societies are being
brought about by the recent developments in science and technology, in
particular in the fields of communication, information, and biological
technologies. To understand the complex relation between science and society is
the primal task of the so-called science and technology studies (STS),
which dramatically diverge from the conventional approaches of the instrumental
and value-neutral character of science and technology (as in technological
determinism).
The perspectives of the various projects of science and technology
studies give a different understanding of the articulations among science,
technology, and society. In general, these are diverse programs with aims of
analyzing the socioeconomic and political factors shaping scientific and
technological enterprises, as they become dominant forms of knowledge and
practice in modern culture. At the heart of these approaches is the methodology
of ‘social constructivism,’ holding that the traces of science and
technology on society can only be gauged through human interpretation. In this
sense, social constructivism being at odds with traditional positivist and
realist epistemology holds that the context of science and technology is
essentially social (“external”) and conceives it as a construction rather a
reflection of its intrinsic (“internal”) properties. The roots of this
methodology lie in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) (e.g.,
Bloor, 1976; Collins, 1985; Woolgar, 1988) but, as the methods of social
constructivism, starting from science studies, were applied to technology
studies, they were diverted in a variety of rather disparate purview.
Before discussing some later developments marking the movement beyond
social constructivism by putting the emphasis on the cultural context of
scientific and technological practices, we will present a brief taxonomy of the
social constructivist streams.
A first social constructivist approach in technology studies is what is
called strong social constructivism, an approach strictly derived from
the sociology of scientific knowledge and arguing for the socially constructed
character of scientific knowledge. It includes the theory of the so- called social
construction of technology (SCOT) (e.g., Bijker et al., 1987) together with
the work of H.M. Collins and Steve Woolgar and, in particular, with what Grint
and Woolgar (1997) call ‘anti-essentialism.’ According to the strong social constructivist
approach, technological change is a genuine social construction to be explained
solely by social practices, which have produced its stabilization, as through
processes of interpretation, negotiation, and closure, by different social
actors.
Under the label of mild social constructivism some more moderate
approaches are characterized, as the approach of the ‘social shaping of
technology’ (e.g., MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985; MacKenzie, 1991). Although
these approaches still accept that social factors shape technology, some
elements of relative autonomy are recognized to technology. They accept the
action of nonsocial factors in technological change and attribute inherent
properties and effects to technology, albeit these properties and effects are
usually defined in a particular social context and are due to social or
political biases embodied by technology.
A third influential approach is that of the ‘actor-network theory’
(ANT) (e.g., Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987). It tries to explain the development
and stabilization of scientific and technological objects as they result from
the construction of heterogeneous networks, which are concrete alignments
between human actors, natural phenomena, and social or technical aspects. In
the processes of stabilization of technology, all actors (or ‘actants’) in the
network, either human/natural or social/technical, are analyzed through the
same impartial prism and the same terms and methods are symmetrically applied
to different entities. However, special preference is given to the explanatory
role of social elements, such as social groups and interpretation processes.
Although the various social constructivist approaches vary in their
perspectives, they possess certain common features. Contrary to the views of technological
determinism, social constructivism incorporates contingency and flexibility in
the processes of technological change, conceived to take place in a network of
heterogeneous factors pertinent to both technology and society under the
presence of certain structural natural constraints. In this sense,
technological change cannot be analyzed independently of human interpretation;
neither it can be attributed to an imagined intrinsic logic of technology.
Rather, technological change is shaped in a general common framework involving
different acting individuals, social groups, and other relevant technosocial
aspects, as they engage in strategies to overcome the existing controversies
and oppositions.
Moreover, social constructivism typically maintains the validity of a principle
of methodological symmetry or relativism (Pinch and Bijker, 1987).
This principle proclaims a sort of ‘agnosticism’ in the analysis of scientific
and technological development, as it remains impartial in front of the various
technical controversies and it is reluctant to evaluate any of the knowledge
claims made by different social groups about the essence of science and
technology. It was in the sociology of knowledge (Bloor, 1976), where this
principle was first formulated, motivated by the idea that in a sociological
analysis of knowledge both true and false statements can be equally well
explained by reference to sociological factors.
A final common element in all social constructivist approaches is the
idea that science and technology systems are regulated according to flexible
technosocial arrangements by processes of stabilization around concrete
developments. In fact, as the stabilization of a technology inscribes the way
technology functions in society, the stabilization of an artifact results from
processes of settling controversies and negotiations among different social
groups, which thus arrive at a similar interpretation. In this way, science and
technology are claimed to possess interpretive flexibility, as far as
they are void of any objective, fixed properties, but allow for different
interpretations by relevant social groups. The outcome of a stabilization
process through negotiation and social action sometimes is described as the closure
of the scientific and technological development around certain social
arrangements.
