Knowledge Communities (and Social Networking)

The Science Studies part of STS has long been concerned with how communities decide what they know.  I argue that these approaches are useful for understanding everyday social networking, too.

 

Van House, N. A. (in press). Feminist HCI meets Facebook:  performativity and social networking sites. Interacting with Computers.

Need to find shorter readings, but here are some great books on the topic:

Shapin, S. (1994). A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth-century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.  Yes, really! The beginnings of empirical science, and determining who was credible witnesses: not women or shopkeepers, because they weren’t financially independent and so couldn’t speak freely.

Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  Although she uses various scientific disciplines as her empirical bases, her analysis can be applied to many areas.  Her major observation is that different fields/disciplines have different epistemic cultures.  Her most recent work is on global financial markets.

Possible readings:

 

Beaulieu, A. (2010). Research Note: From co-location to co-presence: Shifts in the use of ethnography for the study of knowledge. Social Studies of Science, 40.

Forsythe, D. E. (1993). Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence. Social Studies of Science, 23(3), 445-477.

 

 

 

Comments are closed.