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The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a "Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series.

Hypertext - advanced software for organizing information according to webs of conceptual, rather than symbolic, links - has recently provoked humanists to reconsider post-structuralist semiotic concepts. Debates about the design and uses of hypertext, among both software developers and humanists, reflect a conflict between two problematic views of text: as a medium for social interaction, and as a replication of a cognitive structure. Post-structuralist critical theory (PSCT), in challenging concepts of authorship and univocal meaning, argued that semiotic products were more closely connected to each other than to `reality' or to their `original' producers. PSCT's notion of `intertextuality' captured this hyperactive, social aspect of language products. Theories of social construction of scientific knowledge (SCSK), I argue, have crucially relied upon similar, essentially semiotic concepts such as inscription devices, discourse repertoires and the textualization of heterogeneous resources. As SCSK's practitioners have articulated their programme, they have covertly imported cognitive abilities into ostensibly social processes, creating a kind of theoretical hypertension which surfaces in the similar debates over hypertext. Questions about the status of artificial intelligence, which concerns the capacity of a purely symbolic/syntactic structure - a hyper text - to perform as a social actor, sharply expose the tension between cognitive and social that underlies many of SCSK's key concepts.

Machine generated contents note: 1 Introduction: The Globalization of Climate Science and Climate -- Politics 1 -- Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards -- 2 Representing the Global Atmosphere: Computer Models, Data, and -- Knowledge about Climate Change 31 -- Paul N. Edwards -- 3 Why Atmospheric Modeling Is Good Science 67 -- Stephen D. Norton and Frederick Suppe -- 4 Epistemic Lifestyles in Climate Change Modeling 107 -- Simon Shackley -- 5 The Rise and Fall of Weather Modification: Changes in American -- Attitudes Toward Technology, Nature, and Society 135 -- Chunglin Kwa -- 6 Scientific Internationalism in American Foreign Policy: The Case of -- Meteorology, 1947-1958 167 -- Clark A. Miller -- 7 Self-Governance and Peer Review in Science-for-Policy: The Case -- of the IPCC Second Assessment Report ,.,219 -- Paul N. Edwards and Stephen H. Schneider -- 8 Challenges in the Application of Science to Global Affairs: -- Contingency, Trust, and Moral Order 247 -- Clark A. Miller -- 9 Climate Change and Global Environmental Justice 287 -- Dale Jamieson -- 10 Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global Environmental -- Consciousness 309 -- Sheila Jasanoff References 339 -- Index 371

In this conversation between Paul N. Edwards, professor in the School of Information and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, and Alexander Monea, doctoral candidate in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University, Edwards addresses several concerns related to the history and critical analysis of media and technology. In particular, Edwards discusses archival methodology and interdisciplinarity in media studies, theories of technological momentum and infrastructural innovation, the political stakes of historiographic inquiry in terms of media and technology, the importance of the work of Michel Foucault, and the production of the self or subjectivization. He also discusses the contemporary implications of his earlier work on the history of computation and more recent work on climate science.

Web-based platforms play an increasingly important role in managing and sharing research data of all types and sizes. This article presents a case study of the data storage, sharing, and management platform Figshare. We argue that such platforms are displacing and reconfiguring the infrastructure of norms, technologies, and institutions that underlies traditional scholarly communication. Using a theoretical framework that combines infrastructure studies with platform studies, we show that Figshare leverages the platform logic of core and complementary components to re-integrate a presently splintered scholarly infrastructure. By means of this logic, platforms may provide the path to bring data inside a scholarly communication system still optimized mainly for text publications. Yet the platform strategy also risks turning over critical scientific functions to private firms whose longevity, openness, and corporate goals remain uncertain. It may amplify the existing trend of splintering infrastructures, with attendant effects on equity of service.

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.