"More generally, public futures are at stake and reflexive social institutions need to be built where multiple technologies interact to create complex terrains or “ethical plateaus” for decision making. Reflexive social institutions integrate knowledge from multiple sources, often are self-organizing and learning organizations,and respond to new circumstances more easily than brittle, bureaucratic forms of agrarian empires, industrial societies, or closed system, input–output, command-and-control economies."
"Reflexive social institutions are also responsive to the evolution of democratic decision making in perforce multicultural worlds. We need an anthropology of science and technology that pays detailed attention to civic epistemologies and cultures of politics, to epistemologies and presuppositions of policy formulation, makingthemmorereflexive, inclusive,andopentoairingandnegotiatingconflicting interests, situations, requirements, and demands in ways that build legitimacy, without thereby making them unwieldy or formalistic."
“As we move into worlds that are increasingly dependent on linked databases and informatics infrastructures, that require new modes of reflexive social decision making, that are accountable not just to instrumental values but also to the differential cultural sensibilities of affected and invested people in different social and cultural niches, we will need enriched anthropologies of science and technology to inform, critique, and iteratively reconstruct the emergent forms of life already forming around us.”
“The cultural skeins, programming“object-oriented languages,”emergent forms of life,and cosmopolitical marshalling of ingenuity tracked by anthropologies of science and technology productively complicate and make more realistic the demand for attention to the reconstruction of public spheres, civil society, and politics in the technoscientific worlds we are constructing within and around ourselves.”
“With today’s shifts in scale, changes in chronotope, spatial relations, and social organizational forms facilitated by the Internet and other communication, transportation, and dissemination modalities, a more detailed, ethnographic eye is required. Anthropology perforce is becoming a third space, a space of comparative and entangled frames and of emergent forms of life(Fischer2003)”
