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From Bryan Pfaffenberger
Saturday, September 6, 2008. Welcome to Bryan Pfaffenberger's home page. I'm a professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although my Ph.D. is in anthropology (University of California, Berkeley, 1977), I'm working in an interdisciplinary field called science and technology studies (S&TS).
With the assistance of a National Science Foundation Scholar's Award, I'm currently working on the history of voting machines. My blog, Machining the Vote, contains various musings on this and related subjects. Please visit!
Publications
Links to PDFs of some of my more popular publications.
“’If I Want It, It’s OK’: Usenet and the (Outer) Limits of Free Speech,” Information Society 12 (1996): 365-388.
“Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1990), pp. 361-397.
“Mining Communities, Châiines opératoire, and Sociotechnical Systems,” in A. Bernard Knapp, Vincent. C. Piggot, and Eugenia W. Herbert, Social Approaches to an Industrial Past: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Mining (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1998)
“Social Anthropology of Technology,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 21 (1992): 491-516.
“Social Meaning of the Personal Computer, Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution was No Revolution,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 61 (1988), pp. 137-147.
“Technological Dramas,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 17 (1992).
“Technology: Anthropological Aspects,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil Smelser and Paul Bates (eds.). Oxford, U.K.: Pergamon Press, 2001).
"The Rhetoric of Dread: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) in Information Technology Marketing." Knowledge, Technology, and Policy 13(3): 15.
"Symbols do not create meanings- activities do: or, why symbolic anthropology needs the anthropology of technology,” in Michael Schiffer (ed.), Anthropological Perspectives on Technology (Tucson, AZ: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2001).
“Worlds in the Making: Technological Activities and the Construction of Intersubjective Meaning,” in M.A. Dobres and C. Hoffman (eds.), The Social Dynamics of Technology: Practice, Politics, and World Views (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).