Thanks for tips on John Seely Brown's recent materials. The 1995 paper that
Martin pointed to was especially interesting to me because it was early and
less seamless.
I found the following characterization fascinating:
Control, however, is often more subtle. Leigh Star and her colleague
Greisemar makes this apparent in their discussion of "boundary
objects"--objects capable of crossing the boundary between
communities or social worlds. Boundary objects, Star and Greisemar
note,
are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of
the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a
common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common
use, and become strongly structured in individual site use. . . . They
have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is
common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a
means of translation. The creation and management of boundary
objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence
across intersecting social worlds.
It seems we are seeing an early version of Latour's interobjectivity idea here
where it is very difficult to figure out where agency is/nt. At one point
a blackboard is used as an example, locally we think of 5th Dimensions in
these terms, etc. It would be fascinating to collect up all the uses of this
term over the past 6-7 years to see just how polysemic the idea has become.
mike
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