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The use of biometric technology for identification has gone from Orwellian fantasy to everyday reality. This technology, which verifies or recognizes a person's identity based on physiological, anatomical, or behavioral patterns (including fingerprints, retina, handwriting, and keystrokes) has been deployed for such purposes as combating welfare fraud, screening airplane passengers, and identifying terrorists. The accompanying controversy has pitted those who praise the technology's accuracy and efficiency against advocates for privacy and civil liberties. This book investigates the complex public responses to biometric technology. The author uses societal perceptions of this particular identification technology to explore the values, beliefs, and ideologies that influence public acceptance of technology. Drawing on her own extensive research with focus groups and a national survey, she finds that considerations of privacy, anonymity, trust and confidence in institutions, and the legitimacy of paternalistic government interventions, are extremely important to users and potential users of the technology. The author examines the long history of government systems of identification and the controversies they have inspired; the effect of the information technology revolution and the events of September 11, 2001; the normative value of privacy (as opposed to its merely legal definition); the place of surveillance technologies in a civil society; trust in government and distrust in the expanded role of government; and the balance between the need for government to act to prevent harm and the possible threat to liberty in the government's actions.

How should we think about authorship, use and piracy in an era of media convergence? How does the growing focus on amateur creativity impact on existing legal and cultural understandings of around creation? And why are the author, user and pirate so prominent in debates around copyright law? Authors, Users, Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity presents a new way of thinking about these three central subjects of copyright. It outlines a relational approach to subjectivity, charting connections between the author, user and pirate through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, moving from early regulatory debates around radio spectrum and nineteenth century cases on book abridgments to the controversial reuse of Instagram photos and the emergence of multi-channel networks on YouTube. The book draws on legal scholarship, cultural theory and media studies research to provide a new way of thinking about subjectivity and copyright. It also offers insights into a range of critical issues that sit at the intersection of copyright law and digital media including online copyright infringement, amateur media production and the potential futures of creative industries.

After a little more than half a century since its initial development, computer code is extensively and intimately woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. From the digital alarm clock that wakes us to the air traffic control system that guides our airplane in for a landing, software is shaping our world: It creates new ways of undertaking tasks, speeds up and automates existing practices, transforms social and economic relationships, and offers new forms of cultural activity, personal empowerment, and modes of play. This book examines software from a spatial perspective, analyzing the dyadic relationship of software and space. The production of space, the authors argue, is increasingly dependent on code, and code is written to produce space. Examples of code/space include airport check-in areas, networked offices, and cafés that are transformed into workspaces by laptops and wireless access. The book argues that software, through its ability to work universally, transduces space. The authors have developed a set of conceptual tools for identifying and understanding the interrelationship between software, space, and everyday life, and illustrate their arguments with empirical material. Finally, they issue a manifesto, calling for critical scholarship into the production and workings of code rather than simply the technologies it enables—a new kind of social science focused on explaining the social, economic, and spatial contours of software.

The study of combinatorial auctions—auctions in which bidders can bid on combinations of items or “packages”—draws on the disciplines of economics, operations research, and computer science. This book integrates these three perspectives, offering a survey of developments in combinatorial auction theory and practice. Combinatorial auctions (CAs), by allowing bidders to express their preferences more fully, can lead to improved economic efficiency and greater auction revenues. However, challenges arise in both design and implementation. This book addresses each of these challenges. After describing and analyzing various CA mechanisms, it addresses bidding languages and questions of efficiency. Possible strategies for solving the computationally intractable problem of how to compute the objective-maximizing allocation (known as the winner determination problem) are considered, as are questions of how to test alternative algorithms. The book discusses five important applications of CAs: spectrum auctions, airport takeoff and landing slots, procurement of freight transportation services, the London bus routes market, and industrial procurement.

This book addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the “information economy” possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, the book traces three intertwined threads: the relationships among information, labor, and social management that emerged in the nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of computational metaphors; and the appearance of informatic principles in certain contemporary socioeconomic and cultural practices. Drawing on critical theory, media theory, and the history of science, the book names control as the episteme grounding late capitalism. Beyond any specific device or set of technically mediated practices, digitality functions within this episteme as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity, as well as for the intensification of older modes of exclusion and dispossession. In tracking the pervasiveness of this logical mode into the present, the book locates the cultural traces of control across a diverse body of objects and practices, from cybernetics to economic theory and management styles, and from concepts of language and subjectivity to literary texts, films, and video games.

