Forwarded from the cyberspace and society list ...
Subject: Call for Participation: Conference on "Socio-technical Change:
Lessons from
ICT in Developing Countries"
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 21:16:29 +0700
From: merlyna lim <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Apologies for cross-posting.
Call for Participation:
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
"Socio-technical Change: Lessons from ICT in Developing Countries"
June 15, 2001
University of Twente
Enschede - The Netherlands
This conference will provide a forum for the presentation of findings
from a Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) funded programme "Social Construction of
Technology (SCoT) in the
Indonesian Context", led by Joshua Barker, Nico Schulte Noordholt a
Arie Rip, and the comparison
of these findings with similar studies for other developing countries.
Among the speakers will be dr. Hebe Vessuri, prof. dr. Don Slater,
prof. dr. Eric Harwit, prof. dr. Bart
Simon, and also some other scholars from different countries.
Main topics:
· A comparison between processes of societal construction in different
technological regimes, in particular the comparison of the satellite
and the internet in Indonesia;
· Focus on the differences between processes of societal construction
of technology in developed
countries and those in developing
countries.
Some topics for discussion:
- How do ‘ideographs’ or ideologies relating to technology and social
change (e.g. nationalism,
development, modernization, backwardness, etc.) differ in developing
and developed countries? What
are the mechanisms whereby these overarching ideas and ambitions come
to shape socio-technical
change?
- Given that technologies are shaped by actor-networks (Latour, 1987),
what types of actor-networks
are important in different countries (e.g. firm-based,
university-based,family-based, etc.)? What are the
mechanisms whereby the different actor-networks shape socio-technical
change? What are the
strengths and weaknesses of these different actor-networks in acting as
agents of socio-technial
change?
- How do technologists’ agenda-building strategies differ in developing
and developed countries? How
do they differ between technological regimes (e.g. satellite vs.
Internet)? Which strategies are effective
in the respective contexts?
- To what extent are developments in information and communications
technologies ‘global’ and to
what extent are they ‘local’? How does the relative localism or
globalism differ between such ‘old’
technologies as telegraphy, telephone, and the satellite, and such
‘new’ technologies as the Internet?
- What can SCoT theories contribute to discussions conventionally
concerned only with the ‘impact’ of
technology on society? For example, what can SCoT say about the roles
that the media and
information technology play in the development of a country’s national
identity and in the process of
democratisation?
For more detailed information you can email us at:
[log in to unmask]
or look at our web page: http://www.sms.utwente.nl/tdg/scotconference
(also online registration)
Merlyna Lim
Research Fellow
SCoT Research Group
UTwente - ITB
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