THENEXTMACH

[Electronic media] have become an essential feature of modern life because they have helped to mitigate the disruption of stable community ties that has been a characteristic of our era…

The loosening of these ties has also resulted in a greater degree of privatization in our lives; in a rapidly changing and often bewildering world, we retreat to the stability and security of our homes…

For many people, the electronic media fill a void by bringing into their private environments information and entertainment that helps to mitigate their aloneness.

There is interpretative flexibility both in the understanding of technologies and in their design. We should see trajectories of technologies as the result of rhetorical operations, defining the users of artifacts, their uses, and the problems that particular designs solve…

the success of an artifact depends in large part upon the strength and size of the group that takes it up and promotes it. Its definition depends upon the associations that different actors make.

Interpretive flexibility is thus a necessary feature of artifacts, because what an artifact does and how well it performs are the results of a competition of different groups’ claims. Thus the good design of [an artifact] cannot be the move behind its success; good design is instead the result of its success.

These [scientific engineering] microhistories, however, cannot overrule the macrohistorical patterns and trends, any more than the macrohistory should not make us blind to local and temporal irregularities and contingencies.

What these microhistorical irregularities and contingencies reflect is the essential instability inherent in boundary objects.

The flexibility of a boundary object induces various, and even conflicting, elements as its constituents, but the same flexibility contributes to its instability. However, this instability can be a resource for its dynamics. A flexible, unstable boundary object is like the motion of the bicycle: the instability remains constructive as long as it is pushed forward