The art of reading the network: A case study of technological innovation and its daily use in science

Abstract

Summary: The Internet phenomenon in the scientific environment needs to be considered on two levels: the global level of social construction of an object, and a local level of observation of daily practices. This article considers the emerging use of the Internet first in the astronomy community and then in other scientific fields in which appropriation of the tool is more problematical. The technological object is considered first as a "boundary object" and then as a "collective text" where users are readers and sometimes writers. Since the Internet owes its existence to the activity of countless enthusiastic volunteers, we discover another dimension underlying use of the technology: that of pleasure,which engages the individual far beyond the purely functional dimension.