The concept of `script' is discussed extensively in Akrich's chapter of the book. `...like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act' (p.208). While there may be prescriptions accompanying the object, much of the script is contained in its configuration or technological form. `To be sure, it may be that no actors will come forward to play the role envisaged by the designer [or put into the object unintentionally, AR]. Or users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens, the objects remain a chimaera, for it is in the confrontation between technical objects and their users that the latter are rendered real or unreal' (p.208). Akrich presents case material about technical artifacts in developing countries to underscore her conceptual points. Although dense, and often obscure to the general reader, her chapter offers fascinating insights, also for issues of public understanding.
2.
I owe this point to Harro Van Lente. See his Promising Technology. The Dynamics of Expectations in Technological Developments (Delft: Eburon, 1993).
3.
This is Latour's terminology again. He emphasizes the morality involved, and at two levels: the level of what happens (artifacts may make it impossible for humans to behave badly) and at the level of what should happen (artifacts should be accepted on equal footing as humans): According to some physicists, there is not enough mass in the universe to balance the accounts that cosmologists make of it. They are looking everywhere for the `missing mass' that could add up to the nice expected total. It is the same with sociologists. They are constantly looking, somewhat desperately, for social links sturdy enough to tie all of us together or for moral laws that would be inflexible enough to make us behave properly. When adding up social ties, all does not balance. Soft humans and weak moralities are all sociologists can get. The society they try to recompose with bodies and norms constantly crumbles. Something is missing, that should be strongly social and highly moral. Where can they find it? Everywhere, but they too often refuse to see it in spite of much new work in the sociology of artifacts. I expect sociologists to be much more fortunate than cosmologists, because they will soon discover their missing mass. To balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive attention away from humans and also look at nonhumans. Here they are, the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality. They knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the nineteenth century. What our ancestors, the founders of sociology, did a century ago to house the human masses in the fabric of social theory, we should do now to find a place in a new social theory for the nonhuman masses that beg us for understanding (p.227).
4.
Similar recriminations were, and are, levelled at analysts and commentators presenting the `soft' side of science to wider publics, with Alvin M. Weinberg's review article, `Scientific Choice and the Scientific Muckrakers' (Minerva, 7 (1968/69), 52-63) setting a standard. The `muckraking' was attributed to Daniel Greenberg, in his The Politics of Pure Science (1967).
