Imaginary magnitude

“I for one am fascinated by the edge of the academic world meeting my world through blogs.” Joi Ito in a comment to a post by Danah Boyd that is part of a debate about technological and social factors going on at the moment. A good startingpoint for the debate is this post by Anne Galloway.

Is Ito’s comment sign of technology studies and techies meeting through blogging, blogging as boundary work/boundary organizations/trading zones/interfaces?

Some will have to look in to this in detail, but it seems to me that such meetings are rather scarce. How many (productive) tradings between sociotechnical subcultures / manufactures of boundary objects have come out of blogging? I guess they are rather few. If that is the case, blogging would be just a mirror of That. Other. World. Outside. Of. The. Bloggosphere, you know: Society, not-Net, with its Science Wars and its many curricula at tech schools devoid of any humanistic/social science perspectives on technology. Which is not that much of a surprise, but is something that we need to remind ourselves of every now and then, when we marvel at the tools on our screens. Blogging can be a vehicle for change, but in many cases it can, as a first approximation, perhaps rather be seen as a mirroring of not-Net.

Danah also sees little contact between the STS community and techies: “Unfortunately, i feel as though too many science studies folks just wait to see what will be created before studying it, rather than helping the creators think through the environment in which they are creating.”

One wonders if it would be possible to make policy out of these insights, and what such a policy would look like? How do you make perspectives from STS and sci/tech meet?

Update: after posting, I found this interesting note by Brayden King, that takes a similar stance. See also some of the comments to King’s post. Perhaps it is time for a reality check in blogland.