Challenging Potentials of Technologically Mediated Knowledge Production

Abstract: Social science research regarding the effects of new information technology has often been retrospective, offering insight about applications to which these technologies have already been applied or the changes to practice and knowledge that has arisen. Research continues to ask how these new technologies will be incorporated into modes of knowledge production. This question of the challenging potential impacts needs to be expanded to ask what potentials for challenging the current situation exist within these technologies as well. The retrospective analysis offers insight into the roles that these technologies have played but does not increase the potential of information technologies to serve as an avenue for reevaluating currently dominant practices in knowledge production. Through forward-looking research on and use of new technologies could create new spaces from which to evaluate and improve existing institutions. The production of knowledge within most scientific disciplines demands maintenance of protocols that complicates experimentation with the mode of production. The social, behavioral, and economic sciences, wherein the study of the mode is often a central topic, has an opportunity to develop an experimental approach to modes of knowledge production through the integration of technologies intentionally as a fulcrum for movement of long staid traditions.

SBE 2020  White Paper Full Text are available from the National Science Foundation web page listed under the Primary Author's name "Nathan Fisk"