This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue (...) mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital “move beyond impartiality.” I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter. (shrink)

This paper examines the limits and possibilities of topological approaches in the social analysis of technology. It proposes that topology should be considered not just as a theory to be adopted, but equally as a device that is deployed in social life in a variety of ways. Digital technologies help to make clear why: these technologies have facilitated the spread of a topological imagination, but they have also enabled a weak form of topological imagination, one that leaves in place deterministic (...) ideas about technology as the principal driver of social change. This paper examines this situation and alternatives to it through an empirical case, that of smart electricity meters. On the one hand, these technologies enable only a limited ‘expansion of the frame’ on technology, one in which the primacy of technology is maintained. But they are also used to render relations between technology and society more complexly. I explore topological devices deployed in this second way, such as the digital visualization tool of tag clouding and propose that this device enables an empirical mode of critique: here, topology does not just help to foreground the entanglement of the social and the technical, it also helps to dramatize the contingent, non-coherent unfolding of issues. (shrink)

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar (...) as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between public involvement and everyday material practices. While the latter are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of `being intimate in public' to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement. (shrink)

This article introduces an interpretative approach to the analysis of situations in computational settings called situational analytics. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this approach, which is still under development, and show how it can be used to surface situations from large data sets derived from online platforms such as YouTube. Situational analytics extends to computationally-mediated settings a qualitative methodology developed by Adele Clarke, Situational Analysis, which uses data mapping to detect heterogeneous entities in fieldwork data to determine (...) ‘what makes a difference’ in a situation. Situational analytics scales up this methodology to analyse situations latent in computational data sets with semi-automated methods of textual and visual analysis. I discuss how this approach deviates from recent analyses of situations in computational social science, and argue that Clarke’s framework renders tractable a fundamental methodological problem that arises in this area of research: while social researchers turn to computational settings in order to analyse social life, the social processes unfolding in these envirnoments are fundamentally affected by the computational architectures in which they occur. Situational analytics offers a way to address this problematic by making a heterogeneously composed situation – involving social, technical and media elements – the unit of computational analysis. To conclude, I show how situational analytics can be applied in a case study of YouTube videos featuring intelligent vehicles and discuss how situational analysis itself needs to be elaborated if we are to come to terms with computational transformations of the situational fabric of social life. (shrink)

Given the multiplicity of political agencies emanating from the social realm encountered on the Web, the medium appears to drive home the point of the displacement of politics beyond representative and stakeholder arrangements. As such, the social and political significance of the Web resides in its undermining of conventional procedures of democratization. However, tracing movements of protest across the Web, we notice that trajectories of politicization on the Web are highly particular. Resisting the interpretation of the particularity of protest trails (...) as a sign of the transportation of the displaced politics back towards the center, we ask : why take the detour via specific sites and spec issues, given the displacement of politics ? (shrink)

Second-wave of feminism has stressed the particularity of phenomena that modern political theory had conceptualized as general in nature and scope: the citizen, the political community, the topics of politics. Since then, feminist and queer theories and practices have not only shown that the subjects, arrangements and issues of politics are always historically specific. They have also demonstrated that their particularity may be constitutive of politics. The specificity of political actors, of particular procedures and themes may inform political processes. This (...) insight of feminism, this short piece argues, is of special relevance for grasping politics today. Under circumstances of globalization, the particularity of political processes, and their ingredients, becomes increasingly obvious. In this context, unorthodox actors, such as NGO’s, serve as agents of politics, and the boundaries of political communities become unsettled. Also, here issues emerge that resist treatment in classic democratic institutions, such as those founded in the nation-state. As the particularity of the actors, arrangements and issues is increasingly clear, feminist and queer theory become especially crucial to the understanding of politics. It tells us not to resist this particularization of politics, but to embrace it. It reminds us that the main political question is that of the staking-out of particular sites, the construction of specific forms of politics, and the articulation of particular issues. (shrink)