Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and the Transformation of Social Life Book

Generally a solid, interesting, highly readable collection of works by and about Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, and Andrew Pickering. For the junior STS scholar, this is an invaluable collection: growing out of a set of workshops involving the authors, it pushes them towards a clarity, succinctness, and comparison/contrast which can be hard to come by in reading their works on their own.

There's some philosophy grad-student wank: "Author X uses words without understanding how my sub-sub-sub field has manipulated their meaning in arcane and baroque directions! Author Y cannot speak about technology because he/she hasn't read this one 18th century German manuscript!" There's also a good critique of the holy-canon sort of academia here as well, especially in focusing on a group of thinkers (generally, more or less) concerned with the material and immediate.

The ending compare-and-contrast essays are quite clever: "Ihde's Got a Gun!" is a lovely piece of pedagogy, taking a high-noon showdown between Ihde and Latour and spinning it out into a clear yet sophisticated discussion of agency in the two author's works.

I actually liked reading this anthology. There's little higher praise for this sort of thing.