Just south of San Francisco lies California’s Salinas Valley, the heart of a multi-billion dollar agricultural industry that dominates U. S. vegetable production. How did this sleepy valley become the nation’s “salad bowl?” This book explores the ways that science helped build the Salinas Valley and California’s broader farm industry. The author focuses on the case of University of California “farm advisors,” scientists stationed in counties throughout the state who have stepped forward to help growers deal with crises ranging from labor shortages to plagues of insects. These disruptions in what he terms industrial agriculture’s “ecology of power” provide a window into how agricultural scientists and growers have collaborated—and struggled—in shaping this industry. Through these interventions, science has served as a mechanism of repair for industrial agriculture. Basing his analysis on detailed ethnographic and historical research, the author examines the history of state-sponsored farm advising—in particular, its roots in Progressive Era politics—and looks at both past and present practices by farm advisors in the Salinas Valley. He goes on to examine specific examples, including the resolution of a farm labor crisis during World War II at the Spreckels Sugar Company, the use of field trials for promoting new farming practices, and farm advisors’ and growers’ responses to environmental issues. Beyond this, the book argues that the concept of repair is broadly applicable to other cases and that expertise can be deployed more generally to encourage change for the future of American agriculture.

Whether by accidental keystroke or deliberate tinkering, technology is often used in ways that are unintended and unimagined by its designers and inventors. In this book, Jessa Lingel offers an account of digital technology use that looks beyond Silicon Valley and college dropouts-turned-entrepreneurs. Instead, Lingel tells stories from the margins of countercultural communities that have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of how digital technologies should be used. Lingel presents three case studies that contrast the imagined uses of the web to its lived and often messy practicalities. She examines a social media platform (developed long before Facebook) for body modification enthusiasts, with early web experiments in blogging, community, wikis, online dating, and podcasts; a network of communication technologies (both analog and digital) developed by a local community of punk rockers to manage information about underground shows; and the use of Facebook and Instagram for both promotional and community purposes by Brooklyn drag queens. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Lingel explores issues of alterity and community, inclusivity and exclusivity, secrecy and surveillance, and anonymity and self-promotion. By examining online life in terms of countercultural communities, Lingel argues that looking at outsider experiences helps us to imagine new uses and possibilities for the tools and platforms we use in everyday life.

Attention has been paid to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? This book examines key characteristics of Web activism, and investigates their impacts on organization and participation. It argues that the Web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: Sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together. A rally can be organized and demonstrators recruited entirely online, without the cost of printing and mailing; an activist can create an online petition in minutes and gather e-signatures from coast to coast using only his or her laptop. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, the authors show that the more these affordances are leveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest; the less these affordances are leveraged, the more superficial the changes. The rally organizers, for example, can save money on communication and coordination, but the project of staging the rally remains essentially the same. Tools that allow a single activist to create and circulate a petition entirely online, however, enable more radical changes in the process. The transformative nature of these changes demonstrates the need to revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions about social movements.

This book argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, the author states that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as “futures.” By June of 2004, derivative contracts totaling USD 273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. The author suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories which gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities. The book examines the role played by finance theory in the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. It also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream—chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot’s model of “wild” randomness.

The Cold War was not simply a stand-off between the two superpowers. Its theaters were not just in Washington and in Moscow, but also in the social, economic, political, and cultural arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, tensions surrounding the Cold War were manifest not only in global political disputes but also in the struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful tool to shape countries—politically, economically, socially, and culturally. This book explores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became enmeshed in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today’s new global order. It addresses such topics as the the taking over of islands and atolls for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation by South Africa during apartheid, international technoscientific assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi’i rebellion, and the “technopolitics” of emergency as signified by the portable medical kits used by Medecins sans Frontières in the killing fields of the Cold War. The contributors—coming from such diverse fields of study as anthropology, the history of development, diplomatic history, international history, imperial history, and science and technology studies (STS)—chart the course of these historical and geographical entanglements with technology during the Cold War.

Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing with technological mediation, are provided with an in-depth overview, and with suggestions for further reading, on the most relevant past and ongoing debates in the field. The book starts presenting the approach launched by the Bath School in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and follows the development of the field up to the so called “Science wars” of the ‘90s, and to the popularization of the main acquisitions of the field by Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins’ Golem trilogy. Then, it deals with the sociology of technology, and presents the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, launched by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984 and developed in more than 30 years of research, comparing it with alternative approaches like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. Five issues are addressed in depth: relevant social groups in the social construction of technology; the intertwining of social representations and practices; the importance of tacit knowledge in SCOT’s approach to the nonrepresentational; the controversy over nonhuman agency; and the political implications of SCOT. Finally, it presents the main current debates in STS, in particular in the study of materiality and ontology, and presents Pinch’s more recent work in sound studies.

