Just a reminder that, following the Royal Society event in Jan, my article 'Mendel's Closet: Genetics, Eugenics and the Exceptions of Sex in Edwardian Britain' has been made freely available until the end of Feb/LGBTQ+ History Month.
#STS scholars, social media scholars, anyone….: Are there any good reviews on gender differences in attitudes to consent and privacy issues surrounding online social media that you could recommend?
What's missing to replace our current publishing system? What technical and social components do we need to build? My first suggestions below, but I'd like to hear feedback from others.
An easy (frictionless) and flexible way to edit and submit documents that can be permanently referenced and that you feel confident will stay accessible forever
An easy and semantically rich way to link between these documents (e.g. document A is a review of document B)
A way to view these documents that surfaces and highlights relevant related content (e.g. listing and summarising reviews, comments, related papers)
A way to automatically convert documents into any standard format (HTML, Word, LaTeX, PDF, ...) so that the system can co-exist with existing workflows (the legacy journal system for example)
A database storing all this data that isn't owned by a single institution, either commercial or public, but that is distributed or duplicated across all the universities and libraries of the world. A way for these research institutions to democratically decide which organisations can submit data into the database.
Edited to add: not interested in a conversation about whether or not we need the existing publishing industry. That argument is settled for me and the question I'm interested in in this thread is how to change things assuming we want to.
@neuralreckoning I have to come in with the standard #STS response and say building the social and technical layers separately is a mistake. If you want this to work, the social and technical development should happen hand in hand, with effectively no separation between them.
Also, most of these technical tools already exist. Assembling them and the social actors and institutions into a functional network is like 95% of the work here.
Is anyone in #STS space familiar with any work done on interrogating interoperability discourse through the lens of colonialist appeals for homogeneity?
Time for an #Introduction We are a large research group, working and teaching at the IT University of Copenhagen. We are interdisciplinary, and work to examine digital technologies critically. Read about us and our work on https://tip.itu.dk/ - plan to use this account much as we did the bird site - to share academic events, publications, conferences, PhD graduations, and general academic life in #STS#anthropology#HCI and #CSCW
There's a thought that I'm having a difficult time teasing out at 5:30 in the morning, but it's been with me for a little bit. I don't know that a lot of people have room, in their conception of computing and tech, for the legitimacy of what my brain is calling aesthetic taste, or doing something for the artistic merit it has. Let me try to explain with examples.
I follow a couple of open source hardware projects that are very active right now, the @mntmn Reform series of computers and the Tangara music player from @jacqueline and co. Both are boutique, small batch electronics, made by people who seem to be driven mostly by the desire to see something exist in the world. It would be nice if something like this caught on and they sold a couple million open source laptops, but I don't think that's a reasonable expectation from these teams. There is appreciation coming from the public, but there's also a lot of criticism focused on the price of small batch, hand assembled electronics ($250 for an mp3 player? My sansa clip was $3 on ebay and it does the same thing!) or on the "impracticalities" of the design decisions made by the team. My phone can do what this thing does, it's not practical to carry around a music player. My ThinkPad is cheaper and does more work, and is half the size. This chonky boi laptop isn't practical.
There just seems to be a blindness to the importance of, and the validity of, the power of an emotional response to a piece of consumer electronics, the same way a piece of fine art might move you. We can accept that a painting is valuable, primarily, as an object that elicits a human response, that requires a human element for the "thing" to "work" at all. An oil painting isn't practical. It requires care and a bit of maintenance and a big wall to hang it on and who has the time? It's just a picture. There's a guy out there making custom one-off computers using techniques from fine furniture making, trying to imagine and create a world where this semi-magical piece of human ingenuity, the product of countless hours of labor, care and creativity, isn't consigned to the e-waste pile after a couple years. Tech people are baffled. How are you going to upgrade it? Why use wood, it's not as thermally efficient as aluminum. It's not practical.
