History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
ESA Conference: Ageing Societies, New Sociology
September 23-26, 2003 in Murcia, Spain
Two streams of sessions of the
Research Network 18: Sociology of Science and Technology (SSTNET)
Convenors:
Raymund Werle: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Köln, Germany (werle@mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de)
Marja Häyrinen Alestalo: Dept. of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland (marja.alestalo@helsinki.fi)
Luísa Oliveira: DINÂMIA/ISCTE, Lisboa, Portugal (luisa.oliveira@iscte.pt)
Maarten Mentzel: 38 Johan de Wittstraat, 2334 AR Leiden, The Netherlands (m.a.mentzel@planet.nl)
First Stream: Governing Science and Technology in the Era of Globalization
Tuesday Sept. 23
14.00 - 16.00 session 1 (Campus de La Merced)
Chair: Raymund Werle
1.5. Author(s): Thelwall, Mike
Institution: School of Computing and IT, Wolverhampton University
Professional Category:
City: Wolverhampton
Country: United Kingdom
E-mail: m.thelwall@wlv.ac.uk
PATTERNS AND PROBLEMS OF CROSS-BORDER COLLABORATION: THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE HYBRID WEB
The continuing increase of cross-border collaboration between researchers and scientists has been simultaneously driven by forces of economic competition and pulled by the decreasing costs and increasing telecommunications speed and media-richness. This has contributed towards a shift to a fundamentally new paradigm for scientific activity, the ‘Mode 2 Science’ of Gibbons, characterised by a blurring of boundaries between disciplines, between old style university pure research and industrial applied research, and between nations. There is now a need to understand how scientific collaboration is emerging in this new environment. New social structures will be associated with a developing central role in communication for the emerging and rapidly changing hybrid communication genres, principally the organisational Web site, but also the Web sites of individual scientists exercising their ability to be cultural producers of artefacts with a potentially mass audience. In this new era many new questions arise.
How are organisations and individual scientists with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds reacting and adjusting to the new hybrid communication genres?
Is the shift towards the use of new communication media and genres of communication having an impact on the age structure power relationships of scientific organisations?
Are there ethical and political ramifications associated with the partial switch from traditional media channels to the Web, and will science and scientists in the poorer nations benefit or suffer from the changes?
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006