In 1996, the sub-Saharan African country of Ruritania launched a massive waterworks improvement project, funded by the Normesian Development Bank, headquartered in Urbania, Normland, and with the guidance of Shilling & Partner, a consulting firm in Mercatoria, Normland. This book tells the story of this project, as narrated by anthropologists Edward B. Drotlevski and Samuel A. Martonosi. Their account of the Ruritanian waterworks project views the problems of development from a new perspective, focusing on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development bank, international experts, and local managers. This development project is fictionalized, of course, although based closely on the author’s experiences working on and observing different development projects in the 1990s. He uses the case of the Ruritanian waterworks project to examine issues of standardization, database building, documentation, calculation, and territory mapping. The techniques and technologies of the representational practices of documentation are crucial, the author argues, both to the day-to-day management of the project and to the demonstration of the project’s legitimacy. Five decades of development aid (or “development cooperation,” as it is now sometimes known) have yielded disappointing results. The book looks in particular at the role of the development consultant (often called upon to act as mediator between the other actors) and at the interstitial spaces where developmental cooperation actually occurs. It argues that both critics and practitioners of development often misconstrue the grounds of cooperation—which, it claims, are moral, legal, and political rather than techno-scientific or epistemological.

Mobile communication has become mainstream and even omnipresent. It is arguably the most successful and certainly the most rapidly adopted new technology in the world; more than one in three people worldwide possesses a mobile phone. This book offers a view of the cultural, family, and interpersonal consequences of mobile communication across the globe. Scholars analyze the effect of mobile communication on all parts of life, from the relationship between literacy and the textual features of mobile phones to the use of ringtones as a form of social exchange, from the “aspirational consumption” of middle-class families in India to the belief in parts of Africa and Asia that mobile phones can communicate with the dead. The contributors explore the ways mobile communication profoundly affects the tempo, structure, and process of daily life around the world. The book discusses the impact of mobile communication on social networks, other communication strategies, traditional forms of social organization, and political activities. It considers how quickly miraculous technologies come to seem ordinary and even necessary; and how ordinary technology comes to seem mysterious and even miraculous. The chapters cut across social issues and geographical regions; they highlight use by the elite and the masses, utilitarian and expressive functions, and political and operational consequences. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how mobile communication has affected the quality of life in both exotic and humdrum settings, and how it increasingly occupies center stage in people’s lives around the world.

The results of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanning require extensive analysis in the laboratory. This book shows that fMRI researchers do not sit passively staring at computer screens but actively involve their bodies in laboratory practice. Discussing fMRI visuals with colleagues, scientists animate the scans with gestures and speak as they work with computers. The author argues that to understand how digital scientific visuals take on meaning, we must consider their dynamic coordination with gesture, speech, and working hands—multimodal actions, which, she suggests, are an essential component of digital scientific visuals. A semiotician who was trained in cognitive science, she grounds her discussion in concepts from Peirce's semiotics and her methodology in ethnography and multimodal conversation analysis. Basing her observations on videotaped recordings of activities in three fMRI research labs, the author describes scientists' manual engagement with digital visuals of the human brain, and then turns her attention to the issue of practical thinking. The book argues that although fMRI technology directs scientists to consider human thinking in terms of an individual brain, scientific practices in the fMRI lab demonstrate thinking that engages the whole body and the world in which the body is situated. The turn toward the digital does not bring with it abstraction but a manual and embodied engagement. The practical and multimodal engagement with digital brains in the laboratory challenges certain assumptions behind fMRI technology; it suggests our hands are essential to learning and the making of meaning.

Ignorance and surprise belong together: Surprises can make people aware of their own ignorance. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, a surprising event in scientific research—one that defies prediction or risk assessment—is often a window into new and unexpected knowledge. This book examines the relationship between ignorance and surprise, proposing a conceptual framework for handling the unexpected and offering case studies of ecological design that demonstrate the advantages of allowing for surprises and including ignorance in the design and negotiation processes. It draws on classical and contemporary sociological accounts of ignorance and surprise in science and ecology, and integrates them with the idea of experiment in society. The author develops a notion of how unexpected occurrences can be incorporated into a model of scientific and technological development, which includes the experimental handling of surprises. He discusses different projects in ecological design, including Chicago’s restoration of the shoreline of Lake Michigan and Germany’s revitalization of the brownfields near Leipzig. These cases show how ignorance and surprise can successfully play out in ecological design projects and how the acknowledgment of the unknown can become a part of the decision-making process. The appropriation of surprises can lead to robust design strategies. Ecological design, the book argues, is neither a linear process of master planning nor a process of trial and error, but a carefully coordinated process of dealing with unexpected turns by means of experimental practice.