Despite the significance of social constructivism and its hot debates
with the proponents of internalist history and philosophy of science, an
important part of the subsequent work in science and technology studies has
moved to what is known as the field of cultural studies of scientific
knowledge. This is a rather heterogeneous body of scholarship in history,
philosophy, sociology, anthropology, feminist theory, and literary criticism
being unified by a common persistence to consider scientific knowledge as a
cultural formation. Joseph Rouse uses the term of cultural studies of science
“broadly to include various investigations of the practices through which
scientific knowledge is articulated and maintained in specific cultural
contexts, and translated and extended into new contexts” (Rouse, 1992).
Moreover, Rouse quotes a list of contemporary practitioners of cultural
studies of science including “such diverse historians as Donna Haraway, Robert
Marc Friedman, Simon Schaffer, Evelyn Fox Keller, Robert Proctor, and V.B.
Smocovitis; sociologists and anthropologists such as Sharon Traweek, Bruno
Latour, Paula Treichler, Leigh Star, Michael Lynch, and Karin Knorr-Cetina;
philosophers like Ian Hacking, Helen Longino, Arthur Fine, Sandra Harding, and
himself [Joseph Rouse]; and literary theorists such as Gillian Beer and
Lundmilla Jordanova” (Rouse, 1992). In particular, Rouse distinguishes six
common themes in the various approaches of cultural studies of science
establishing their distinctive specificity: (1) scientific anti-essentialism,
(2) non-explanatory stance, (3) emphasis upon the materiality of science, (4)
cultural openness of scientific practices, (5) subversion of scientific
realism, and (6) commitment to epistemic and political criticism (Rouse, 1992).
Closing this section, we should mention that both social constructivist
and cultural studies of science have been vigorously contested by a storm of
criticisms raised in the middle of the so-called science wars, a rather
popular event in which is the so-called Sokal affair (Gross &
Levitt, 1994; Gross et al., 1996; Koertge, 1998; Sokal &. Bricmont, 1997).
Chaos and Complexity: Local or Global?
In general, chaos theory is considered to refer to the economy between
order and chance, determinism and unpredictability, clarity and aporia and, in
a similar way, its successor, complexity theory, refers to the interplay
between simple and complicated behavior. However, from an epistemological and a
critical point of view, it might be interesting to assess the local and global
perspectives rooted into the interdisciplinary body of chaos and complexity.
Such an assessment is meaningful not only in order to understand the various
claims about the validity of chaos/complexity in different scientific fields,
but also in order to clarify their cultural and political context.
The common direct way to distinguish between “local” and “global”
character of knowledge (either scientific or experiential) sets the stage to
the range of applicability and the domain of methodology involved in the
discourse into which this knowledge is embodied. Of course, such an approach is
not only sensitive but also pertinent to the adopted organization and
articulation of the examined body of knowledge; for example, the opposing
presuppositions of social constructivism and positivist realism might imply
different characterizations of local/global. Nevertheless, from the standpoint
of an external observer, the local or global attribute hinges upon the degree
of “visibility” of the way different pieces of knowledge are related to each
other. Apparently, this is a question of identifying differences and coarse
graining similarities, which necessitates the construction of a virtual space
of all possible and contingent configurations of knowledge. Although analogies,
shifts, and other transfers between separate theories quite often occur
(usually at the initial level of the intuitive theoretical formation), they can
generically smoothly be appropriated into the internal structure of a
knowledge. At least, this is what happens at the regime of a normal science,
i.e., far from the uprising conditions of scientific revolutions, when the
interior coherence of a theory is maintained by her epistemological autonomy
(Kuhn, 1962).
External strains between theories can develop as a result of a variety
of reasons. Some of them may reflect an intrinsic tendency towards a
theoretical expansion, in some cases due to the high generality or abstract
potentiality of the assumed means of analysis. Others may simply have socio-
political or cultural connotations, and correspond to existing tensions at the
social level. In this respect, as a rule, the social controversies are the ones
to be induced onto the scientific ground: questions of power are often at the
heart of certain theoretical disputes. Even if this fails to be true some
times, more often it can be seen on the way and the conditions under which the
theoretical debates and antagonisms are usually committed.
