The nature of a website, as opposed to other writing technologies, resists reduction to single purposes and dominating tropes. Links lead many places, and these paths are explored by users, within the web initially spun by the designers, to be sure, but rapidly spiraling out of the control of any designer...its degrees of semiotic freedom are many (Haraway 2003:73-4).

...the scientific phenomenon is not only accessible through manipulation but occurs only in the context of a carpentered instrumental context (Ihde 1991:120)

Utilizing the 'degrees of symmetry' of Ihde (cf 2002:96) and Pickering, a way into the acknowledgement of alternate goals can begin with another avowed material-semiotician, Dona Haraway. Analogous to Latour and ANT thinkers, Haraway follows a "semiotics of materiality, applying this ruthlessly to all materials" (cf Law 1999:4; Haraway 2003:47,1991) to propose the radical trope of a material-technology-human cyborg to emphasize the complexity of sociotechnical relations. However, in this complexity, Haraway focuses on a 'political epistemology' to 'democratize knowledge' in-step with Harding's 'strong objectivity' program (1991,1998; cf Parsons 2003; though she characterizes the approach as properly 'aliberal' due to non-centeredness on humans 2003:77). This means that:

is impossible to epistemologically inquire into the constitutive reality of technoscientific practice without simultaneously engaging in the political arena of legislating who and what counts (cf Selinger 2003:158).

Connecting up with a multivocal concern in archaeology, Haraway (1991:194) contends that knowledge is always situated in complex assemblages which includes a Nietzschean perspectivism or the acknowledging of 'observer bias' in technologically mediated vision which always involves selection (1997:113). For her, questions of "how to see?", "where to see from?", and "who gets to have more than one point of view?", etc. (1991:194). The result of the politics of cyborgian bodily situatedness necessitates democratic measures in technoscientific production (cf. Selinger 2003). Enabling multiple stakeholders to engage with one another becomes an integral part of technologically mediated practice (1997:95-6).

To this end, Haraway espouses the democratic employment of technological mediation, and forwards the advantages of 'hypertext' for the intrinsic 'openness' and rhyzomatic linking.

The nature of the website, as opposed to many other writing technologies, resists reduction to single purposes and dominating tropes. Links lead many places, and these paths are explored by users, within the webs initially spun by designers, to be sure, but rapidly spiraling out of control of any designer...its degree of semiotic freedom are many (Haraway 2003:73-4).

Drawing from popular-political culture and the swelling of Media Informatics Liberation, as well as early espousal within archaeology by Michael Shanks, utilization of social software has been argued to facilitate just such 'situated' yet democratic enabling (Shirky 2005a,b). Archaeologists have, of course, employed internet resources, but these comprise static pages of information, or textual homologies, which publicize and make accessible archaeological information which would otherwise be restricted to smaller target audiences. More savvy projects which employ the internet generally have explicit theoretical interests behind such information facilitation, and so the content tends to be less simply ‘dumping on the web’ (Adler 2004) from non-net sources. These other projects use the web-medium to support: a 'multivocal/multinarrative' archaeology (eg. Joyce, et al 2000, Lopez 2005) or reflexive approaches (eg Catalhoyuk). However, I am going to focus not on ‘old media’ web-design and internet sites, but on a particular ‘group’ of social software: task-oriented wikis (task oriented, collaborative workspaces) and blogging. The contrast to ‘static pages’ will become apparent.

‘Social Software’ is not new in any sense, as it dates back to ‘Plato’ systems of forty years ago, and really serves as an all-inclusive rubric for anything from ‘Groupwares’ to e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, chatrooms, instant messaging, mailing lists, bulletin boards, multi-user games and more. And in these capacities, we’ve been using it for decades. But what I want to focus upon is one increasingly popular and political niche of the developing web-based platforms combining wikis, weblogs and RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds – such as what you are engaging with now. There are varieties specializing in imagery, music, group organization, etc. But essentially: ‘blogs’ are continuously updated web pages that are part stream-of-consciousness diaries and part forums for news commentary and analysis; wikis are ‘open-editing’, collaborative and group organizing versions of blogs; and RSS feeds allow instant messaging to appraise involved bloggers of updates. And in this form blogging has begun to have a felt impact, especially in terms of political organization and opinion/news dissemination.

Weblogs are the freest media the world has ever known. Within the universe of internet users, the costs of setting up a weblog are minor, and perhaps more importantly, require no financial investment, only time, thus greatly weakening the "freedom of the press for those who can afford one" effect. Furthermore, there is no Weblog Central -- you do not need to incorporate your weblog, you do not need to register your weblog, you do not need to clear your posts with anyone. (Shirky 2003).

