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

[jeremy hunsinger]

>
> 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?

sociology is the discipline, technology is the field, many other  
disciplines, interdisciplinary areas, take technology as a field.   so  
we have a simple venn diagram of two circles with 'sociology of  
technology' as the overlap.
>
>
> 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.?

the problem here is that... there are very few non-technical things in  
fact, looking around southern virginia, a fairly rural area, i see  
virtually nothing that does not fit into the regimes of technology,  
even the nature is 'produced', 'managed', 'designed' etc.

In terms of different methods, I think that like all specializations,  
there is a tendency of the smaller group to accept the validity of  
different methods.  I wouldn't call 'actor-network theory' a method,  
but I would call much of sociologist John Law's books methodological,  
and some sociologists of technology might be working within a set of  
theories and methods that are not recognized outside.  As an sts'er, i  
recently sent a piece in that left the editor 'befuddled' 'perhaps  
disciplinary clash'... They were in comm, weren't really paying much  
attention to current debates in philosophy of social science, weak  
ontologies, and related matters, so the text was lost to them.   Small  
fields, specialization, might have things in them that they debate  
about, that aren't recognized by the larger fields.  One topic that is  
becoming somewhat big in 'sociology of technology' is 'thing theory',  
which spun out of questions of materiality and objects in society, I  
saw a blog post with 5 or 6 syllabi titled 'thing theory' being  
taught, not all were sociology of technology courses, but all had some  
sociology of technology readings.

>
>
> 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.

don't think this is a valid question.  the reason is that each of  
these people could be in a subfield in the discipline /  
interdisciplinary area that pretty much makes them unable to work  
together.  I can easily imagine an hci person working on ubiqitous  
computing, a communications scholar working on interpersonal  
dialogues, an sts scholar working on nanotechnological ethics,  
sociologist of science mapping scientific conflicts, a philosopher of  
technology concerned with biological engineering.   they might have  
nothing in common at all.  (I've been in such crowds, the weather is a  
popular topic...)

If we grant the possibility that they are all working on web 2.0, then  
they might have a conversation.  The question then becomes for me,  
what does the sociologist of technology do.... here i would suspect  
they would bring a stronger sense of separation between the social and  
the technology than say the STS scholar, and more of a concern for the  
'things' or 'objects' in the world than the sociologist of knowledge.   
For the rest, the spectrums are too huge to posit a possibility.  I  
know of several hci scholars who are indistinguishable from  
philosopher's of technology, except for where they publish, similar  
communications is a 'field' that has somehow become a discipline, and  
some of them are sociologists of technology, etc.

>
>
>
>
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