This newly launched “Forum for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology” is part of the “Beijing Graduate Academic Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology,” which will be held this coming November.
This graduate forum was founded last year; Tsinghua took charge of it last year, and this year it is our turn. So the heavy responsibility of overall coordination has landed on my shoulders.
As a shut-in, I have never been good at organizing affairs, nor am I good at socializing. Of course, under Professor Wu, people who are particularly good at organizing social activities have always been rather scarce, so I could only brace myself and take it on. Fortunately, our friends at Tsinghua last year already set a model for us; as long as we can imitate their work, that is good enough.
But after all, our forum has only been held once, so it hardly counts as a “tradition.” Our second edition is still at the stage of probing and breaking new ground, and simply copying the model of the first session does not seem sufficient. I also hope to contribute something to this forum.
Compared with the previous session, this year’s forum has been expanded in scope, with master’s programs in the history and philosophy of science and technology from all universities in Beijing invited. But that alone hardly counts as any contribution. As for the conference topics, we still remain broadly open to all categories of the history and philosophy of science and technology, and there will not be any changes there. In terms of organization, we have a bit more money to work with this time, so we may be able to do things a little better, but that is hardly anything worth mentioning. The truly added element, the new ingredient brought in through me, is this online BBS.
When we were preparing the event, someone asked: we need to think carefully about what the distinctive feature of our forum is. Compared with forums like the interdisciplinary science forum, our forum seems to overlap a great deal in topic. How could we possibly stand out on our own? My answer was that our distinctive feature lies not in the subject matter, but in the organizational form—in particular, that we are a forum organized by students.
What is different about a forum organized by students? If we are merely imitating the way teachers organize forums, then “student-led” hardly counts as a distinctive feature; does it even mean that our organizational method is not mature enough, merely that the teachers are giving us a chance to practice by letting us stage an academic house game once? If we want to turn “student-led” into one of our forum’s major “features,” rather than a weakness, then what should we do?
One characteristic of student organization is that our communication may be freer and more open. Teachers often have many misgivings when they communicate, and it is hard for them to be completely candid with one another. Their social circles are also basically fixed long ago. Different fields are as distant as mountains and rivers; especially in the history and philosophy of science and technology, even colleagues do not seem like colleagues. Even when they gather for a conference, they often each say their own thing, and the whole academic world presents itself as a fragmented mess. Yet students’ social circles within academia have not yet taken shape; we do not need to follow our own advisors and simply replicate the existing academic connections, and may instead be able to rebuild our own academic community.
Therefore, building a regional, specialized, lively, and open social circle is the main purpose of this forum. Of course, after all, this is meant to build a platform for academic exchange rather than mere socializing, so the forum’s academic character also needs to be guaranteed. Naturally, this circle of exchange cannot be limited to the students involved in the preparatory work; it must also extend to more participants. But if most participants merely sit in the conference venue for half a day each year and listen to a few presentations, how could they possibly join our platform for exchange?
The establishment of an online BBS is precisely meant to solve these problems: the functions of social interaction and networking, the functions of academic debate and review, and the function of enabling all students to participate continuously and broadly can all be provided by this online forum. At the same time, this is also an element uniquely characteristic of students—we are a generation that grew up together with the internet. In other respects, students’ experience can hardly compare with that of teachers, but when it comes to using the network, we are probably the more adept ones.
Whether you are fashionable or conservative, whether you praise it or resist it, networkization is unquestionably the general trend. Academia in fact has already irreversibly entered the wave of networkization—these days, if you do not search literature on the internet, can you still do scholarship? How many of the papers that are published are still read as paper journals? How many people deliberately subscribe to various academic journals, and how many, when writing, will leaf through printed journals one by one rather than first searching keywords online? Academia has long been unable to do without the internet, but the process of networkization in scholarship is still extremely passive. There have long been all kinds of “portals,” “forums,” and “circles” online, but how many academic portals, academic forums, and academic circles are there?
People seem to think that doing scholarship means being content with solitude, “working in seclusion,” and not caring at all about using any kind of social medium. That is of course wrong. Squares, salons, guilds, cafés, letters, pamphlets, journals… every period of academic flourishing often coincides with the rise of some new social medium. Even the current form of the “academic conference” became possible only under the conditions of advanced modern transportation media. From ancient times to the present, academic traditions have always used new media to stimulate their vitality. Academia cannot and should not resist the rise of new media.
But as scholars, we should of course also have some stubbornness; we cannot simply chase trends and simply go along with the current. Yet this stubbornness should not be manifested as stubborn resistance to new things. Such resistance cannot prevent the networkization of scholarship; on the contrary, it can only leave academic tradition entirely passive, swept along by the tide of the internet. Scholars should be stubborn about their own ideas, and take the initiative to explore the possibilities of new technologies.