In the last four decades, during which magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has emerged as a cutting-edge medical technology and a cultural icon, technoscientific imaginaries and practices have undergone a profound change across the globe. Shifting transnational geography of tecchnoscientific innovations is making commonly deployed Euro/West-centric divides such as west versus non-west or “innovating north” versus “non-innovating south” increasingly untenable—the world has indeed becoming flatter. Nevertheless, such dualist divides, which are intimately tied to other dualist categories that have been used to describe scientific knowledge and practice, continue to undergird analyses and imaginaries of transnational technoscience. Imperial Technoscience puts into broad relief the ambivalent and contradictory folding of Euro/west-centrism with emergent features of technoscience. It argues, Euro/West-centric historicism, and resulting over-determinations, not only hide the vibrant, albeit hierarchical, transnational histories of technoscience, but also tell us little about shifting geography of technoscientific innovations. The book utilizes a deconstructive-empirical approach to explore “entangled” histories of MRI across disciplines (physics, chemistry, medicine, etc.), institutions (university, hospitals, industry, etc.), and nations (United States, Britain, and India). Entangled histories of MRI, it shows, better explain emergence and consolidation of particular technoscientific trajectories and shifts in transnational geography of science and technology (e.g. centers and peripheries).

The scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) has been hailed as the “key enabling discovery for nanotechnology,” the catalyst for a scientific field that attracts nearly USD 20 billion in funding each year. This book argues that this technology-centric view does not explain how these microscopes helped to launch nanotechnology—and fails to acknowledge the agency of the microscopists in making the STM and its variants critically important tools. It also tells the story of the invention, spread, and commercialization of scanning probe microscopy in terms of the networked structures of collaboration and competition that came into being within a diverse, colorful, and sometimes fractious community of researchers. By forming a community, the book argues, these researchers were able to innovate rapidly, share the microscopes with a wide range of users, and generate prestige (including the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics) and profit (as the technology found applications in industry). The author shows that both the technology of probe microscopy and the community model offered by the probe microscopists contributed to the development of political and scientific support for nanotechnology and the global funding initiatives which followed. In the course of his account, the author charts the shifts in U.S. science policy over the last 40 years—from the decline in federal basic research funding in the 1970s through the rise in academic patenting in the 1980s to the emergence of nanotechnology discourse in the 1990s—that have resulted in today’s increasing emphasis on the commercialization of academic research.

The urban youth frequenting the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana, who are decidedly not members of their country's elite, use the Internet largely as a way to orchestrate encounters across distance and amass foreign ties—activities once limited to the wealthy, university-educated classes. The Internet, accessed on second-hand computers (castoffs from the United States and Europe), has, for these youths, become a means of enacting a more cosmopolitan self. This book offers an account of how these Internet enthusiasts have adopted, and adapted, to their priorities a technological system that was not designed with them in mind. It describes the material space of the urban Internet café and the virtual space of push and pull between young Ghanaians and the foreigners they encounter online; the region's famous 419 scam strategies and the rumors of “big gains” that fuel them; the influential role of churches and theories about how the supernatural operates through the network; and development rhetoric about digital technologies and the future viability of African Internet cafés in the region. The author integrates concepts from science and technology studies and African studies with empirical findings from her own field work in Ghana, capturing the interpretive flexibility of technology by users in the margins but also highlighting how their invisibility puts limits on their full inclusion into a global network society.

The place of discovery and generation of human knowledge has become a somewhat fuzzy area, and it is at the crossroads of equally blurred disciplines where new glimpses of the future occur. This book looks at these issues through a series of interconnected and heterodox reflections. It is much more a book of non-linear questions than one of answers, where the index consists of a list of questions with those who address the issues linked to them. In 33 dialogues, the author attempts to draw the participants, researchers and creators—each specialists—out of their “intellectual comfort zones”, and get them to delve into areas of disciplines not considered part of their usual activities, thus enabling different concepts to be discussed. For example, “intelligence”, viewed simultaneously from the perspective of neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence, or whether quantum physics allows for freewill. The diversity and interconnecting ideas in these conversations is wide ranging and intense. The dialogues, preceded by a foreword from Tim O’Reilly, are arranged in four blocks: I, The Physical World; II, Information, and III, Intelligence; the fourth block is a dialogue-epilogue with the artist and painter J. M. Yturralde, closing the book with a critical foray into the overlap between Art and Science, with tantalizing questions, with an artistic slant, such as the validity of the equation “Beauty ≠ Truth,” or whether we can go back in time to the past and change it.

Although social scientists generally agree that technology plays a key role in the economy, economics and technology have yet to be brought together into a coherent framework that is both analytically interesting and empirically oriented. This book draws on the tools of science and technology studies and economic sociology to reconceptualize the intersection of economy and technology, suggesting materiality—the idea that social existence involves not only actors and social relations but also objects—as the theoretical point of convergence. The contributors take up general concerns, such as individual agency in a network economy and the materiality of the household in economic history, as well as specific financial technologies such as the stock ticker, the trading room, and the telephone. Forms of infrastructure—accounting, global configurations of trading and information technologies, and patent law—are examined. Case studies of the impact of the Internet and information technology on consumption (e-commerce), the reputation economy (the rise of online reviews of products), and organizational settings (outsourcing of an IT system) round off this collection.