[CITASA] Take two-Will the real sociology of technologies stand up?

[Andrea Tapia]

Wow. Double wow.

These questions of mine have generated a lot of discussion yesterday and
today, both on and off the list.

Thank you! This has spurred me on to think in new ways about what we do and
find new ways to translate it to others!

I think the discussions have been very interesting. So much so, that I think
I'm going to anonymize and aggregate them for everyone to read. I think more
than myself might benefit from the responses.

One line of questions keep popping up.

Why did I exclude this or that? Why did I draw artificial boundaries between
sociology of technology and other things? Wouldn't if be better if "X" were
included?


So, I pose a few questions back to the list...

1.  Is the sociology of technology an umbrella term? discipline? That others
fit inside? If so, what fits inside?

2.  If the sociology of technology is just sociology applied to technical
things--then does the sociology of technology offer anything that overall
sociology doesn't in terms of theories/methods/etc.?

3.  One author suggested that the sociology of technology exists only in the
overlap of other things. I think this is an intriguing idea. Do you think it
hold water?

4.  Imagine that you found yourself on a six person team. The other members
of the team were an HCI (human-computer interaction) scholar, a scholar of
communications, an STS (science and technology studies) scholar, a
sociologist of science/knowledge, and a philosopher of technology. After a
few beers and some good pizza they all look at you and ask you what you add
to the team that they don't already have.