Blogging has been light again lately as I’ve been recovering from my extended European tour (which included a terrible cold mid-way through, unhelped by Europe’s restrictions on cold medication available over-the-counter). Here’s a quick summary:
- I presented at the Social Software and Web 2.0: Critical Perspectives and Challenges for Research and Business seminar and workshop at Aalborg University in Denmark. My talk, “The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0: How Web 2.0 Platforms Act as Infrastructures of Dataveillance” can be downloaded here (PDF), and the slides from my presentation are here (large 7.1MB PDF). Thanks to Thomas Ryberg and Anders Albrechtslund (who recently became a father) for organizing the event and arranging my participation.
- I then traveled to Stockholm, Sweden to visit Sven Ove Hansson, Holger Rosencrantz and other scholars dedicated to the ethics of traffic technology in the Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology. While there I delivered a talk about my research on the ethics of vehicle safety communciation technologies, and the challenges of engaging in value-conscious design of these tools.
- Next came the Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science in the Philosophy Department at the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. Here I met Philip Brey, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Adam Briggle, Ed Spence and other scholars investigating the relationship between values and technology. They provided valuable feedback on the paper I’m writing with Noëmi Manders-Huits on the pragmatic challenges of engaging in Value Conscious Design within real-world technical design contexts.
- I then traveled to Delft to visit Noëmi, where we presented our paper together to the Department of Philosophy at the Delft University of Technology. While there, I also had the pleasure of chatting with Jeroen van den Hoven, who, along with Philip Brey and other Dutch philosophers of technology, is spearheading an exciting new Center for Ethics and Technology, which will will focus on the ethics-related issues in technology and scientific research, and on ethical and social issues in the embedding of technology in society.
After 4 weeks in Europe (the last 5 days spent with my wife touring Amsterdam and The Hague), I was ready to return to Brooklyn. But the homecoming was short: 3 days after returning home I hopped on another plane to come to the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting in Vancouver. I arrived today, and already have listened to some excellent talks on the intersection of STS and surveillance studies, as well as Nancy Van House on the the social uses of photography, and how these relate to the emerging uses of networked, digital imaging technology (which is closely related to my interests in peer-to-peer surveillance in Web 2.0 infrastructures).
Tomorrow morning I’m taking part in a dual-panel discussion on STS interventions into scientific and technical practice. Should be a great conference.
MichaelZimmer.org 