The instinct to tear something down, just because it's primary merit is artistic expression, isn't present in other disciplines. When someone shows up to a dinner party in a nice outfit, and the wearer shares that they made it themselves at home because they couldn't buy something exactly the way they wanted, people are impressed at the effort and might ask more about the construction. If they share that they're trying to buy less clothing because the waste in textiles and fashion is ATROCIOUS, SIMPLY A MONSTROUS ATROCITY BY ANY MEASURE, people may admit that they don't share that conviction that strongly, but good for you. Or maybe they'll say "well that's well and good but you aren't as good a sewist as the person from checks tag Bangladesh that constructed my outfit so keep trying." What you don't hear from the majority of people, right off the bat, is that you're dumb for spending all that time making your own or paying a sewist to custom make it for you because you could have bought something to cover yourself for $20 at walmart.
So I guess I just want to validate the emotional response to a piece of computing hardware as a good enough reason, on it's own. The joy of ownership of a device that not only fits your taste but also has a story and a particularity. Something with stickers and spray paint and dents and wood scrollwork and a CRT monitor. Because you like it. Because it's yours, and it's made the way you want it, and it's made for you to use.
I'll conclude with a similar thought I read in a book about building and renovating kitchens. The author spent a lot of time in the introduction opposing the HGTV-ication of the entire conversation of a kitchen renovation. How much do we spend, how much did the value of our home rise? What finishes and fixtures do we use, which do we avoid? We don't want to negatively impact the value of our home, we don't want to put custom cabinetry in because we'll never get the money out of it that we put in to it. What if they don't like teal paint, they may not pay as much for the house. Completely left out of this conversation is how much you will enjoy using the kitchen in the intervening time between you renovating this kitchen and you selling this house! You're the one who spent the money, you should enjoy using the kitchen!
You should enjoy using your stuff. If you'd enjoy it more if it was spray painted neon green, then break out the rattlecan. Make it yours. Even it it's less practical.
This is just a vague hand-wave for now, but in the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society (#STS) we broadly refer to these as "affective ties to technology." All technical systems are inherently social, and the bonds between the human and non-human actors in those networks take many forms. People will keep a car going long after they "shouldn't" because they love it, which at some level has to do with understanding it.
My first sole-authored book just came out! Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications is about the privatisation and digitalisation of the UK's telecom infrastructure, and why that was such a pivotal moment for the rise of neoliberalism.
morning, sociotechnical pals! I'm doing a foresight project and would like to interview social media researchers / digital sociologists / others with research interests in online social interactions and how these things might shake down over the next few years. Is that you, or someone you know? Let me know! #STS#DigitalSociology
Maybe none of these examples seem particularly shocking or "unimaginable". But it is precisely because this may appear so mundane, so "imaginable" that academia has a problem with abuses of power. #sts#WeDoSTS#ichbinHanna#ichbinTina@sts@stsing
@stsing@sts@stsing remember the stsing collab with the network against abuses of power in the sciences? They have now published 4 anonymized reports on abuses of power in #STS on their website. #WeDoSTS
📢 Celebrating that "Caring for Methods: 'Care-Ful Method Practice' through Methodography" by @i_ngli & I has been published today! 🎉
📖 In the chapter we advocate for methodography as a genre of care-ful interrogation of method practice in #STSethnography.
📙 The chapter is part of a beautiful collection concerning "Ethical and Methodological Dilemmas in Social Science Interventions" edited by @DorisLinnea & Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen.
Congrats to @laura4lano and Danya Glabau on their new book Cyborg being out soon with @mitpress !!
" Critical cyborg literacy foregrounds power dynamics and pays attention to the ways that social and cultural factors such as gender, race, and disability shape how technology is imagined, developed, used, and resisted."
#GoetheUniversity's #STSkitchen is closing, and people are re-membering the last 12 years, wonderful interactions @sts, with our friends and colleagues, conversations with Andrew Barry, Tahani Nadim, @racheldouglasjones (names mentioned so far) ;)
P300: Infrastructures, crises and transformation, hosted by Nina Amelung (Universidade de Lisboa), Huub Dijstelbloem (University of Amsterdam), @jhpassoth Silvan Pollozek
@simulo@stsing@sts Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertonian_norms for a start. Note that the establishment of #STS in the 1970s has very much worked on problematising the Mertonian norms However, the normative context has not been so much addressed as far as I am aware
📢 The best practices working group of stsing e.V. is launching a collaboration with the Network against Power Abuse in Science to continue and broaden the conversation begun under the #MeTooSTS and #WeDoSTS 💪