When the Guardian (Guardianonline 2003) refers to social software as just being massively overhyped,” and “just a sideshow run by a few geeks with a tenuous grip on reality,” which doesn’t reflect new technology at all, it just reflects changes in society” (ibid), I would agree with them. It is reflective of a new ‘change in society’. This change is most visibly evidenced by the attention that has come during the last presidential campaign, wherein the democratic primary contender Howard Dean garnered both organizational and financial boosts from his weblog. As The Nation reported during the run-up to the democratic convention, “’social software’ is changing and enhancing the participation of ordinary people in politics…” and “the Dean campaign, with its success at raising small dollar contributions, is returning the party in this country to where it belongs--in the hands of the grassroots and everyday Americans."

Obviously, (for Dean), the wiki and blogging support did not dissolve all obstacles to a radical democratic participation, viz. the disconnect between ‘blogger community’ and ‘actual community of voters’ with the failure of Getting Out the Vote (GOTV). But the media is increasingly popularized, as well-known bloggers (people like Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Cameron Barrett, Halley Suitt, Mitch Ratcliffe, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Ed Cone and Danah Boyd) have thousands of daily readers. “Links, RSS feeds and new protocols such as Trackback are increasing the number of connections between groups of people and their blogs, creating a parallel universe that is already known as the blogosphere” (The Guardianonline 2003) – an “electronic back-channel, which is blending the physical world/electronic world experiences” (Guardianonline 2003).

And this is no longer a parallel ‘underground’ of grass-roots communication. The participatory and organizational effectiveness of weblogs and wikis has become apparent to ‘mainstream’ media sources as well. The BBC recently flicked the switch on an ambitious website designed to help Britons organize and run grassroots political campaigns – to promote local activism. The site, dubbed BBC iCan, is designed to help citizens investigate issues that concern them, find others who share those concerns and provide advice and tools for organizing and engaging in the political process (Wired 2003). And other examples (see Background) abound where ‘mainstream media’ are embedding correspondents and analysts within ‘blogging communities’ to get in touch with grassroots sentiments – and to increase their ratings by anticipating ‘big stories’.

Granted, wikis and blogs as social software are still largely limited to textual interface. And Ihde (2002:83) describes such instrumental mediation as "…a hermeneutic human-technology relation in that the machinic mediation...becomes a kind of language-analog mediation". As well, there are practicalities to be minded: inundation by spam, encouraging relevant 'posts' and maintaining a critical mass interest. However, the increased ease of 'hosting' the necessary server on ordinary desk tops, the ability to mold to particular interest groups (perhaps just a dozen) as 'form-fit software' (Shirky 2005a), and the relatively inexpensive commercially available software platforms all favour social software's utilization.

Taking a lesson from popular and political culture, the facilitation of stakeholder groups in archaeology via hypertexting, and especially wiki-blogs, is evident. So what might linking-up wikis and blogs afford a hypertexting archaeology? Akin to increasingly evident 'grass roots' mobilizing and dissemination of social software in popular culture, a more "diverse and free" (Shirky 2003a) approach to information in archaeology is possible - though already the FCC in the States is considering regulation of blogging (ibid). Hypertexting affords an ability to register publicly the conceptual models and particular/alternate instrumental mediations that, I argue, must be a part of the 'mangle of practice' in archaeology. The application of hypertexting is not restricted to 'multivocal' approaches; and conversely, 'multivocal' archaeology is not limited to hypertexting. Yet the application of hypertexting to salient contexts gets at Haraway's instrumental enabling. And I am beginning just such a type of inclusion at the prominent Mexican site of Teotihuacan (see Teotihuacan dissertation project). This instrumental enabling allows stakeholder groups to mobilize media in idiosyncratic ways, registering non-specifically archaeological attitudes, goals and underlying conceptual models brought to engagements with 'the past'. Via such a public exhibition, these complexifying factors may then be integrated into a better proximate understanding of the archaeological process. Per Haraway, attention is directed to who is mobilizing the world through instrumentation, what is selected for mobilization and how this instrumentation is inter-related to the myriad of other situated positionalities – institutional, socio-political, technological. One that accounts for technoscience's portrayal of science as the articulation of heterogenous actors and actants in an emergent, diplomatic and ethical 'collective'(Latour 2003:214).

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