This collection explores how technologies become forms of power, how people embed their authority in technological systems, and how the machines and the knowledge that make up technical systems strengthen or reshape social, political, and cultural power.

The authors suggest ways in which a more nuanced investigation of technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the changing meanings of modernity.

They consider the relationship among the state, expertise, and authority; the construction of national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of labor; political ideology and industrial development; and political practices during the Cold War.

Most documents are the product of continual evolution. An essay may undergo dozens of revisions; source code for a computer program may undergo thousands. And as online collaboration becomes increasingly common, we see more and more ever-evolving group-authored texts.

Anthropologist Christopher Kelty on programmers, networks and information technology

Kelty has studied the political economy of information; Free Software; cultural aspects of intellectual property law; reputation, trust and exchange in communities of software programmers; and the history of medicine in America. Kelty teaches classes in science and technology studies, the mechanization of thought processes, the history of memory systems, ...

Not all people involved with "hacking" are self-identified hackers. ... Entrepreneurs, visionaries, activists and lawyers are engaged in some of the same social worlds but may not call themselves hackers. In the end, the goal is to investigate the nature of social relations and shared attitudes toward the worlds we live in ... to find what ties people together in a given social world.

... information is not necessarily something that circulates on the Internet. It is something that can be understood socially as existing in a particular time and place through repeated interactions between people.

I also talk about the differences between communication networks and social networks and try to give the students a way of thinking about how one might have both a communication network and a social network at the same time.

... areas like this are quite hard for students to get their head around ...

I like to focus on banal, boring issues like standards, protocols, and IPR because I delight in showing how supposedly arcane technical problems actually turn out to be political.

... IP rights hand a kind of police power over to private bodies. ... The economic justification for the existence of IP is different from the actual uses to which people put it.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,'" said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, referring to the millions of dollars studios throw at a movie to ensure a big opening weekend.

"You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience," he said. "Those days are over. Today, there is no fooling the public."

Could the next generation of online communications strengthen civil society by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities, so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to revitalize democracy in the 21st century?

This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks.

Advances in information technology are heavily influencing ways in which business, society, and government work and function throughout the globe, bringing many changes to everyday life, in a process commonly termed the "information revolution."

WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.

WASTE is designed to enable small companies and small teams within larger companies to easily communicate and collaborate in a secure and efficient fashion, independent of physical network topology.

WASTE is licensed under the GPL.

# Network architecture: WASTE uses a distributed architecture that allows for nodes to connect in a partial mesh type network. Nodes on the network can broadcast and route traffic. Nodes that are not publicly accessible or on slow links can choose not to route traffic. This network is built such that all services utilize the network, so firewall issues become moot.

We propose two new tools to address the evolution of hyperlinked corpora. First, we define time graphs to extend the traditional notion of an evolving directed graph, capturing link creation as a point phenomenon in time. Second, we develop definitions and algorithms for time-dense community tracking, to crystallize the notion of community evolution.

We develop these tools in the context of Blogspace, the space of weblogs (or blogs). Our study involves approximately 750K links among 25K blogs. We create a time graph on these blogs by an automatic analysis of their internal time stamps. We then study the evolution of connected component structure and microscopic community structure in this time graph.

We show that Blogspace underwent a transition behavior around the end of 2001, and has been rapidly expanding over the past year, not just in metrics of scale, but also in metrics of community structure and connectedness. This expansion shows no sign of abating, although measures of connectedness must plateau within two years. By randomizing link destinations in Blogspace, but retaining sources and timestamps, we introduce a concept of randomized Blogspace. We observe similar evolution of a giant component, but no corresponding increase in community structure.

We present a study of information flow that takes into account the observation that an item relevant to one person is more likely to be of interest to individuals in the same social circle than those outside of it. This is due to the fact that the similarity of node attributes in social networks decreases as a function of the graph distance.

An epidemic model on a scale-free network with this property has a finite threshold, implying that the spread of information is limited.