Images of Technology in Sociology: Computer as Butterfly and Bat

Computers begin, without being aware of it, to effect a major turn in social science technology research: machine technology, having been left for a long time to engineers and environmentalists, arouses the interest of sociologists, too. The paper highlights the conceptual advances of a new sociology of technology, which takes seriously the social constructions of technology of computer scientists and computer users. In the context of an emerging "media ecology", the main argument is about a social scientific mystification of Artificial Intelligence technologies. ; begutachtet (peer reviewed) ; Veröffentlichungsversion ; peer reviewed ; Published Version