Quick Summary: CATaC 2006 Day One

Tartu
Finally today we're in a summary plenary which brings together all the CATaC 2006 sessions we've seen. I'm not completely sure whether this is particularly bloggable, but I'll give it a go. Lelia Green notes that her session was focussing on the relationship of knowledge and the Net - knowledge and bird flu; knowledge of how to attack Websites in the course of information warfare; knowledge of health practices in specific communities, but shared online; and knowledge of how to repair cars as it is shared locally and successfully in Burundi as opposed to knowledge introduced by welfare agencies without a full consideration of all implications.

Marie-Christine Deyrich notes the question of distance between groups which may be perceived as inferior or superior; rhetorical distance in communicative interchange and of the identities which are communicated; distance between local and global and the underlying ideologies of either; and détournement - the taking of ideas which are placed in different contexts. Educational design was another topic, and requires more research and a stronger consideration of the social context. And I've already blogged the other afternoon session which I attended - which covered e-voting, news and cultural biases, and the search for alternative frameworks for intellectual property.

Overall, Charles Ess suggests, knowledge is processual - and the acquisition of knowledge and the changes associated with it are about changes to the way bodies move; this is often resisted by the bodies themselves. Another delegate notes that the definition of what is technology needs to be further problematised; and there is a suggestion that there is an overall move in CATaC to get away from staking claims, finding resources, and quantitatively demonstrating trends, towards deeper reflection on the themes of this conference - this also marks a move away from, or beyond, Hofstede's theories. If this is a field, Charles says, it is now a field which has matured, and there is a certain confidence in research in this area which is able to transcend disciplinary boundaries and take on a more strongly explorative nature. This also reflects the high complexity of the areas which are under observation at this conference, Herbert Hrachovec suggests, which elude simple explanations and require more intricate theoretical work. Lelia suggests that we simply cannot examine what we want to examine if we limit ourselves too much to a quantitative framework.

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