There’s some people who clearly left the Earth too soon and Susan Leigh Star is one of them. She brought some essential ideas from ethnography and the history of science into the discussions around technology, notably monsters (and not in a bad way, more like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and the idea of boundary objects and boundary infrastructures.

A boundary object is “any object that is part of multiple social worlds and facilitates communication between them; it has a different identity in each social world that it inhabits. As a result a boundary object must be simultaneously concrete and abstract, simultaneously fluid and well-defined…”

And then there’s boundary infrastructures which “exists at the crossroads of a large and complex network of individuals, institutions, and practices…”

Either of these can be explicit technological artifacts and objects but they can also be something we don’t necessarily categorize as such. For example a scholarly journal, an academic senate or a P&B committee.

It’s going to be a deep dive but here we are. Technology has a number of aspects in education, some of which are pragmatic and grounded in actual use but what if we were to see technology as just an alternative species of intellectual capital that participants can use the same way they use scholarship in their discipline to gain field position? Not completely absurd. It was certainly the case early in the cognitive revolution when being able to build and operate a modern language lab could get you tenure and promotion.

Of course for a person in a technical field itself it’s just intellectual capital, but if you aren’t in a technological field it’s an alternative form.