Under the action of such a multiplicity of internal and external
determinations, the resulting local or global characterizations are quite
intricate. Although it is not one of the most crucial epistemological
questions, subsuming a theory to the label of either locality or globality
sometimes turns out to be something more than a conforming convenience; it
becomes a matter of belief, which is a rather political and questionably
scientific attitude. This culpable ambiguity may penetrate even at the level of
methodology. In this way, one may wonder whether scientific reductionism might
be considered as a local interpretation disguising a global disposition, and
whether scientific holism might be considered as a global settlement assembling
a local inducement.
The fact is that chaos and complexity are undoubtedly establishing a
mainstream paradigm to many scientific fields. What remains to be seen, and it
is still at stake, is whether this is a paradigm shift. On the one side, chaos
and complexity are providing a source of methodological intuition for those
working in a variety of disciplines. On the other side, the interdisciplinary
institutions do possess the tools to articulate a novel arrangement over an
existing body of a scientific field. However, these events are often
misunderstood; the way to conceive the resulting rearrangement is not by
employing a simplistic appendage of a predefined condition of knowing in order
to organize the body of some knowledge. In other words, chaos and complexity
being a paradigm neither means that they are just an instrument of knowledge
nor that a paradigm is just an interchangeable or scalable passive theoretical
formation. In this sense, those globalizing claims for chaos and complexity
need to be reconsidered.
In fact, James Gleick’s popular book, Chaos (1987), has fueled an
abundant pool of statements claiming the globalizing value of chaos theory. For
example, Gleick says: “Chaos breaks across the lines that separate scientific
disciplines. Because it is a science of the global nature of systems, it has
brought together thinkers from fields that had been widely separated. ... It
makes strong claims about the universal behavior of complexity. ... They (chaos
theorists) believe that they are looking for the whole” (Gleick, 1987, p. 5).
Contrary to these rather absolute claims and though there are a lot of
opposite arguments carrying the case for locality, the local/global
constitution of chaos theory raises many delicate questions. Both in practice
and in theory, for example, the occurrence of a chaotic behavior results from
the nonlinear interactions between different parts of the system. Therefore, it
is a local coordination subordinating the global flows of the dynamics in a
strange way, i.e., extremely sensitive to fluctuations and thus completely
unpredictable. However, one has to suspect this argument, when one realizes
that a lot of chaotic systems reveal a universal character of transition in
their processes. Taking into account the previously discussed precaution to
respect the relative autonomy of scientific disciplines, this almost
ubiquitously emerging globalization in chaos should not pass unexplored.
In any case, the problematic relation between local and global in chaos
and complexity is part of a wide-ranging debate about local and global in
contemporary thought. Katherine Hayles in the Chaos Bound (1990) remarks
some astonishing similarities between the sciences of chaos and critical
theory. According to her, “In the new scientific paradigms, the global subsumes
the local, but at the price of reconceptualizing the global as constituted by
locality. Within critical theory, the claims of the local are expanded until
the local itself becomes a new kind of globalizing imperative. These two
impulses mirror each other, for in the sciences of chaos the global is
localized, and in critical theory the local is globalized” (Hayles, 1990, p.
213-4).
Actually, Hayles’ concern (in the last chapter of her book, the Chaos
Bound) was to confront critically and refute the assumptions that local
knowledge is progressive, politically libertarian, while global theory is
oppressive, politically totalitarian. Such a political connotation of the
local/global scheme has been quite popular among some critical theorists. For
example, particularly important are Michel Foucault’s (1970) archaeological
analyses of the totalizing theories of the Enlightenment, from grammar to
biology, and to penology, and their association with totalitarian political
practices. Now, by considering an intermingle between local and global, Hayles
argues that “it is wrong to assume that global theory is always politically
more coercive than local knowledge” (Hayles, 1990, p. 214). But she realizes
that such a balance between local and global is extremely paradoxical, “for to
answer it one must put forward generalizations, yet generalizations are
precisely what are at issue” (Hayles, 1990, p. 214).
Sometimes the valorization of local knowledge appears in extreme tones.
Such might be considered the criticisms of Lyotard, who, according to Alexander
Argyros (1991), even proceeds that far as to “define the urge towards
globalization as terrorism” (Argyros, 1991, p. 213). In the concluding chapter
of his Postmodern Condition (1984), Jean-François Lyotard
foresees that the coming of the information societies will strengthen the power
of the ruling elites having access to the information resources. He thinks that
this totalitarian danger can be confronted by the emergence and development
within natural and mathematical sciences of such theories as fractal geometry,
quantum mechanics, catastrophe theory, and Gödel’s theorem. Grouping them
under the label “paralogy,” Lyotard suggests that they will let us “wage a war
on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the
differences and save the honor of the name” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 82).