Technology and humanity “mutually co-constitute” one another: technology will shape new ways of life and even new ideas of life, and conversely, different ways of life and different ideas can also unfold different possibilities for technological development. For example, the birth of the internet itself is intertwined with multiple cultural elements, including military elements, the elements of hobbyists in civil society (hackers), academic traditions, and commercial traditions. Without the contribution of scholars, ARPANET would not have become today’s internet, and there would not have been Linux. Technology is not neutral; it carries culture and values. But the culture it carries is never singular; it is always an overlap of multiple possibilities. People from different cultural backgrounds, stubborn in different ideas, all intervening together in the history of technological development—this mode of intervention ensures that human beings still retain the capacity to “choose” in the face of the irresistible tide of technology.
In short, what I want to say is that the networkization of scholarship is the general trend, but exactly how it is networkized will depend on what our generation does. As things stand now, academia is still almost completely passive in the face of the internet wave; at most, it treats the network as a neutral tool—for instance, using the internet to search journal articles is nothing more than being a bit faster than going to the library to search, while the journals themselves are still published just as before; similarly, academic conferences use the network to release information and contact participants, which is merely a bit more efficient than sending letters, but conferences are still held exactly as before. Yet even if we can regard technology as a neutral tool, in fact it is not. New technologies are reshaping our entire way of life, and they will also ultimately reshape the way academic activity is conducted. Wishful blindness to technology’s power to shape things cannot help us preserve tradition; on the contrary, it may cause us to lose ourselves before technology and become slaves to the logic of efficiency. Only when we see technology as merely a neutral tool does technology appear as nothing but the “logic of efficiency.”
Leaving philosophy of technology aside, in any case, I have always hoped to promote the networkization of scholarship through my own ideas. My Suixuan blog was such a probe. Back then, when Professor Wu had me manage KKBBS, that was also an opportunity to practice. Of course, the KKBBS experiment ultimately failed, and after a brief period of bustle it entered dormancy. But the failure of KKBBS did not dispel the idea I had at the time, for example: BBS is Better Suited to Academic Exchange: Online Forums Should Replace Academic Conferences. For now, opening this forum still relies on that “real” conference—the Beijing forum on the history and philosophy of science and technology to be held in November—and is an auxiliary part of that conference. But I believe that in the near future, these actual conferences will become auxiliary and secondary, while online forums will become a more “real” platform for exchange.
Perhaps some people still harbor the prejudice that the internet is “illusory,” anonymous, and flashy, and has nothing to do with rigorous, solid academic discussion. Indeed, the network may create an environment in which everyone wears a mask and nothing is anyone’s responsibility, but that is only one possibility; are there no other possibilities? Just a few years ago everyone thought the internet exalted anonymity so much—then Facebook appeared out of nowhere. Who would now dare underestimate the power of a real-name internet? Technology, like humanity, is never something already finished and simply placed before us; it always remains open-ended and in development.
Of course, technology, like humanity, is also difficult to detach from the present situation in order to design some blueprint of the future out of thin air and then steer technology toward that goal. To shape technology and guide its development is not based on some future, but precisely on standing in the present and devoting oneself to subtle adjustments of the current situation. Therefore, I do not currently have some clear concept of what “an academic forum ought to be like” and then build our forum according to that. But having no blueprint does not mean being at a loss; we can, based on the ideas we hold fast to, grope and probe step by step. Rather than entrusting ourselves to some unrealistic vision, we should embark on exploration grounded in an understanding of reality.
This involves our understanding of scholarship and of the network: academic activity is not a secret craft of working in seclusion, but a social activity with a strong public dimension. It is only that scholars need to maintain a certain distance from the “masses”; yet this “distance” does not necessarily mean closure, still less does it mean isolation among scholars themselves. The online world, however, is not a completely flat, isotropic, homogeneous space. Establishing connections always also means some kind of positioning; in cyberspace we possess “positions” or “places.” Understandings of this sort guide me in constructing the online environment.
After all this talk, what I mean is nothing more than that the creation of the BBS has behind it my own considerations in philosophy of technology. But in any case, from the standpoint of practical efficiency, I believe this forum also has its uses. To take a step back, even if the social function of this BBS does not come into play, its function as a review platform should still be able to show itself; and to take a step back still further, even if scarcely anyone responds to the review work and only I, or very few people, do the reviewing, this forum can at least ensure that the review process is made transparent. The only problem I worry about is that when people see that submitted papers are to be posted on the forum for public review, they will shrink back and not submit anything. In fact, some people’s submissions may indeed have such a problem; that is, they have long been accustomed to understanding submission as dropping something into some “black box,” after which a result is displayed, while they do not care at all what happens inside the black box. As a result, some people will submit articles with no qualms, even though they have no confidence in them at all, because if the writing is truly terrible it will not be accepted in the end anyway. But if we adopt this kind of review method now, even bad submissions that are not accepted will be “aired out” in public (together with the reviewers’ criticism), and this may indeed make a small number of people shrink back. Yet I believe that people who truly love scholarship will not shrink back because of this; on the contrary, they will be more willing to submit work that may not yet be mature, because even if it ultimately fails to pass review, their paper may still receive ample feedback and broad discussion. Even if they ultimately do not get the chance to present their paper at the conference venue, every submitter will already have been able to participate in the exchange within our academic circle.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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