Nigel Thrift
UK-Nordic Co-operation
Information and Communication Technology and the Social Sciences

The relationship between ICT and social science theory is a vexed one for a number of reasons: cyber-hype, unwitting technological determinisions, the tendency to ignore doing (the practical uses of ICT) in favour of knowing (ICT as a set of theoretical premises), a general lack of feedback between and theory and empirical enquiry, and so on. Yet, at the same time, ICT has also stimulated much recent social theory (consider, for example, Latour's likely of actor-network theory to various ICT networks). Against this background, I would argue that there are seven questions that we need to ask:

1. How are the practices of ICT historically embedded? There is remarkably little work on the genealogy of ICT practices, and this does not help matters since it allows so many commentators to claim that ICT is 'new'. Yet, for example, in my work on the use of ICT in financial markets, what is clear is how many of these market practices were laid down in the 1920s and 1930s as telephonic technology bedded down and have only been adapted to recent developments. What are the echoes of the past in the present?



2. Why is it that some ICT practices get the sobriquet of 'new', 'fast', and so on? We need to work out why some objects are seen in this way and how this rhetoric has evolved.



3. What are the geographical consequences of ICT technology in business? In the past, it was thought that ICT would produce a static distributed workforce able to communicate instantaneously. Now it seems that ICT is actually producing the possibility of a more mobile workforce. ICTs have produced the means where by centres of calculation can exist on the move with the result of more rather than less business travel. In turn, the development seems to be part of a whole scale reorganisation of business as manifested in office design, the growth of knowledge exchange, and so on.



4. Though there is much work on ICT hardware, software still seems to be a poor relation, in several ways. First, there is little work on how programs have effects. For example, there is the case of credit-scoring programs of the kind offered by companies like Experian which have important economic and distributional effects but have not been studied as such. Second, there is a need to consider the practices -mundane and ethical - of software programmers and engineers. How do these actors work, what are their prejudices, and so on? (see Downey). Then, third, there is the way that software can take a 'life' of its own, programs which no one any longer fully understands, made up of 'legey' software, unexplained sub routines, mistakes, simulations of older programs, and so on, yet alone excursions into artificial life (see Helmreich).



5. There is a need to consider how ICTs are making what was intangible, tangible and so available to be operated on. For example, marketing systems are now working hard to produce information on consumer reaction across the senses ('sensorama') in order to produce new products (as in the food industry). These new sensory products would not have been possible without an approach based on the proliferation of ICT-induced information. Then, there is the increasing use of ICT to represent 'spiritual' matters, as is becoming common in some New Age practices. Perhaps Fourier's state of Harmony is now being produced!



6. There is the problem of information. Conventionally it is argued that we live in a world with too much information. But perhaps the cognitive representational basis of so much of this information means that it is less effective than we think. All the ''exformation''(Norre tranders) continues to elude us.



7. Finally, there is the problem of changing technological form. If the PC and the like is replaced by hosts of smart machines, what are the consequences?