Although Lyotard’s arguments express a contemporary popular allergy
toward globalization, his paralogies are rather biased and hardly convincing.
Their problem, as Hayles (1990) has remarked, is that they are confusing
scientific theories with social problems (a kind of a social Darwinism) and
that they all, despite of their local endorsement, encompass a redefined global
quality. However, one might agree with Argyros’ conclusion that at least one of
Lyotard’s themes merits special attention; this is, according to Argyros, “the
question of whether the meaningfulness and pragmatic usefulness of language
games, by which Lyotard means semiotic exchanges in general, are best described
as local or global phenomena” (Argyros, 1991, p. 234).
Internet: Integration or Balkanization?
In this section we are going to examine the global dynamics activated by
modern information and communication technologies, a concrete realization of
which is the (virtual) reality in the cyberspace of global computer networks,
as on the Internet. Our scope is to speculate on the interplay between two of
the main tendencies drifting the corresponding technosocial constructions and
cultural practices into two opposite directions: At the one end stand the
processes of globalization and integration through the unhindered traffic of
information in global channels of communication flows. At the other end emerge
the social differentiated patterns of segregated zones picturing a cyberspatial
landscape of informational seclusion and communicational fragmentation.
For some thinkers advances in information and communication technologies
can contribute to globalization processes and extend the most basic trends in social
integration more often than they have countered them (Calhoun, 1992). There are
plenty of metaphors describing the modern informational globalization. Marshall
McLuhan’s (1964) “global village” refers to the technological reshaping of
social space implied by the shrinkage of distance in the “new Galaxy” of
communication. Harold Innis’ (1952) “time- and space- binding” is raising the
importance the “new time” regime in this period. Similar is Paul Virilio’s
(1984) “lost dimension” extending the spatial disappearance to the accidental
collapse of time and investigating their urban consequences. The analysis of
time plays a central role in the work of Anthony Giddens (1985) too, whose
“time-space distanciation” dramatically overcomes the time-space constraints in
the information and communication era. David Harvey’s (1989) “postmodern
condition” of “time-space compression” is claimed to result an economic and
geographical global reshaping of capitalism by revolutionizing “the objective
qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite
radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (Harvey, 1989, p. 240).
A common denominator in all the above approaches to grasp and explain
social change in the age of modernity is the fact that a massive expansion of
indirect social relationships has been facilitated by the advances in
information and communication technologies. In a sense, the prevalence of
indirect, mediated relations over direct, face-to-face relations, which are
typical of traditional and early modern societies, signifies a constitutive
characteristic of modern societies (Boudourides, 1997).
However, although it is clear that information and communication
technologies multiply the range of indirect social relationships, it is not
that obvious that they contribute to the accomplishment of social integration.
In fact, the apprehension that new technologies supplant human labor is
obscuring this matter, because it is merely restricted to quantitative aspects
of production. On the other hand, computerization and other communication
technologies not only enable the automation of production processes but also
they reorganize the information flow through these processes. This qualitative
feature of information technology is well presented in Beniger’s (1986)
“control revolution,” i.e., the rapid technological innovation in the
infrastructure of transportation and telecommunications at the end of the 19th
century that restored the economic and political control lost during the Industrial
Revolution. According to Calhoun, the transformative power of new information
technologies aims “to organize more of social life through indirect
relationships, to extend the power of various corporate actors, to coordinate
social action on a larger scale, or to intensify control within specific
relationships” (Calhoun, 1992, p. 221).
What next is interesting to explore is whether the indirect social
relationships in the information and communication era do produce a particular
type of communities, the so-called “virtual communities,” claimed to support
new types of social interaction within cyberspace. Licklider and Taylor, as
early as in 1968, were anticipating virtual communities as “on- line
interactive communities [which] in most fields will consist of geographically
separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working
individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common
interest. … [They will] support extensive general-purpose information
processing and storage facilities … [and] life will be happier for the on-line
individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be
selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of
proximity” (Licklider & Taylor, 1968, pp. 30-31).
The expansion and the disembodiment of indirect relationships in virtual
communities, many argue, provoke a strengthening of the civic and public modes
of interaction and participation by providing open public fora for debate and
mobilization. Some proceed further to laud the Internet as “a model for a truly
anarchic society where information is freely exchanged, control and regulation
are impossible to exercise where there is no hierarchy” (E. Bell, 1994).
