Bringing Science and Technology Studies to Bear on Communication Studies Research (Report‪)‬

1. Introduction As the technological landscape has shifted rapidly over recent decades, the terrain of academic disciplines concerned with actors' engagement with technology has adjusted and expanded as well. Given the ubiquity of technology in our contemporary society, such engagement occurs in nearly all contexts, and is of increasing relevance to academic disciplines ranging across the social sciences and the humanities. Due to the desire and need to investigate the practices and implications of technology use from a variety of disciplinary standpoints, the insights and approaches gleaned from a field that has built itself around investigations of the complexities of technologies--that of Science and Technology Studies (STS)--are becoming more relevant than ever before. As the field of Communication Studies' long standing concern with media and communication technologies becomes both more prevalent and more routinized (Herring, 2004), a nuanced approach to research concerning engagement with, views of, and discourses concerning communication technologies is increasingly necessary. The field of STS, as it has investigated an incredible variety of technologies and their historical, social, and political contexts, contains analytic approaches that are especially beneficial for Communication Studies. Together, STS and Communication Studies approaches provide a fertile ground for research focusing on specific technologies, as well as that which is directed toward the social engagement, development, and societal implications of technology in general. The combination of these approaches can contribute many conceptual insights that can be used across disciplines to better understand the complex, socially situated role of technologies and their processes of creation.