This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Jun 2008, by Jeremy Price.
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10 Jun 08
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analysis of relations between human agency and modern technology and a smart rap on the methodological knuckles for many of us
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situated studies of local activity misapprehend contemporary technologies such as nuclear power, the automobile, and large information systems
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“ethnographic positivism” -- the tendency to dwell on the details (which are abundant and fascinating), missing the bigger picture beyond “the horizon of the present,” and missing the “mediation of history and culture.”
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dedication to the details seems to Kallinikos a failure of “theoretical imagination.”
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figure-ground reversal problem
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We have focused down on the local details while missing the enormous power technologies (in the hands of modern organizations) have to constrict our activity, to “enframe” our situations, to virtually eliminate huge swaths of our personalities as we conform to the rules of the game established by the organizations/technologies.
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Even organizations themselves end up conforming to technologies which are designed in the abstract, not in response to local conditions.
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if we agree with Kallinikos that the trend is to confine, to enframe with technology, then we can predict that the communication and self-expression afforded by the Internet-- everything the ERPs of the world suppress -- will result in suppression of the Internet itself
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The Internet is a marvelous technology but it also represents a complex array of technologies and practices (writing, information processing, procedural reasoning etc.) that are superimposed upon another to construct a potent system whose immediate influence on people is not evident and cannot be accounted, at least not solely, by ethnographic interpretations.
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Don Slater has a couple of years ago criticized Dreyfus book "On the Internet" in Theory, Culture and Society from such an ethnographic perspective. The more I read his critical review the more I become convinced that "situated" accounts of the Internet treat it only as an occasion for studying social groups.
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