Theodore Roszak notes “its spontaneously democratic and libertarian spirit” and
suggests that “the coffee houses of eighteenth-century
Not a few discover in virtual communities a sense of convivial urbanism
that has been lost in the physical and social transformations towards
postmodern urbanism. Geoff Mulgan, for example, argues that “given that the
architecture and geography of large cities and suburbs has dissolved older ties
of community, electronic networks may indeed become tools of conviviality
within cities as well” (Mulgan, 1991, p. 69). Howard Rheingold (1994)
interprets the turn to virtual communities as a search by people who are
alienated by the repressive and instrumental character of daily urban life.
However, independently of the ultimate reasons making people use
computer mediated modes of communication, the question is whether such
computerized communication does build a community or it is an evidence of
Beniger’s (1987) “pseudo-community.” For Beniger, a pseudo-community is “a
hybrid of interpersonal and mass communication,” part of “the reversal of a
centuries-old trend from organic community – based on interpersonal
relationships – to impersonal association integrated by mass means” (Beniger
1987, p. 369). In other words, as face-to-face communication has been always
associated with community, a technology-mediated (or simulated) “face-to-
interface” communication is associated with “pseudo-community” (Jones, 1994, p.
27). Beniger’s criticisms of pseudo-community focus on the insincerity (or
inauthenticity) of simulated personalized communication and on the lack of
genuine community about which Howard Rheingold is wondering: “Is
telecommunication culture capable of becoming something more than … a ‘pseudo-
community,’ where people lack the genuine personal commitments to one another
that form the bedrock of genuine community? Or is our notion of ‘genuine’
changing in an age where more people every day live their lives in increasingly
artificial environments?” (Rheingold, 1993, pp. 60-61). To answer these
questions, Jones accepts that “one of the measures of genuine community ought
to be its relationship to action (political or otherwise)” (Jones, 1994, p.
25). Apparently such a view, offering a political legitimization of communal
authenticity, may be used to determine the relation between community and
power, through which it may even assess the very constitution of a virtual
community. Unfortunately the conclusions that could be drawn from this point of
view are not so encouraging for virtual communities. According to Jones (1994),
“the situation in which we find computer-mediated communities at present is
that their very definition as communities is perceived as a ‘good thing,’
creating a solipsistic and self-fulfilling community that plays little
attention to political action outside of that which secures its own
maintenance” (Jones 1994, p. 25).
Beyond the self-referential solipsism of virtual communities, severe
doubts have been raised about the extent to which the public and urban places
of social life could be reconstructed inside the electronic regime. Stephen
Graham and Simon Marvin (1996) are very skeptical of the strong claims of
virtual communities as they argue that “public interaction on streets and in
public spaces offers much more than can ever be telemediated” and that it is
very hard to substitute “real face-to-face interaction, the chance encounter,
the full exposure to the flux and clamour of urban life – in short, the
richness of the human experience of place” (Graham & Marvin, 1996, p. 231).
Moreover, the information which is available on-line is often of
questionable usefulness, obsolete, and often an overload of low quality
(Roszak, 1994, p. 165). Virtual communities are overwhelmingly dominated by a
white, male technological elite, while “the poor, the excluded and the
disenfranchised who have tended to suffer most from the polarization and
privatization processes in contemporary cities tend to be overwhelmingly
excluded from virtual urban communities because they do not have the skills and
finance necessary to participate” (Graham & Marvin, 1996, p. 232). In
addition, the fragmented seclusion of virtual communities implies risks that “ethnic
groups [will] collect in their own electronic communities, libertarians speak
only to libertarians … inevitably, the effect will be to shatter local
geographic communities and ultimately weaken the national community” (Brown,
1994). The eventual risk could be that “telematically linked communities could
fragment our larger society, enabling each of us to pursue isolation from
everything different, or unfamiliar, or threatening, and removing the occasions
for contacts across lines of class, race and culture” (Calhoun, 1986). In other
words, to quote Mike Davis (1993), “urban cyberspace – as the simulation of the
city’s information order – will be experienced as even more segregated, and
devoid of true public space, than the traditional built city.”
