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SOCIAL SOFTWARE, SCIENCE STUDIES AND MEDIATING ARCHAEOLOGY
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by Timothy Webmoor

Abstract

Technoscience proposes the 'the death of man' in a Posthuman movement to symmetricize things-humans. As a curative for the long-standing 'theoretical' and 'abstract' focus of Philosophy of Science (particularly the Anglo-American tradition) - contexted itself within an even more sedimented predisposition in general Western philosophy back to Platonic Ideals to center human consciousness in the search for representational connections to reality - such technoscience (re)habilitations of things has confronted a human sciences often directing itself in a simultaneous avowal of 'materiality' and 'discourse'. To submit the perspicacity of recent Technoscience authors (I will primarily restrict consideration to Pickering, Ihde, Latour, Haraway and other A-N-T practitioners) to a 'trial of strength' in the appropriate context of archaeology ('study of people through things'), I will attempt to argue its applicability to the contentious issue of 'multivocal archaeology' and the mandate of indigenous groups to participate in archaeological knowledge constitution in the model of democratized participation. This trial is intended to stretch the pragmatic elasticity of technoscience across the spectrum of:

things-people symmetry_______radical asymmetry of 'absolute ethno-idealism' 
       or Posthumanism______Humanism.  

Working (briefly) through the major thinkers, I suggest that such an application of technoscience posthumanism to this contentious archaeological issue also serves 'to trial' technoscience where it has received much criticism: in its apparent inability to address normative issues such as ethics. I suggest that an absolute symmetry (Latour, Haraway, A-N-T), while idealistically the most 'democratic' (in its anonymity and absolute inclusion of humans-nonhumans) must be pragmatically tempered by Pickering and Ihde's formulations of 'hybridized symmetry' or 'post-subjective humanism' with the inclusion of both bodily situatedness and conceptual frameworks as a part of the 'mangle of practice'. Drawing these implications out, I suggest that the 'stasis of dialogue' and dialogic approaches characterizing politicized archaeological engagements with indigenous beliefs may be side-stepped by incorporating alternate conceptual frameworks and bodily situatedness as simply one of the myriad of 'actants' which are mobilized in 'the archaeological collective'. Finally, drawing from Ihde's notion of 'instrumental realism' and Haraway's democratizing effort in the sciences (such as with hypertext and situatedness), the crescendo of 'social software' usage in academic, popular and political settings is portrayed as a direct media for enabling an ethical/democratized archaeology by extending mediational capacity to mobilize articulations to those ordinarily situated Outside (in participatory sense) of 'the Collective' of humans-nonhumans.

Forward to Introduction

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Posted at Mar 15/2007 01:01PM:
timwebmoor: Due to spam inundation, the pages are locked down to comments with the psswd 'mediation'. Please enter psswd if you wish to leave a comment, or email me.

February 23, 2005:Please bring your wireless enabled laptops as this will be an enunciated hypertext presentation.

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Webmoor,T 2005:Social Software, Science Studies and Mediating Archaeology, Metamedia Laboratories, Stanford University, http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/mediatingarch/home, accessed date.



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