Investigación Social punto Net: opening scientific knowledge to the collaboration

Authors: Alejandra Ramírez Soruco, originally posted here in Spanish, November 1 2017 - Undoubtedly, the cybernetic age is having an impact on the daily life of people, not only in their social and recreational relationships, in consumption patterns, in their own political actors and citizen exercises, but also in the ways in which - concern of social scientists - we see ourselves, we understand, we deconstruct and re-construct (identitatively, socially, politically, etc.) constantly.

Hence, it is increasingly urgent to begin to reflect on the role of new communication technologies and cybernetic social networks and, from there, to understand the social networks, as much an object of study as a tool, and to do so methodologically. And it is that these spaces / instruments, although they carry in themselves a series of problems ranging from the control of individuals by either private corporations, states and national and international governments or the world system as a whole, they also include in themselves, a huge potential to question, rebel and change the same systems that shape us.

This potential, discovered and deepened from the borders and remnants of freedom that are built from software / free culture, has been widely discovered by new generations and especially activists in different fields, while being still ignored and little used in the field of academia. The platform that we present to you on this occasion, seeks to face this void. It is opened as a space for and from academic perspectives, jointly with activists from technology, where we can reflect, understand and re-construct (rethink) as agents that build our society on a daily basis.

Thus, it is presented as a space / tool to achieve three specific objectives: (a) to build a community - from the virtual in its interconnection with the physical - of knowledge exchange between academic scientists and cybernetic activists (b) to promote feedback, debate, the discussion and, therefore, the diffusion of different approaches / inputs / views to the different aspects of the social networks (understood in their integrated interconnection with things, objects, technologies, environments, etc., that is to say, the not-human) (c) to be a bibliographic repository space, which serves as a source, food and inspiration for the different topics that will be discussed in its agora. All this with a larger purpose, such as making the meeting, the discussion and feedback between academics, activists and citizens in general, a driving force to (re) build our society.

This platform has been created by Nodo Comun. 

Click here to access this platform and the investigacionsocial.net blog.

Image credit: investigacionsocial.net

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