Therefore, although the transformative power of the information and
communication technologies aims to the extension of social relationships in new
forms of human sociality, as in the emergence of “virtual communities,” it is
not that obvious that social integration is attained through them. From our
previous discussion, it might be the case that increased connectivity is
possibly accompanied with a high degree of fragmentation of social interaction
and with the emergence of disconnected patterns of isolated groups being
focused on narrower contacts. In particular, a conceivable outcome might be
towards what is usually referred as “balkanization,” i.e., the process of
dividing people into special interest groups according to preferences,
including social, cultural and economic affiliations. Basically, the mechanism
of electronic balkanization can be traced back to the fact that a preference
for contacts more focused than contacts available locally leads to narrower
interaction. This is also certified in a theoretical model of the informational
balkanization elaborated by van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (1995, 1996), in which
the effect of bounded rationality is taken into account too. As Internet access
is widened and information infrastructure is developing at an increasingly
faster rate, understanding of the self-(dis)organized emergent patterns of
fragmented coalescence is of great importance for policy makers in the
information society.
This paper reports on part of M.A. Boudourides’
research done under his participation at the EU FP 4 TSER project “The Self-Organization of the European
Information Society” (1997-2000).
Alstyne, M. v. and E. Brynjolfsson (1995).
Communication Networks and the Rise of an Information Elite. Do Computers Help
the Rich Get Richer? Proceedings of the International Conference on Information
Systems.
Alstyne, M. v. and E. Brynjolfsson (1996).
Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkans? Proceedings of the
International Conference on Information Systems.
Argyros, A.J.
(1991). A Blessed Rage of Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos.
Beniger, J.
(1986). The Control Revolution.
Beniger, J.
(1987). “Personalization of mass media and the growth of pseudo-community.” Communication
Research, 14(3), 352-371.
Bijker, W., T.
Pinch, and T. Hughes (eds.) (1987). The Social Construction of Technological
Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology.
Bloor, D.
(1976). Knowledge and Social Imagery.
Boudourides,
M.A. (1997). “Accounts of Sociality in the Information Society.” Paper
presented at the International Conference “Electronic Commerce.”
Brown, L.
(1994). “The seven deadly sins of the information age.” Intermedia,
June/July, 22(3).
Calhoun, C.
(1986). “Computer technology, large-scale social integration and the local
community.” Urban Affairs Quarterly, 22(2), 329- 349.
Calhoun, C.
(1992). “The Infrastructure of Modernity: Indirect Social Relationships,
Information Technology, and Social Integration.” In H. Haferkamp &
Callon, M.
(1986). “The Sociology of an Actor Network.” In Callon, M., J. Law, and A. Rip
(eds.), Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology.
Collins, H.M.
(1985). Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice.
Foucault, M.
(1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Giddens, A.
(1985). The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique
of Historical Materialism.
Gleick, J.
(1987). Chaos: Making a New Science.
Grint, K., and
S. Woolgar (1997). The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organization.
Gross, P.R.,
and N. Levitt (1994). Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels with Science.
Gross, P.R., N.
Levitt, and M.W. Lewis (eds.) (1996). The Flight from Science and Reason.
Harvey, D.
(1989). The Condition of Postmodernity.
Hayles, N. K.
(1990). Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.
Innis, H.A.
(1951). The Bias of Communication.
Jones, S.G.
(1994). “Understanding Community in the Information Age.” In S.G. Jones (ed.), CyberSociety:
Computer-Mediated Communication and Community (pp. 10-35).
Koertge, N.
(1998). A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science.
Kuhn, T.
(1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (second edition, 1970).
Latour, B.
(1987). Science in Action.
Licklider,
J.C.R., & R.W. Taylor (1968). “The computer as a communication device.” Science
& Technology, 76, 21-31.
Lyotard, J.-F.
(1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. G. Bennington
& B. Massumi, transl.
MacKenzie, D.
(1991). Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Missile Guidance.
MacKenzie, D.,
and J. Wajcman (eds.) (1985). The Social Shaping of Technology.
McLuhan, M.
(1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Mulgan, G.
(1991). Communication and Control: Networks and the New Economics of
Communication.
Pinch, T., and
W. Bijker (1987). “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the
Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.”
In Bijker, Pinch, and Hughes, 1987.
Rheingold, H.
(1993). “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community.” In L.M. Harasim (ed.), Global
Networks: Computers and International Communication (pp. 57-80).
Rheingold, H.
(1994). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
Roszak, T.
(1994). The Cult of Information.
Rouse, J.
(1992). “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” Configurations, 1, 57-94.
Sokal, A.
J. Bricmont (1997). Impostures Intellectuelles. Paris: Editions Odile
Jacob.
Virilio, P.
[1984] (1991). The Lost Dimension. D. Moshenberg, transl.
Woolgar, S.
(1988). Science: The Very Idea.