Knowledge Communities (and Social Networking)

Posted by Nancy Van House on August 03rd 2011 to

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.

 

 

 

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